Joanna Kane’s The Somnambulists, published by Dewi Lewis in 2008, is a collection of photographic portraits unlike any other: the subjects are life and death masks, cast from individuals who lived between 150 and over 200 years ago. These masks, many from the collections of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, were originally gathered as scientific specimens within the pseudo-science of phrenology. Kane photographs them not as curiosities of a discredited discipline, but as embodied portraits of individual men and women—figures who, in most cases, predate the invention or popular use of photography. The result is a series of faces that seem to hover in a suspended state between life, death, and sleep, giving the book its title and its quiet, unsettling force.

The book argues, through its images and its accompanying texts by Duncan Forbes and Roberta McGrath, that the mask is the sculptural analogue of the photographic portrait. Both are direct traces from life, both involve a play of positive and negative, and both evoke a mysterious connection between a living subject and a captured image. Kane’s decision to re-photograph these casts removes them from the hierarchies and categories of their phrenological context. They are no longer disembodied scientific specimens but portraits of particular people, recovered from the archive and given a second existence through the camera. The title itself refers to mesmerism and phreno-mesmerism, currents of thought contemporary with the masks, and the photographs sustain that ambiguous, trance-like mood.

The book is a hardback volume of 112 pages, containing 53 photographs, with a page size of 240 by 297 millimeters. The design is straightforward and dignified, allowing the faces to carry the weight of the project. The sequencing moves with a deliberate pace, letting each portrait register before the next appears. The essays by Forbes and McGrath provide historical and theoretical grounding without overpowering the images, and the credits are complete: this is Kane’s photographic work throughout, with the two authors contributing text.

For collectors, The Somnambulists occupies a distinctive place. It is a sustained meditation on portraiture and its prehistory, made by an artist who uses photography to examine what portraiture was before photography. The book’s subject—identity, mortality, and the trace of a face—gives it a lasting resonance, and its treatment of the mask as a kind of proto-photograph is a serious contribution to the literature on both media. It is a book that rewards slow looking and repeated returns.