Beyond the shutter: Jonathan Kane show reveals Naples photographer as artist

During his life, Jonathan Kane had reached the plateau known as "heard of" in photographic art. In death, perhaps the Naples photographer will ascend to the pinnacle of instant recognition for which he had longed. 

That is, at least, the hope of organizers for the first retrospective of his works. It opened Friday, Sept. 7, at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center in Fort Myers, close to a year after Kane died of a heart attack in the same Naples hospital where he had undergone a quadruple bypass. Some people would implicate Hurricane Irma; Kane, 60, and his parents, Paul and Anne, had been whisked out of town when Irma struck Sept. 10, 2017. They had just returned when the artist had his fatal attack. 

Heather Nigro, Bonita Springs-based e-commerce strategy/consulting firm founder and a photographer herself, organized the exhibition to honor her friend and mentor. She gleaned thousands of photographic prints, negatives, digital photo files and digital prints. They range from Naples High School candids to Kane's last works, large-format on aluminum. 

"I felt very passionate about showing his art in the biggest and best way possible," Nigro said of the show. She was, surprised, she said about just how much output there was in Kane's life: "I never thought it would  be so big."

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A black-and-white nude arches over an architectural construct of plastic straws; faces take detail from mechanical parts; women peer around layers of petal-like swashes or ragged rings of digitally applied color.

There are glimpses of work as early as his years at Naples High, and from his work as a social photographer for the long departed Naples Star. Even then, Nigro said, she could see a puckish humor materializing in his work.

“There was sort of a Diane Arbus quality about his early black-and -white photos,” Nigro said, singling out the print of a woman in bikini making soup. “That was so quintessentially Florida.”

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In another, an aging shopper poses in mufti with her grocery cart, her freshly pinned Cinderella-at-the-ball up-do a stark contrast. And one of Jonathan Kane’s Naples party photos, “high-soc,” as he referred to them, gives more of a glimpse into their thoughts than the revelers probably intended. 

Kane’s color work, on the other hand, holds the viewer with its nudes and their layered environs. Although one of them, a byzantine waif, gazes out with alabaster eyelids, nearly all of them have smoky halos around gray eyes, giving the messages they send with a sort of Rembrandt gravity.

"There's an ethereal tone to his later works," Nigro observed. "He'd find these interesting textures to incorporate." 

Their expressions can be potentially disingenuous, however. The intent nude in “Central Nebraska Regional  Airport” (undated) was possibly a foil for the fascination of a crackled terminal wall.

“Lord Have Mercy on My Wicked Soul,” (2014), on the other hand, entwines the young woman in IV tubes such as Kane needed for dialysis. Her expression is a mix of defiance and exhaustion.

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Kane, while he was working in in the stock market in San Francisco, still pursued photographic art on the side, manipulating Polaroid images to turn head shots into small masterpieces.

"He did everything from running over them with his car to cutting into them to create techniques that gave him the effect he wanted," Nigro said. A wheel of them on one wall shows his inventions, largely laid over photos of family and friends. 

After his first heart attack at age 37, Kane turned strictly to perfecting his art. But he also was suffering from end-stage renal disease, and the dialysis robbed him of large blocks of time when he was trying to produce more of his abstraction-tinged, layered photographs.

“He was dealing with some amount of frustration that his works weren’t appreciated more. And he was struggling to keep his output up,” his brother, Bill,  recalled.

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A private family reception for his exhibition during its opening weekend served to honor those, and "really was his memorial,” Bill Kane said. The elder Kane, who lives in New York, helped Nigro collect them, which both concede was a massive undertaking. It took Nigro's work to distill the show, he said. 

Bill Kane said he had seen a good deal of his brother's work, "but I didn’t have the perspective. Now when you draw back, you see his art develop."

Jonathan Kane's work won international magazine coverage, but most of his exhibitions, save a solo show in New Orleans, were in Florida. 

"I think there was some general under-appreciation of how good he was," Bill Kane said. "I think even my parents were surprised, by seeing it all in one place, by how good he was.

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Jonathan Kane Retrospective

When: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays now through Sept. 27

Where: Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center, 2301 First St., Fort Myers

Admission: $1 suggested donation

Information: www.sbdac.com