Collecting portraits of people who have one seemingly accidental feature in common (profession/gender/age/hair colour), doesn’t seem to carry much of a message, apart from a visible desire to classify things.
JANE BRETTLE has taken this approach in the Six Women Surgeons series, which is a part of her ongoing project of portraying successful women. Inspired by Ingres, the 19th century French painter, Brettle’s photos show the surgeons in a rather classical way, looking serious and striking a pose in their work environments.
Edinburgh-based Brettle admits that indeed, ‘the use of colour and scale are important elements in (these) photographs in that they “mimic” the painted portrait in museum collections’.
London, UK
Jane Brettle - Surgeons
Until 22 November 2008
Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England
www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums
(c) Jane Brettle, Anne Moore
