Triggered: Arne Svenson

Linda Keyes,1996, Arne Svenson

Image and text by Arne Svenson

In 1996, while taking photographs of pathology specimens in the Mutter Museum, a Philadelphia-based institution dedicated to medical arts and history, I came across an intriguing object: a sculpture of a woman’s head replete with eyeglasses and a brown, wavy wig.  Exactly as photographed, it was resting on its side on a storage room shelf between an ancient microscope and the dried leg of a horse. She had the look of the utterly lost, and certainly seemed an abandoned anomaly in this storage room filled with historical medical ephemera.  I carried the head to the museum director and was told that it was a forensic facial reconstruction sculpture. 

Foremost in my practice is to seek out the inner life, the essence, of my subjects, whether they be human, inanimate, or something in between. This woman’s head, later identified as murder victim Linda Keyes, exemplified all I look for in a project. Ultimately, this discovery inspired me to embark upon a five-year quest across the US and Mexico seeking out and photographing more such reconstructions.Though this photograph triggered the project, I ultimately shot the portraits in black and white using a 4 x 5 view camera. The resultant series/book is titled “Unspeaking Likeness”.