PORTRAIT at Lounge, September 29 - October 29, 2006 Private View 28 September.
Lounge, 28 Shacklewell lane, E8

Kate Potter’s Portrait forms part of an ongoing investigation into the intimate relationship between the camera and its subject, a relationship of power, challenge and intrusion.







All images courtesy of Lounge

Kate Potter’s oversized photographic portraits of ordinary cats are a challenge to our preconceived notions of animal photography and of portraiture itself.

Although these are non-breed cats and are therefore placed outside any ‘social’ categorisation of their own, the subjects are photographed according to various conventions of portraiture, playing with the dead-pan genre of the passport photograph and the questions posed by the portraiture of Thomas Ruff and Rineke Dijkstra.

These portraits present a startling challenge to the commonly held notion of the ‘inscrutability’ of the feline facial expression. Instead, they are constructed in such a way that it is tempting to project ‘human’ characteristics onto these subjects, these individuals who display all the varying characteristics of the human, from the arrogance of youth to the indignities of illness and old age.