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Lot Essay
"The Saltpetriere Hospital in Paris...provided the cast and crew for consultations and lectures performed by Freud's one time teacher, Charcot, who would take his hysterical patients through their paces in front of a crowd of curious onlookers. Charcot also compiled an impressive photographic casebook on hysteria and related nervous disorders. A century later, Anne Ferran dipped into the Saltpetriere archives for a series which brought together the discourses of medical photography, modernism and hysteria under the title, I am the rehearsal master.
Whilst the series has an exquisite high grain finish, reminiscent of archival prints, Ferran eschewed the poetic codes of an art photography in favour of the medium's more mundane talent for documentation. Ferran directed young models to perfom states of ecstacy, physical convulsions and other psychosomatic symptoms documented by Charcot's camera. Indeed, Ferran's rehearsal pays as much attention to representation as to hysteria itself, or rather, the latter is used as a metaphor for certain representational difficulties." (C. Moore, op.cit., pp. 145-146)
Whilst the series has an exquisite high grain finish, reminiscent of archival prints, Ferran eschewed the poetic codes of an art photography in favour of the medium's more mundane talent for documentation. Ferran directed young models to perfom states of ecstacy, physical convulsions and other psychosomatic symptoms documented by Charcot's camera. Indeed, Ferran's rehearsal pays as much attention to representation as to hysteria itself, or rather, the latter is used as a metaphor for certain representational difficulties." (C. Moore, op.cit., pp. 145-146)