angela deane haunts old photos with painted ghost portraits

angela deane haunts old photos with painted ghost portraits
(above) ‘untitled (ghost photograph no. 222)’
all images courtesy of angela deane

a sentiment of mystery, curiosity and nostalgia thematically runs through the ‘ghost photographs’ by american artist angela deane. working with collected images, which the artist says, ‘have a history unknown to me and speak of another’s memory, removed in both time and space’, she subtracts the people captured with the vintage finds by covering them in white paint and illustrating two black circles where their eyes would be. the new portraits liken themselves to the familiar visual of a ghost, cloaked in opaque material and masked behind the guise of the fabric ‘in this way, a private and specific experience becomes an open and shared one through the material addition of paint on photograph’, she describes. deane explores the beautiful, painful and sometimes puzzling human condition of memory — where these reflections stem come from and what can be learned from their everlasting recollection.

‘untitled (ghost photograph no. 193)’

‘untitled (ghost photograph no. 114)’

‘untitled (ghost photograph no. 111)’

‘untitled (ghost photograph no. 212)’

‘untitled (ghost photograph no. 128)’

‘untitled (ghost photograph no. 88)’

‘parade (ghost photograph no. 323)’

‘untitled (ghost photograph no. 209)’

‘today’s embrace’