Katerina Jebb is a British-born artist who lives and works in Paris. She is known for her use of a high-resolution scanner and works across a range of media including photography, film and installation. Jebb studied drama at St Anne’s College, Oxford, before moving to California. There, she experimented with photography, making photomontages within the camera itself through the repeated exposure of a single roll film. Jebb relocated to Paris in 1989 and worked for the French newspaper Libération as a photojournalist. An accident in 1991 caused her right arm to become paralysed. She was no longer able to hold a camera and began to make life-size images using a high-resolution scanner.
In 2016, Jebb’s photography was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Musée Réattu in Arles, France, which included over one hundred artefacts and moving images from Jebb’s career and invited visitors into her creative process.
This photograph from the exhibition is a high-resolution scanned image of a dress worn by Joséphine de Beauharnais, the first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. Jebb borrowed the historic object from the collections at the Parisian Musée Galliera. Most scanners require a covering over the object to be scanned. Because of the three-dimensional quality of her historic object, Jebb cut a box-shaped piece of cardboard to the size of the scanner’s panel, which she then held over the object in order to reflect light back to the scanner.