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The Art Bulletin
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Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary
Photography of Sculpture
Mary Bergstein
To cite this article: Mary Bergstein (1992) Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary
Photography of Sculpture, The Art Bulletin, 74:3, 475-498
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Lonely Aphrodites:
On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture
Mary Bergstein
Sculpture, Photography, and Time
Photographs of sculpture are representations of representations:
charged with nuances of the photographer's choice as
well as the cultural circumstances of their formation and
reception, photographs of sculpture define their own realities,
which are dense and self-referential. Photography and
sculpture have long enjoyed a close, complicit relationship,
which is determined by an inherent asymmetry: whereas
photography does not especially lend itself to being sculptured,
sculpture (three-dimensional, static, and inflected by
light) is a highly photogenic art form.' If the work of
sculpture is to be considered the primary referent, then the
intervening photographic process, with its inevitable subjectivity,
propels the representational image away from the
referent, if psychologically closer to the beholder. In the
history of sculpture, photography acts as a mode of critical
intervention, and so, simply stated, the documentary photography
of sculpture is a special area of art historiography.
The fourth dimension, time, determines both mediums,
sculpture and photography, in reception as well as expression.
Traditional Western statuary tends to be hard, opaque,
and monumental, and it aspires to durability in metaphorical
language in addition to descriptive fact. Permanence is
essential to the sculptural presence: even according to the
rather grudging paragone of Leonardo, "the one advantage
that sculpture has [over painting] is that ofoffering a greater
resistance to time."? The essential physical and metaphorical
fabric of photography, instead, is perceived as soft and
transparent, a rapid, mechanically easy process that aspires
to neutrality and a relatively compressed survey of continuously
concatenated but separable moments whereby the
permanence of the depicted object evaporates into time.'I
Insoluble' paradoxes about photography and time surface in
contemporary literature. Roland Barthes, for example, coined
the metaphor that cameras are essentially "clocks for seeing,"
and that photographs provide a "certain but fugitive
Of the many friends and colleagues who share my interest in the
photography of sculpture, Baruch Kirschenbaum, Elizabeth Bartman,
and Emanuela Sesti were especially helpful in the early preparation of
this essay. I am indebted toJoel Snyder for his astute critical reading ofa
draft of this article for The Art Bulletin: the subsequent revisions to my
text cannot do justice to the eloquence of his critique.
I The relationship is causal rather than symbolic, and not actually
reversible: the photograph acts upon the referent object. For an
analogue, see U. Eco, "De Consolatione Philosophiae," in Travels in
Hyperreality: Essays, trans. W. Weaver, New York, 1986, 221-255: "The
stroke of lightning burns the tree: the male member inseminates the
female uterus. These relationships are not reversible: The tree does not
burn the stroke of lightning, and woman does not inseminate man" (p.
248).
2 Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS 20:38, cc. 24, 25, quoted and trans. in
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. ed. I. Richter, New York and Oxford,
1987.207.
testimony" to historical time." James C. A. Kaufmann puts it
differently in his essay on photographs and history, contending
that, "History is temporally evolved, the product of time,
and the photograph deflates time."?
If works of sculpture have semi-secret, acquired lives of
their own, shaped by the accidents of history and by the
historical stance ofthe beholder, then photography reacts, as
it were, to that accreted circumstance ("takes" it, as we take a
picture), and plays the part of the framing, isolating, interpreting
voyeur. Notions of the human-made inter-fabrications
of photography, sculpture, and historical time have
been addressed by such seemingly disparate authors as
Susan Sontag, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Donald Preziosi."
Sontag was the first to observe that "old" photographs, like
the ruins of ancient monuments, become more desirable
through the passage of time: each medium acquires a special
patination and a romantic detachment from quotidian context
that enhance its value as a stimulant to the historical
imagination." Yourcenar concerned herselfwith the aging of
figurative sculpture, "hard objects, fashioned in an imitation
of forms of organic life [which have] ... in their own way
undergone the equivalent offatigue, age, and unhappiness,"
and continue to suffer or benefit from the "shifts in taste of
their admirers.?" Preziosi cares about the constructed discipline
of art history and the tendency of the historian to
assume the dominance of finite objects through the panopticism
of the photographer's lens. Whereas the reader of
Yourcenar's essay (or Sontag's) is invited to contemplate the
psychological mode in which we receive concrete figurative
remnants from the remote past (through veils of patination
and the accidental facture of fragmentation), Preziosi critiques
the technical apparatus ofacademic art history, that is,
the way in which photography as a pseudo-science has
claimed ("taken") these transmogrified objects for speculation
in the present tense." All of these writers, however, are
engaged in examining the relativity, elasticity, and subjectiv-
3 R. Barthes, Camera Lucida:Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard,
New York, 1981.
4 Ibul., 15,93-94.
5 J.C.A. Kaufmann, "Photographs and History: Flexible Illustrations,"
in Reading into Photogmphy, 193-199: 198.
6 S. Sontag, On Photography, New York, 1977: M. Yourcenar, "That
Mighty Sculptor, Time," trans. W. Kaiser, New Criterion, June, 1990,
85-87: 1st ed., "Le Temps, ce grand sculpteur," La Revuedesvoyages, xv,
December, 1954; republ. in Voyages, Paris, 1981, 181-185, and in Le
Temps, cegmnd sculpteur: Essais, Paris, 1983,59-66; Preziosi (in Sources).
7 Sontag (as in n. 6), 79.
H Yourcenar, 85-87; quotations are from 1990 trans. unless otherwise
indicated.
9 Preziosi, xiv, 72-76,87,158. See also reviews of Preziosi: W. Davis in
TheArt Bulletin, l.XXII, 1, 1990, 156-166; A. Silvers inJoumal ofAesthetics
and Art Criticism, XLIX, Winter, 1991,95-96.
476 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1992 VOLUME LXXIV NUMBER :J
ity of a mutable point of view. Yourcenar's and Preziosi's
themes, for instance, are more or less obliquely predicated
upon ideas first announced in the essays ofWalter Benjamin
("The Work ofArt in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
1936) and Andre Malraux ("Museum without Walls," 1947).10
Benjamin and Malraux were among the first non-photographing
theorists to set forth those salient precepts about
the photographic "reproduction" of works of art-precepts
with which our current conversation about the history of art
(as well as the making of contemporary art) are particularly
saturated.
Benjamin made claims in 1936 that may seem obvious to
art historians-all art historians living in the later part of our
century are perforce connoisseurs of photography-namely
that, "process reproduction can bring out aspects of the
original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible
to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will";
and of course that, "technical reproduction can put the copy
of the original into situations which would be out of reach for
the original itself." I 1These quotations are excerpted from a
study in which Benjamin was to some extent bringing an
extended dialectical argume.nt to observations made by the
English inventor-practitioner William Henry Fox Talbot in
The Pencil of Nature, which he composed almost a century
earlier.l? Fox Talbot had stated empirically that, "a very
great number of different effects may be obtained from
[photographing] a single specimen of sculpture.l'l" But the
complex Benjaminian idea that the "aura" of the work of art
may wither and disappear in reproduction is double-edged
in the sense that the delectation ofa photograph is inseparable
from its function. 14 And the enchantment and historical
prestige of the original are typically augmented, not dissipated,
by photography. Indeed, the ultimate significance of
mechanical reproduction may be that when the same photographic
images are used time and again in publication after
lOW.Benjamin, "The Work ofArt in an Age ofMechanical Reproduction"
(1st French ed. in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, 1936), in Illuminations,
ed. H. Arendt, New York, 1969, 217-251; A. Malraux, Le Musee
imaginaire (La Psychologie de l'art, I), Geneva, 1947, passim. Malraux's
Mush imaginaire appeared in English as The Museum without Walls (The
Psychology of Art, I), trans. S. Gilbert, New York, 1949. See Malraux's
subsequent works: Les Voix du silence, Paris, 1951; The Voices of Silence,
trans. S. Gilbert, New York, 1953; and Le Mus{e imaginaire de la sculpture
mondiale, 3 vols., I: La Statuaire; II: Des Bas-reliefs aux grottes sarres; Ill:
Le Monde chretien, Paris, 1952-54. For complete Malraux bibliography
in French and English, in order of publication, see P. Galante, Malraux,
trans. H. Chevalier, New York, 1971,260-262.
II Benjamin (as in n. 10), 220.
I~ See A. Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October, XXXIX, Winter,
1986, 3-64, who describes The Pencil of Nature as "a series of prescient
meditations on the promise of photography" (p. 5).
13 From W.H.F. Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, London, 1844-46, in LJ.
Schaaf; ed., w.H. Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, Anniversary Facsimile,
New York, 1989, 14. For the photography of plaster reproductions of
sculpture by Fox Talbot and other early inventors, see Ballerini (in
Sources; Professor Ballerini kindly provided me a copy of her paper in
typescript form.) The quotation is related to Talbot's own photographs
of the plaster cast of the bust of Patroclus, which he purchased in 1839
specifically for his photographic experiments, and photographed in
1844. See also Pymalion photographe, 65-67; and E.P. Janis, "Fabled
Bodies: Some Observations on the Photography of Sculpture," in
Fraenkel, 9-23; 7.
14 See R. Vine, "Walter Benjamin," New Criterion, June, 1990,44, and A.
Crundberg, "John Berger and Photography," New Criterion, March,
1983,43.
publication, they effectively displace the actual artifact in the
collective art-historical imagination.
At a time when the commercialization ofphotography and
the photography ofart was at a post-World War II crescendo,
Andre Malraux argued after the fashion of Benjamin against
the "aura": to Malraux, photographic representation was the
primary instrument of our intellectualization of art. Photography
pressed that which was photographed to acquire
significance through the denial, or at least the alteration of
relative scale, so that the beholders' sensations of distance,
be they physical or temporal, receded perceptually. Even as
those orientations of time and place vanished, photography
could create a homogeneous pool of images from which the
sensitized eye could pick and choose (Fig. 1). In this way, the
broken torso of a Praxitelean Venus could be set against a
cropped photograph of a stone Apsara from Khadjuraho
(India) for purposes of cross-cultural comparison (Fig. 2).15
Similarly, a small Scythian gold plaque from the steppes of.
Central Asia was photographed and published to the same
scale as the large Romanesque horizontal stone relief figure
of Eve at Autun: the works of sculpture become comparable
in style, and their respective geographic locations are transcended
(Fig. 3).16Ergo, according to Malraux's system, the
chooser can compare and contrast images in an almost
algebraic way, as along the matrices established by Wolfflin
and Panofsky. Malraux, who had been an art book editor
since 1928 ("La Galerie de la Pleiade") and who became
Minister of Culture under Charles de Gaulle, codified and
elaborated a visual method that determines our classroom
practice today.
Malraux's idea of the "fortunate mutilation" whereby "the
fragment of sculpture is king," embraced, in that author's
photographic universe of images, all known constellations:
Khmer heads transplanted from French Indochina to France
occupied the same psychological zone as the ruins of French
Romanesque sculpture on French soil. Any kind of fragment
was equally "set free [by photography] from its architectural
setting and its God."17 According to Malraux, effective
photography could cause a fragment or a detail to disclose
the full significance of a work of art in its universal meaning
according to a kind of reverse Gestalt configurationism. As
the represented artifact is freed of its physical limitations, of
its finite bulk, and the numinous aura of its site, the stance of
the beholder becomes a particularly fertile coefficient in an
essentially modernist dialogue that occurs between the photographed
image (floating free in time and place) and the
slippery cerebral state of its viewer. Marguerite Yourcenar
disclosed no special fondness for, or aversion to, looking at
photographs, but her thoughts on the sculptural fragment
conform to the Malrauvian argument, especially his assertion
that "mutilations [of sculpture], too, have a style."!"
The idea of the "museum without walls" as a para-political
enterprise that strategically defies ownership, nationalism,
'" Malraux, 1953 (as in n. 10), figs. 82-83.
Iii Malraux, 1949 (as in n. 10), 26, and passim.
17 Ibui., 62, and passim; idem, 195:\,21,24, and passim.
IH Malraux on the Aphrodite from Melos, 1953,67; note that Yourcenar's
essay first appeared in 1954 (see n. 6): the ideas she shared with Malraux
include her notion that (1983, (2), "Certaines de ses modifications sont
sublimes."
ON THE DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY OF SCl.:LPTURE 477
1 Maurice j arnoux. Andre Malraux at work. in Paris-Match
and the Church, coincided with (ifit did not cause) a marked
rise in the study ofContinental European art in America and
Britain, and the study of Asian and African art outside their
proper continents, Photography appeared to endow the
activity of looking at art with a calculable impartiality.
Malraux would have sympathized, perhaps, with the postwar
internationalist tone of Erwin Panofsky's "Three Decades of
Art History in the United States" (1955): in this essay
478 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1992 VOLUME LXXIV NUMBER :1
2 Apsara and Venus, from Malraux,
Les Voixdu silence
Panofsky celebrated the twentieth-century arrival of photographic
documentation per se, citing examples such as the
"Index of Christian Iconography" at Princeton and Arthur
Kingsley Porter's multi-volume scholarly handbook, Romanesque
Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads (first ed. 1923).19
The transplanted European Panofsky made his medium into
a metaphor when he stated that, "seen from the other side of
the Atlantic, the whole of Europe from Spain to the eastern
Mediterranean merged into one panorama the planes of
which appeared at proper intervals and in equally sharp
focus." In America, art historians "were able to see the past in
a perspective picture undistorted by national and regional
bias ...," and "historical distance ... proved to be replaceable
by cultural and geographic distance.V'' This Malrauvian
posture as articulated by Panofsky represents exactly the
phenomenon that Preziosi has analyzed critically, namely
that, "art history as we know it today is the child of
photography."21 Preziosi's critique of the discipline spurs us
to recognizing that the universal "museum without walls" is a
problematic concept, charged with polyvalent, contradictory
ideologies. If in some sense to deny local ownership means to
permit ownership to "everyone" (or at least to a stratum of
people in the West), then the museum without walls also runs
19 E. Panofsky, "Three Decades of Art History in the United States:
Impressions of a Transplanted European," epilogue in Meaning in the
VisualArts, New York, 1955,321-346; 325.
20 lbid., 325, 328-329.
21 Preziosi, 72.
the risk ofbecoming a closed, authoritative archive that locks
its material referents into ordered sets for pre-packaged
consumption.P
Let me turn to an example of such ordering that has, I
believe, political overtones; a 1950 UNESCO publication
entitled Repertoire international des archives photographiques
d'oeuures d'art/International Directory of the Photographic Archives
of Works of Art. 23 The UNESCO (United Nations
Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) Repertoire
is a handbook that consists of an indexed guide to photographic
resources of works -of art in 1,195 collections worldwide.
In the introduction, Leigh Ashton (then director of the
Victoria and Albert Museum) extolled the "standard document,
the guide and counsellor ofall study, the photograph."
Speaking as photographic reproduction did, with what he
called an "International voice," Ashton maintained that
photographic material had its own "cultural value."24 Photography
of art is thus characterized as a scholarly and diplomatic
commodity, not only complementary to, but comparable
with, and in some sense even superior to, the intuitive,
subjective instrument of human memory. If, as John Berger
states, "the camera' relieves us of the burden of memory,"
then this photo-inflicted amnesia would appear to be the
22 Silvers (as in n. 9), 95.
2:\ Repertoire internationaldesarchivesphotographiques d'oeuures d'art/ International
Directory ofPhotographic Works ofArt, intro. L. Ashton, Paris, 1950.
24 lbid., ix.
from the Steppes be sho.... llbo'IC • ~ llM-nIW, in the wne
f _ it ~ • llM-ldIo£ ThaI rcpI'lICIM:dtJG _ &eo • Itylc ftom lh.
limieatioDs which JIIIkc it _ • .....,. lit.
IO.""aova .urr (aA"'Y xn6 eDt'UIIY). ava. IVUAoCI ...... 01' 111&.....&1. 100 nMU 011,,"1 TUN T....T
O.TI'I.~U• ..-ov&.
3 Scythian Animal and EvefromAutun from Les Voix du silence
basis for the practice of much art-historical study, especially
in the United States.P Just as Susan Sontag regards the
collection of pictures in the A1inari enterprise (founded in
the 1850s and still going strong) as a symbolic reflection of
the political unification of Italy, the vast self-conscious
awareness of photographic holdings that was acknowledged
by the UNESCO Repertoire seems to have presented the
photography of art, packaged and indexed, as a cultural
prelude to the political unification of the world.s" The
political problematics of this phenomenon-a situation that
sanctioned the potential for extra-nationals to survey and
assimilate Asian, African, and European art for their own
supposedly unbiased delectation and research-are complex.
The ethical implications of the colonization ofcultures
distant in time and place through the photography of art
might be argued forever.F? And although Malraux's vision
(and some of his personal actions) remained contradictory
on the subject of property, the nation, and the Church, his
idea of the expansive, visually elastic photographic museum
was essentially liberating insofar as it removed (according to
2"'.J. Berger, "The Uses of Photography," in About Looking, New York,
19HO.48-63.
26 Sontag, in Colombo and Sontag, 12-13.
2; The question is addressed by A. Scharf: Art and Photography, Baltimore,
1969, 253-254.
2" For the life and work of Malraux, see J. Flanner, "The Human
Condition," in Men and Monuments, New York, 1957, 1-70.
ON THE DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY OF SCCLPTURE 479
the precepts of Walter Benjamin) the capital and emotive
premium from the "original" work of art.2!\ Antiquated
property rights and national borders could be vanquished
through photography, in the interest ofthe humanities.
I and others see Malraux's dicta as ethically poignant, as
well as open to debate. But setting aside the problematic
political implications of the photography of art, there remains
the abiding question of the documentary verity of the
photographic medium as reproductive. The photography of
art may be a genre unto itself, but its study is burdened with
oppositions that have haunted the study of photography for
the past century: objectivity versus subjectivity, documentation
versus interpretation, transparency versus opacity.s''
Paintings and other primarily two-dimensional images
represented through photography are already several times
removed from presumed authenticity. But sculpture (precisely
because of its photogenic properties) may be the plastic
art most deflated, most deprived of its substance in photographic
representation.s? When it comes to the depiction of
sculpture, it is simply a trivial truth that a picture cannot
replicate a three-dimensional object. But unlike natural
landscape or human physiognomy, sculpture is a humanfabricated,
three-dimensional object ofrepresentation to begin
with. What the photograph, the slide transparency, and the
art book do to sculpture is to transform it ipso facto into
pictorial art. Drained of physical presence, its density, mass,
and textural qualities are replaced with representations of
those qualities in the cool play oflight on sensitized paper or
the hot translucent internal glow of the color slide projected
with electric light."! For these reasons, the typical student of
2'1The most recent and valuable essay on the subject is B.E. Savedoff,
"Transforming Images: Photographs of Representations," Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, L, Spring, 1992, 93-106. See also G. Currie,
"Photography, Painting and Perception," Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, XLIX, Winter, 1991,23-29. W.M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual
Communication, Cambridge, Mass., 1969, 144-147, 176--177, maintained
that photographs had the advantage of objectivity as opposed to
the culturally determined biases of the engraving: subjectivity was
bypassed in effect by the mechanical nature of the camera. Ivins's view
was refuted by E.Jussim, Visual Communications and the Graphic Arts, New
York and London, 1974, 297-301.J. Snyder and N.W. Allen, "Photography,
Vision, and Representation," in Reading into Photography, note that
"writers as diverse as Etienne Gilson, R.G. Collingwood, Stanley Cavell,
William Ivins, and E.H. Gombrich (and only Gombrich entertains
doubts as to the usual reference to photography to settle questions of
pictorial fact) have all used photography as a benchmark of 'pictorial
fact' against which to measure the more traditional pictorial media" (pp,
61-91; 66). The de mystification ofphotographs as documentary "proof'
of property rights, classifications of people, or historical and archaeological
fact is argued by S. Armitage and W.E. Tydeman, intro., Reading into
Photography, 3-6; and Kaufmann (as in n. 5), passim. The impossibility
that the photograph can be a representation of neutral fact is also a
theme of Sontag's work (as in n. 6 and in Sources). A good overview is
provided by Williams, 5-9.
:\0 See, for example, the beautiful passage opening AS. Byatt's short
story entitled "Art Work" (New Yorker, May 20, 1991,36--51), in which
she describes a black and white art book reproduction of Matisse's Le
Silence habit« des maisom: "It is a dark little image on the page: charcoal
gray, slate gray, soft pale pencil-gray-subdued, demure. We may
imagine it flaming, in carmine or vermillion, or swaying in indigo
darkness, or perhaps-beyond the window-gold and green. We may
imagine it."
:11 See E. Wind, "The Mechanization of Art," in Art and Anarchy, London,
1964,68-84, who took exception to Malraux's principle ofsmall objects
attaining the plastic eloquence of monuments through photography.
See also Savedoff(as in n. 29), 95-96 and passim.
480 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1992 VOLLME LXXIV NUMBER 3
art history, especially when learning about art from other
continents, apprehends sculpture as a pictorial and serial
experience-an experience that usually consists of looking
at illustrations cropped and printed on the pages of a book,
or watching color slides projected on a screen in a darkened
room. Violette de Mazia's eccentric pamphlet entitled The
Lure and Trap of Color Slides in Art Education, published recently
under the auspices of the Barnes Foundation, remarks
on a "duplicitous collaboration" of projected light with the
dark surroundings at a slide lecture, the mood of which
"blur]s] our identity, captivates, fascinates, casts a spell."32
For de Mazia, the color slide is a kind of "tainted ambrosia,"
and her metaphor of the menu-the pamphlet is subtitled
"A Repast in Five Courses Followed by Entertainment and
Postprandial Musings Hosted by the Proud Possessors'
Club"-goes on to posit that through slides, "... everything
has been so sugarcoated, made so easy of access and so
appealing in color and glow, that our taste for the 'real thing'
may have been surreptitiously undermined, even
destroyed."33 She argues in favor of the aura of the original
and believes that the "attempt to study paintings by way of
'performances' in entirely different media," namely the color
slide or print, has no place in the study of art. De Mazia was
concerned mostly with the ills of translating easel paintings
into slide form; but in photographic transformation, the
apprehension of bas-relief or statuary in space is equally
traduced when filtered first by the photographer through the
lens of the camera and then through a sequential scansion of
pages or a quasi-cinematic viewing. Violette de Mazia might
have had more in common with Donald Preziosi than either
of them would have tended to acknowledge: both are
troubled by the fact that slide transparencies have forced the
learning ofart history into a quasi-cinematic matrix.vt
In the forum of the art book, too, the photographer
metamorphoses an image, which itself is as much a gloss on
the history of the primary object as is the column oftext at its
side. And frequently books are composed as though the
photographs were the fundamental material to be "read,"
with the text functioning as an accompanying illustrative
apparatus. (Malraux's own "museum ofthe imagination," for
instance, reveals the ways in which the varying frames used to
display a photograph on the page can determine the reception
of information about a work of art.) The representation
ofsculpture and its appropriation by photography isolate (or
even fabricate) pictorial, narrative, and anecdotal elements
in the visual encounter. The apprehension of such images
makes the activity of considering sculpture nooking at"
32 V. de Mazia, The Lure and Trap ofColor Slides in Art Education: The Time
Released Venom of Their Make-Believe, A Repast in Five Courses Followed by
Entertainment and Postprandial Musings Hosted bythe Proud Possessors'Club,
Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pa., 1986,5.
33 Ibid., 6, 9.
34 Preziosi, 73, observed that, "the art history slide is always orchestrated
as a still in an historical movie."
35 See J. Szarkowski, ed., Photography until Now, exh. cat., Museum of
Modern Art, New York, 1989.
36 Among these contributions are, in order of publication date: F. Zeri,
ed. Alinari: Photographers of Florence 1852-1920, exh. cat., Alinari,
sculpture) more like that of viewing paintings on a gallery
wall, reading a book, or going to the movies.
Shades of Transparency
Figurative sculpture in photographic representation has its
own special history, and even a cursory glance through an
exhibition like the survey Photography until Now, curated by
John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art for the
photography sesquicentennial, reveals that the photography
of sculptured objects looms large in the history of that
medium." Accordingly, the analysis of pictures of encrusted
architecture, ruins, plaster casts, fragments, and the integral
sculptural entity (all cousins of the still life, landscape, and
portrait genres) has recently engendered a kind of subspeciality
in the history of photography, with a number of
scholarly, more or less theoretically grounded books, articles,
and exhibitions appearing in this decade; they are too
numerous and too varied to be listed, let alone reviewed
here.36 Suffice it to say that the mainstream histories of
photography now include the social history of the photography
of monuments (sculpture and architecture) sui generis,
and as an integral aspect of the larger art-historical continuum.
Naomi Rosenblum (herself an expert on the photographic
documentation of sculpture by Adolphe Braun)
dedicates a section of her textbook survey, A World History of
Photography, to "Art Works in Photographic Reproduction,"
reviewing the roles of several early documentary photographers
of art, including James Anderson, Roger Fenton, the
Alinari brothers, Braun, and Goupil.37 Rosenblum presents
the historical origins of photography of art in a deterministic
and ultimately melioristic tone (the book is presumably
intended for students who have been exposed to the traditional
discipline of art history):
While students thoughtfully continued to insist on contact
with real works of art, photographic reproductions did
have a profound effect on the discipline of Art History.
For the first time, identically replicated visual records
enabled scholars in widely separated localities to establish
chronologies, trace developments, and render aesthetic
judgements.... Besides familiarizing people with acknowledged
masterpieces of Western art, photographs made
lesser works of art visible and awakened interest in
artifacts and ceremonial objects from ancient cultures and
little-known tribal societies.i"
Leigh Ashton's "International voice" from the UNESCO
Repertoire resonates in this passage from Rosenblum's survey,
Florence, 1977; Eng. ed., intra. .J. Berger, Florence, 1978; P. Bechetti,
Fotografi efotografia in Italia /839-1880, Rome, 1978; K.B. Einaudi, ed.,
Fotografia archaeologica 1865-1914, exh. cat., American Academy in
Rome, Rome, 1979; Pygmalion photographe, 1985; Williams, 1988;
Colombo and Sontag, 1988; M. Falzone del Barbaro, M. Maflioli, and E.
Sesti, eds., Alle origini della fotografia: Un itinerario toscano /839-/880.
exh. cat., Alinari, Florence, 1989; Ballerini, 1991; Fraenkel, 1991.
37 N. Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, New York, 1989,
239-241; see also idem, "Adolphe Braun: A Nineteenth-Century Career
In Photography," History ofPhotographs, III, October, 1979,357-372.
38 Rosenblum, 1989, 241.
4 Esther B. van Deman,
Inscription to
Gaius et Lucius, 1902
(courtesy: Fototeca
Unione, Rome)
ON THE DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY OF SCULPTURE 481
and the persistent ghost of transparency, the idea that
photography can be used to know or possess an object
outside interpretation is yielded to anew. A more relativist
textbook might stress the idea that photographs-much as
they may provide certain evidentiary information about
works of art-are constructed representations, and as such
do not function as strictly neutral scientific "proofs" of
objects: Gisele Freund in Photography and Society, for instance,
devotes a section to "Photography as a Means of Art
Reproduction," a phenomenon that Freund reflects upon in
terms of society. According to Freund (who was a personal
acquaintance of Malraux), the photography of art has, more
than anything else, "altered the artist's vision and changed
man's view of art."39 Within this condition of what (for want
ora better word) one may call "subjectivity," photographs
have formed some of our most fundamental and abiding
perceptions of art, and of sculpture in particular. Therefore
we need to ask deep questions ofeach synthetic documentary
image that is used in art history.
The notion ofdocumentation in photography is so charged
with oppositions that it is perhaps best to remove this
discussion ofthe photography ofsculpture from the realm of
theoretical argument and to proceed to the more concrete
subject of intention, or photographic formation, and recep:19
G. Freund, Photography and Society, New York, 1980,95.
tion. In this way, I propose to analyze the extent and quality
with which an individual photographic image inflects, transforms,
or even consumes the sculptural subject.
It is useful, when possible, to consider the assumptions and
intentions of the individual photographer together with the
resulting mode in which a sculptured object is portrayed and
presented. A case in point is the work of the American
documentarian Arthur Kingsley Porter, who considered his
travels to Europe to be a kind of pragmatic "laboratory
work. "40 His ten-volume Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage
Roads (1923) consists of a single volume of text, with the
subsequent volumes presenting quarto-size credited photographs
in handbook format; typically a single image per
page is set off by regularized rnargins.f Photographic
material is to be received as scholarly documentation equal if
not greater and more scientific in importance than the text:
following the bibliography comes an annotated list of "Addresses
of Photographers," including Alinari, Anderson,
Brogi, Giraudon, Clarence Kennedy, the Kunsthistorisches
Seminar Marburg, Moscioni, and others.V
40 See Medieval Studies in Memory of Arthur Kingsley Porter, ed. W.R.W.
~?ehler, intra. L. Kingsley Porter, 2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1939, I,
xm.
41 A.K. Porter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, 10 vols.,
Boston, 1923, passim.
42 Ibid., I, 357.
482 THE ART BCLLETIN SEPTEMBER 1992 VOLUME LXXIV NUMBt:R :1
5 Esther B. van Deman, Roman
Forum, 1902 (courtesy: Fototeca
Unione, Rome)
Porter's own photographs are integrated into the handbook
format along with those he acquired from the listed sources.
Some of his photographs are luscious, or crisp, or evocative;
there are others that he obviously had trouble with, but his
goal was clearly that of inclusion, rather than that ofpersonal
interpretation or photographic celebrity.
It is evident that Arthur Kingsley Porter would have wished
to be received and judged as an art historian and a purely
documentary photographer. In this sense, his mentality is
distant from that of, say, Le Secq at Chartres, Atget at
Versailles, Steichen on Rodin, or Mapplethorpe on Praxiteles.
But it would be facile to categorize Porter's work as
having less potential for interpretation than that of the
auteurs of earlier or later periods simply because he was a
practicing art historian. Porter's moderate, restrained, unarresting
presentation is also vastly different from, for example,
that of his near-contemporary, another American-born
academic, Esther B. van Deman, who photographed in
Rome.v' Van Deman's photographs, although ostensibly
made for archaeological purposes, persistently, and perhaps
unconsciously, defy the limits of documentation and express
a more poetical vision. Possibly because the inanimate body
held little interest for Van Deman for its own sake (her
scholarly expertise was in Roman architectural structural
processes), her finest images portray a vast scale and tend to
4:l K.B. Einaudi, ed., Fotografia archaeologica /865-/9/4, exh. cat.,
American Academy in Rome, Rome, 1979, 14-15; idem, ed., Esther B.
van Deman: lmmagini dall'archivio di un 'archeologa americana in Italia
all'inizio del secolotlmages from the Archive ofan American Archaeologist in
Italy at the Turn of the Century, exh. cat., intra. J.Connors, essays K.A.
Gelfcken, K. Einaudi, L. Scaramella, American Academy in Rome and
Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
1991.
ON THE DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY OF SCULPTURE 483
6 Romuoldo Moscioni, Lanuvium, 1885 (courtesy: Fototeca Unione, Rome.)
transform the archaeological fragment into a monumental
component of Romantic landscape. In her Inscription to Gaius
et Lucius (1902), for instance, the old stones in question loom
large in the foreground, creating a strong, craggy diagonal
against an opposed diagonal of horizon, and the Arch of
Titus hovers small and remote at the upper left (Fig. 4).44 In
her Roman Forum photographed in the same year, when the
Forum was flooded, she apprehended the place through the
Arch of Septimius Severus: water, ruins, and light create a
fantastic vision of Rome-we are utterly dislocated as to
present and past-reminiscent of the Course ofEmpire series
byVan Deman's co-national Thomas Cole (Fig. 5).4;;
An erudite archaeologist, Esther van Deman never contained
her flair for visualizing emotions about the grandeur
of the past. To understand her intentions one should
consider the cultural trajectory within which Van Deman
worked, itself the potential stuff of a study that would go
beyond the scope of this paper. Here I limit myself to
examining the images of one of Van Deman's Roman
predecessors, Romuoldo Moscioni, who worked as a documentary
photographer of the sculpture excavated at Lanu-
44 Einaudi, 1979 (as in n. 4:~), 51, no. 2M.
45 Ibid.. 52-53, no. 29.
46 Ibid., 79.
vium in 1885 (Fig. 6).46Such a splendid, dreamlike sense of
isolation and impression of time past are expressed in
Moscioni's works that his pictorial material seems to predict
the dark tenor of Marguerite Yourcenar's prose, as in her
phrase "torse que nul visage ne nous defend d'aimer.i'"?
Moscioni's documentary images communicate the anonymity
ofplace and the somber consciousness ofthe mutilation of
the figurative object so powerfully that I could not suppress
an initial emotional response in the interest of gathering
purely archaeological facts.
The photographer and the beholder of a photograph of
sculpture share interacting expectations, and the emotive
ingredient of time in Van Deman's and Moscioni's photographs
(and those of hundreds of others) again calls forth
Susan Sontag's memorable dictum that photographs themselves
look "better" when they are aged, stained, tarnished,
and patinated: like ruined sculpture, photographs are subject
to an "inexorable promotion through the passage of
time."4H When antique sculpture is photographed, that
mood is intensified as form and content commingle. Vision is
pressed further (and probably far beyond the intentions of
47 Yourcenar (as in n. 6), 1983,62.
4H Sontag (as in n. 6), 79.
484 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1992 VOLUME LXXIV NLMBER :1
the photographer) when the medium of light on paper
parallels that of the gradations of light and dark apparent in
the actual staining and corrosions of the represented marbles
and bronzes. The mechanical or pondered documentary
activity behind an old photograph carries its own pathos, a
sense of sadness and absurdity that renders the image
opaque with self-reference. In the case of Moscioni's Lanuvium
photographs, the body inanimate, poignantly mutilated,
and at the remove of the lens creates just that sense of
estrangement that was later explored by the Surrealists:
Moscioni's work-to all purposes archaeological and documentary
in its primary motivation-is instilled with that
sense of anonymity and historical displacement that would
resurface in the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico.t? The wish
to look through such photographs-as though they were
Albertian "windows" permitting one to scrutinize the sculpture
they represent-is denied.
Our contemplation ofour mixed feelings about the past as
represented in images fabricated in the past is intriguing, but
more recent photographs ofsculpture can be deeply perplexing
as well. Documentary photographers of sculpture perceive
and offer for interpretation what interests them most
about the three-dimensional referent. They thus formulate
and perpetuate ideas about the reception of sculpture (be
they personal, societal, aesthetic, or intellectual) that demand
critical attention. An inquiring critique may appraise,
at least descriptively, the extent to which the author of the
photograph is the real subject, and the sculptured referent is
simply used to appeal to aesthetic emotions, as any artist
would be expected to use landscape or a nude model. To
address this critical dilemma, I will introduce a few case
studies in twentieth-century photography of sculpture. The
following examples are culled from personal experience as
encountered in published books and are intended as no
more than a prolegomena to an overarching historical
critique of the rich variety of the documentary photography
ofsculpture.
The Boston Aphrodites, Edward). Moore, Baldwin
Coolidge, and Adolphe Braun
In the forward to Greek Sculpture (1957), Max Hirmer
extends his gratitude to Reinhold Lullies, "who wrote the
text for this book, for his useful advice in the choice ofworks
of art to photograph.t"? Greek Sculpture is the product of a
fairly common sort of collaboration, in which the scholarly
text and notes complement a group of photographs assembled
by the photographer or publisher. In the spirit of
Arthur Kingsley Porter, photographic images are the primary
scholarly material. The text tends to illustrate the
photographs rather than vice versa, and the tone of the book
is largely attributable to Hirmer's photographic production,
49 Einaudi, 1979,84, no. 51, Lanuino, ca. 1885, photo Moscioni 20275.
According to Ballerini, "The inanimate body from the very beginnings
of photography provided ... terms of displacement that were later
explored by the Surrealists in particular." For de Chirico's notions of
"plastic solitude," see W. Bohn, "Giorgio de Chirico and the Solitude of
the Sign," Gazette desbeaux-arts, CXVII, April, 1991, 169-185.
5U Lullies and Hirmer, unpag.
7 Max Hirmer, Headofa Youth from the Sanctuary ofthe Ptoan
Apolloin Boetoia, National Museum, Athens, from Lullies and
Hirmer, Greek Sculpture
which is characterized by what we are meant to perceive as
interpretive restraint. Hirmer sought very consciously to
present each work of sculpture as an object that was more
than a pretext for the expression of his own vision through
the lens. Since no photographer is neutral or passive, the
historian of sculpture must evaluate Hirmer's documentary
style. His black and white photographs are composed scrupulously
in a spectrum of infinite shades of gray: light is evenly
dispersed from above so that dramatic contrast for its own
sake is eschewed; light is frequently stronger from one side
than the other to insure a "proper" representation of
three-dimensionality; each object is placed against a light
gray ground meant to be neutral; an inclusive, inquisitive
rather than expressive, emphasis is given to the texture of
the material photographed (Fig. 7).:>1 Hirrner's technical
control is smootherthan that of, say, Arthur Kingsley Porter,
51 Hirrner's technique corresponds closely to the norms for the photography
of sculpture prescribed by B. Bothmer in "Musings of an ARCE
Fellow at Work" (published under the pseudonym "A") in Newsletter of
theAmericanResearch Centerin Egypt, LXXIV,July, 1970, 11-19; see below
and n. 127.
8 Edward J.Moore, Chios Girl, 1910 (courtesy: Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston)
so that each image is eminently readable by the contemporary
viewer; the photographic medium is used with an
economy suggesting that it deferred to the richness of the
other medium-sculpture. Hirmer's method is consistent
throughout the book, aiming for a s~lf-conscious, normative
"innocence" that remains little changed by the nature of the
individual object. In his chosen documentary style, the
extrinsic emotional temperature is always cool. For this
reason, plates 242 and 243, Head of a Girl from Chios, a
fourth-ceritury fragment in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
arrest the reader as exceptions (Fig. 8).52 Here, any and all
pretense of fastidious neutrality is denied: a gorgeous,
disfocused, disembodied head floats against a dense black
ground. (The quality and density of black are what we are
told in art school is peculiar to the print media, etching,
lithography, and photography.) The representation of the
Girl from Chios has clearly sprung from the imagination of a
much more pictorializing personality than Hirmer's, Normative
conditions of seeing are denied in favor of an artful lack
of focus that obliterates hard contours and exaggerates the
qualities of softness and dissolution that are intrinsic to the
object.
The unfocused gaze and softened smile of the sculptured
woman are reciprocated, here, by the softened gaze of the
,',~ Lullies and Hirmer, pls. 242, 243; cat. nos. 242, 243.
'>:\ I am grateful to Dr. Florence Wolsky, Senior Research Associate in the
Classical Department of the Museum of Fine Arts, for helping me
ascertain that these photographs were made in March 1910 by Edward
.J. Moore.
ON THE DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY OF SCULPTURE 485
9 Baldwin Coolidge, Bartlett Aphrodite (courtesy: Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston)
photographer-an American named Edward J. Moore.I"
Moore was the staff photographer at the Museum of Fine
Arts in Boston for over halfa century, and his photographs of
the Chios Girlwere made in 1910, at the time of its acquisition
by the museum, under the prevailing aesthetic of Pictorialism.r'
The piece was acquired and photographed just six
years after Auguste Rodin published an essay about it
entitled "La Tete Warren" in Le Museeon the occasion of the
exhibition of the head at the Burlington Club. 55 Rodin's
essay (illustrated with two small, dramatically softened photographs
apparently provided by the owner, Monsieur Warren)
is celebratory in tone and written in the first person:
"L'antique est pour moi la beaute supreme ... c'est la
transfiguration du passe en un vivant eternal." For Rodin,
works like the Chios Girl exuded a "jouissance" and
'>4For Moore as staff photographer, see W.M. Whitehill, Museum ofFine
Arts Boston: A Centennial History, 2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1970, I, 232;
II, 673. For the acquisition of the Chios Girl by the museum, see Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston. Thirty-fifth Annual Report for the Year /9/0, Boston,
1911, 58-59; and Museum ofFine Arts Bulletin, VIII, 44, 1910, 11-12. G.
Rodenwaldt ("Ein photographisches Problem," Archaologischer Anzeiger,
I., 1935, 3.54-363) observed that antique works of art were photographed
differently according to the aesthetic influences of Realism
Impressionism, and [German] Expressionism. His perceptions of various
photographs of the Dipylon head (Athens, National Museum) and
the head ofApollo at Olympia are extraordinarily subtle.
',',A. Rodin, "La Tete Warren," Le Musee: Revue d'art antique I, 1904
298-301. ' ,
486 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1992 VOlXME LXXIV Nl'MBER :;
"sensualite," as well as a perfect balance of weights and
volumes.t" Edward J. Moore, while perhaps not consciously
photographing as an auteur, responds in a like way to the
object, and one receives from his photographs a highly
emotive image of feminine beauty as if speaking from some
remote place in the past, or from the preconscious locus ofa
dream.P?
Today the Chios Girl is displayed in Boston in a glass vitrine
above eye level: for the museum-goer acquainted with
Moore's photographic representation, confrontation with
the object itself may be a bit of a disappointment. The
relatively intense, glistening whiteness of depatinated Parian
marble (the object was cleaned with acid when it was first
unearthed) overwhelms the softness of carving to the point
where articulation is all but lost.58 Lullies's description of the
head is evocative-"All the shapes and contours of this
glorious work appear as though seen through a gossamer
veil and as though the surface were beginning to dissolve."
But one senses that the description was motivated, consciously
or not, as much by Moore's style ofrepresentation as
by a memory of the object itself.59 This is not to disdain
Moore's visualization, for it belongs ultimately to a tradition
far more venerable than the aesthetic "jouissance'' of Rodin.
The photography of sculpture is, ofcourse, just one mode of
historical intervention in the long story of the vicissitudes of
the reception of Greek and Roman artifacts.s? When the
Roman writer Lucian (A.D. 120-200) described the legendary
Aphrodite of Knidos, he spoke of the "dewy gaze" of the
sculptured goddess."! Here the liquidity of the gaze is
returned, complemented, by the eye of the photographer.
Modern beholders and readers participate in the Praxitelean
transcendence of the sculptor's material: thanks to the
pictorial style of Moore's photograph, the Chios head holds
the light, articulating a perfected balance of weights and
56 Ibid., 298-301. For the related subject of Rodin and photography, see
K. Varnedoe, "Rodin and Photography," in A. Elsen, ed., Rodin
Rediscovered, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1981,
203-247; apropos Rodin and the sublime nature of the antique
fragment, see Yourcenar (as in n. 6), 1983,63-64.
57 See Janis's idea (in Fraenkel, 18) that, "in viewing photographs of
sculpture we play perpetually the frustrated lover or striving spiritual
seeker," and that, "to photograph was not only to record, but in some
strange fashion to raise the dead from complex and discontinuous time,
as an archaeologist might do in pulling from the dust the latest remnant
that has pushed its way to the surface." One is reminded of Freud's
"archaeology of the mind"; see P. Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, New
York, 1988, 170-173, 674-675; D. Kuspit, "A Mighty Metaphor: The
Analogy of Archaeology and Psychoanalysis," in Sigmund Freud and Art,
ed. L. Gamwell and R. Wells, exh. cat., State University of New York,
Binghamton, N.Y., and London, 1989, 133-151.
58 Boston, MFA, no. 29, 1nv. no. 10.70. See L.D. Caskey, Catalogue of
Greek and Roman Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1925, no.
29; M.B. Comstock and C.C. Vermeule, Sculpture in Stone: The Greek,
Roman, and Etruscan Collections ofthe Museum ofFine Arts, Boston, Boston,
1976, no. 56, p. 40.
59 Lullies and Hirmer, 97; Cornelius C. Vermeule, Director of the
Classical Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, told me in conversation
that he believed Lullies's entry on the Boston Chios Girl in Greek
Sculpture was probably based upon Moore's photographs.
60 See N. Bryson and M. Bal, "Semiotics and Art History," Art Bulletin,
LXXlIl,June, 1991, 179.
61 Lucian, Imagines 6, excerpted and trans. J.J. Pollitt, The Art ofGreece:
Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, N..J., 1965, 130.
10 Adolphe Braun, Aphrodite ofMelos, Louvre, 1868-70 (courtesy:
Bryn MawrCollege Photograph Collection)
volumes, even as the hardness of the stone metaphorically
evaporates from the very pages ofGreek Sculpture.
Moore was employed by the Museum of Fine Arts as a
behind-the-scenes documentary photographer. Virtually
none of his hundreds of photographs of sculpture (including
those of the Chios Girl) are credited to him. Susan Sontag has
compared such archival photographers, whose names have
disappeared from history, with the anonymous stonemasons
who carved in the workshops of the Gothic cathedrals; and
indeed, the pictorial style of Moore's Chios Girl belongs to the
workshop tradition ofhis predecessor at the Museum of Fine
Arts, Baldwin Coolidge, and then, ultimately to the genre of
museum photography established by Adolphe Braun, who
was the official photographer for the Vatican and the
National Museums of France in the 1860s and 1870s.62
Before Moore documented the Chios Girl, Baldwin Coolidge
had photographed the so-called "Bartlett Aphrodite," which
was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1900.b3
Coolidge turns the head, which is believed to be by a younger
62 Sontag, in Colombo and Sontag, 12; for Baldwin Coolidge, see below;
for Adolphe Braun, see Freund (as in. n. 39), 96, and Williams, 1-3, 10.
For the expectations of authorship with regard to photographs, see
Bryson and Bal (as in n. 60),180-181.
6:1 Florence Wolsky directed me to Coolidge's photograph of the Bartlett
Aphrodite; see also Comstock and Verrneule (as in n. 58), no. 55.
11 Giorgione, Concert Champetre, ca.
1509..Paris, Louvre (photo: Alinari)
ON THE DOCl:MENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY OF SCULPTURE 487
contemporary of Praxiteles, into a deeply contemplative,
warm-toned. absorbing image (Fig. 9). His rendering conveys.
again. what Reinhold Lullies calls the "zerschmelzenden"
gaze of the quintessential Hellenistic Aphrodite.r' And the
sensation of romantic mystery exuded by Coolidge's photograph
is reflected in an essay about the Bartlett Aphrodite
written five years later by Henry James. When James visited
the United States after a long absence, he wrote. among
other observations, a charming essay about the Bartlett head
entitled "The Lonely Aphrodite." in which he proclaimed it
well worthwhile to cross the Atlantic to see the genius of
ancient Greece in the "American Iight."65 As he encountered
the Bartlett head. James experienced "feelings not to be
foretold." He described the disembodied fragment in an
ekphrastic reverie upon its disjuncture of time and place:
"The little Aphrodite. with her connections, her antecedents
and her references exhibiting the maximum of breakage, is
no doubt as lonely ajewel as ever strayed out ofits setting; yet
what does one quickly recognize but that the intrinsic lustre
will have. so far as might be possible. doubled?"66 The
isolation of the fragment that James construed is at the
cultural heart of the photograph made by Coolidge. His
poetic use of light as sfumato speaks of a desired but remote
and unknowable past in the life of the statue, and communifi4
R. Lullies, Die KauerndeAphrodite, Munich, 1954, 69; Lullies believes
the sfumato gazes of the Chios and Bartlett heads were ultimately
determined by Praxiteles' paradigmatic Aphroditeof Knidos.
fi', H..James, "The Lonely Aphrodite," in The Ameriran Scene (1905). ed.
L. Edel, Bloomington, Ind.. 1968, 252-2:>3.
fifi Ibid., 252-253.
fi7 Williams, 1-3, 10, and no. 2.
cates the geographical. temporal, and psychological chasm
between Aphrodite and her beholder. "The intrinsic lustre"
of the sculpture. doubled in its fragmentation. has. in
representation. been redoubled.
Because Adolphe Braun's pioneering work for the Vatican
and Louvre created a paradigm for the historical genre of
museum photography. I will examine a relevant subject in
just one ofhis thousands of images, images that lived on into
the next century in the photographs made across the Atlantic
by museum photographers like Coolidge and Moore. In a
photograph by Braun ofthe world's most famous Aphrodite,
the Aphrodite of MeLos, acquired by the Louvre in 1821, the
setting is negated and the statue emerges-another "lonely
Aphrodite"-from deep soft shadows in a three-quarter view
(Fig. 10).67 The pervasive darkness that veils her gaze into
the distance makes the figure psychologically unavailable to
the viewer and creates a suggestive representation of the
past. Paradoxically, the same softening shadows that deny
the true hardness of the material enhance the viewer's sense
ofintimacy and simultaneously evoke the goddess's historical
and emotional distance. It is as though desiring viewers were
forced to pull the image forth from a place in the preconscious
mind at the same time that they retrieve the sculpture
psychologically from beyond the barrier of time past.68
fi~ .Janis (in Fraenkel, 9) observes that sculpture was "one of the few
available sources that allowed photographers to gaze at idealized forms
from other times and other places, the very remoteness of which
continued to fuel the flame of romantic longing." Regarding 19thcentury
tensions of real versus ideal and sexual versus aesthetic in
images of Aphrodite, see.J.L. Shaw, "The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of
the Ideal in the Salon of 1863," Art History, XIV, December, 1991,
540-570.
488 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1992 VOLLME LXXIV Nl:MB~:R :l
12 Clarence Kennedy, from Studiesand Criticism, II: Desiderio da
Settignano, Marsuppini Tomb, Base Sphinx at Left (courtesy: New
York Public Library)
Many of Braun's museum photographs are invested with
profound art-historical and historiographical insights.v? Here,
his handling of the inanimate female nude looks back,
consciously or not, to a pre-photographic, even Ciorgionesque,
mode ofrepresenting classical sculpture. Braun's
depiction of the Aphrodite of Melos strongly engages the
beholder's imagination: one restores the image to that of a
whole, if ultimately unavailable, woman. The dreamy mood
ofBraun's photograph and the tonality ofenveloping shadow
allow the viewer to deny the famous Aphrodite's lack ofarms,
and to act the part of Pygmalion and bring her to life. In
Braun's Aphrodite, as in Giorgione's Concept Champetre, for
example (on view in Braun's time as today in the Louvre; Fig.
11), the viewer is implicated in the poetic experience through
the deliberate absence ofexplicit inforrnation.?"
Within the prevailing aesthetic of Pictorialism, neither
Edward J. Moore nor Baldwin Coolidge had a self-conscious
signature in their photography of sculpture. Their work for
69 See Williams; for examples of Braun's perception of the museum
setting, see A. Braun, Views of Examples of Greek and Roman as well as
Roman Copies of Greek Sculpture in the Collection of the Vatican Museum,
album in 3 vols., Paris, n.d. (acquired by New York Public Library, 1927).
In a separate study, "Adolphe Braun's Antiquity," currently in preparation,
I will discuss the various ways in which the museum site is invested
with meaning in Braun's work
13 Clarence Kennedy, from Studiesand Criticism, II: Desiderio da
Settignano, Marsuppini Tomb, Foliage Right of Vase (courtesy: New
York Public Library)
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was subordinate to the
documentary service of the museum. The preface to the
catalogue of Greek and Roman Sculpture at the Museum ofFine
Arts (1925) states that, "nearly one hundred of the illustrations
are from photographs by Mr. E. J. Moore, photographer
of the museum; 18 by Mr. E. E. Soderhaltz; 54 by Mr.
Baldwin Coolidge; and 28 by Professor Clarence Kennedy of
Smith College."?' The catalogue does not credit individual
photographers for individual images, and styles are difficult
if not impossible to identify on the intuitive level of connoisseurship.
Only one ofthe contributing documentary photographers,
Clarence Kennedy, has achieved recognition for his
images of sculpture.
Clarence Kennedy and Desiderio
Clarence Kennedy's oeuvre in the photography of sculpture
has been the subject of no fewer than five recent retrospec-
70 See D. Rosand, "Ciorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision," in R.C.
Cafritz, L. Gowing, and D. Rosand, eds., Places of Delight, exh. cat.,
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988,41.
71 Caskey (as in n. 58), vii.
14 Clarence Kennedy, from Studiesand Criticism, 11: Desiderio da
Settignano, Marsuppini Tomb, Capitalof Pilaster (courtesy: New
York Public Library)
tive exhibitions.F Kennedy (1892-1972) was a historian of
sculpture;' from the very outset of his career he chose
photography as the primary means to investigate the sculpture
of classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. His
Harvard doctoral dissertation (1924) was entitled "Light and
Shade and the Point ofView in the Study ofGreek Sculpture,"
and he continued as a practician and theorist to write
copiously on the strategy for effective photography of sculpture
while teaching art history at Smith College.n The "how
and why" of his earliest endeavors make for intriguing
biography, but his vision is of course best known through his
work. Kennedy's photographs of sculpture are at once
sensuous and spare, in a word modern: as such, his oeuvre
stands at the threshold ofcontemporary art-book photography.
Just a year after his relatively anonymous contribution of
twenty-eight images to the antiquities catalogue of the
72 See Photographs byClarenceKenned», intra. B. Newhall, exh, cat., Smith
College Museum of Art, Northampton, Mass., 1967; "The Photographs
ofClarence Kennedy," curated by A. Weinberg, Toledo Museum ofArt,
I'oledo, Ohio, 1979; "Clarence Kennedy: Scholar-Photographer," curated
by L. McGavin, Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Worcester,
Mass., 1980;.1. Van Haaften. ed., ClarenceKrnneds and His Photographs of
Srnlpture. exh. cat., New York Public Library, New York, 1987; Swenson.
ON THt: DOCLMt:NTARY PHOTOGRAPHY OF SCULPTURt: 489
15 Clarence Kennedy, from Studiesand Criticism, II: Desiderio da
Settignano, Marsuppini Tomb, Vase with Pears from Soffitt(courtesy:
NewYork Public Library)
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Kennedy began to work on his
imposing series called Studies in the History and Criticism of
Sculpture, the aim of which is announced in the subtitle:
"Photographic details of figure sculpture and architectural
decoration taken expressly to facilitate the study of attribution
and the critical analysis of style." Published under the
auspices ofSmith College and the Carnegie Corporation, the
Studies consist of seven large folio-sized boxed volumes of
individually mounted black and white photographs. The
most representative and popular ofthese portfolios are those
dedicated to the sculpture of Desiderio da Settignano.?"
Desiderio's sculptural oeuvre seemed made to order for
Kennedy's concerns, namely to photograph a work of sculpture
part by part, in series, with an absorbed, even obsessive
7:\ For a salient precis of Kennedy's life and work, see Swenson.
74 C. Kennedy, Studies in the Historyand Criticism of Sculpture, 7 fol. vols.,
New York and Northampton, Mass., 1928-32. See The Tomb of Carlo
Marsuppini byDesiderio da Settignano and Assistants. Studies . . . , It, 1928;
Tabernacleof the Sacrament byDesiderio da Settignano and Assistants.Studies
_.. , v, 1929; The Magdalen and Sculptures in Relief by Desiderio da
Settignano and His As.\Ociates, Studies . . ., VI, 1929. See Swenson, 6, 10, II.
490 THE ART BL:LLETIN SEPTEMBER 1992 VOLL:ME l.XXIV NLMBER :1
eye given to the play of light on the surface of carved
marble." The resulting photographs are breathtaking, and
they may have had a greater formative impact on the
American vision of fifteenth-century Italian sculpture than
any single descriptive text. In the Desiderio folios there is, in
fact, no text to interfere with our apprehension of the
photographs, save for a table of contents at the beginning of
each volume.
In format, Kennedy's project assumes the status of a work
of art unto itself: one does not leaf through the portfolio,
because each image is too separate, self-contained, and
arresting to encourage a rapid overview. With Kennedy's
Desiderio pictures, the relationship between photographer
and subject can be described as one of virtual fixation. Each
picture is composed according to an intimate, rather than
historical, point of view: the hyper-reification of the sculptural
surface stresses its seductive objecthood as well as the
physical presence of the photographer's paper and chemicals.
Context-that nebulous, concentric ambience of historical
empiricism that contains, or frames, the work of art-is
pushed as far away as possible from the photographer's real
subject, which is frequently limited to material details,
whether it be a sculptured seam where verde da Prato joins
white Carrara marble or the way Desiderio finished the skin
of a marble hand. Although there is no question that
Kennedy conformed his image-making to the way Desiderio
carved, that is with a consummate attention to subtle gradations
of surface, the documentary aspect ofthis body ofwork
is, despite his stated aim, always immersed in, or just
beneath, an impenetrably beautiful surface of light floating
on paper. For this reason, the pleasure of experiencing the
sculpture is secondary to the pleasure of contemplating the
photograph.
Kennedy's representation of the Marsuppini Tomb at S.
Croce in Florence, for instance, allows little historical or even
physical distance from the studied object. The mentality is
that of an exclusive dialogue-the marriage for life, so to
speak, of a twentieth-century photographer with a work of
fifteenth-century sculpture. There is no sense of narration
outside that dialectic: in this sense Kennedy is a purist and a
modernist. Subjects such as the harpy at the corner of the
sarcophagus section ofthe Marsuppini Tomb (Fig. 12)'6 give
way to even more fragmentary details (Fig. 13), where the
closeup study creates a closed in, almost claustrophobic
experience. Palmette vases with pear branches in relief, for
example (Figs. 14-15), are photographed with a maximum
isolation and peculiarly ahistorical melancholy.
In our age of social contextualization, Clarence Kennedy's
photography is received rather coolly by many graduate
75 Swenson, 2.
76 Titles of individual plates are simplified here according to the style of
Swenson's titles.
77 1 am grateful to Deborah L. Lubera for her critical review of T1lP
Magdalen and Sculpture in Relief written for a seminar in Florentine
sculpture at Princeton University, September, 1989; 1would also like to
thank the other members of the seminar, Alex Curtis, Frederick
Hehman, Caroline Levine, Jennifer Milam, Jacki Musacchio, and Dr.
Susan B. Packer, for their insights regarding the photography of
Renaissance sculpture.
16 James Anderson, Michelangelo's Moses, S. Pietro in Vincoli,
1850s (photo: Alinari)
students. The thrill of the beautiful is not felt on the same
terms as it was during Kennedy's lifetime, and his photographs
are often considered too contemplative and beautifying
to be useful as documents.F Time in Kennedy's work is
sensed as myopic and slow. This sensation is, of course,
paralleled, if not caused, by the photographer's technique,
whereby the aperture was closed down to a minimum and left
open for long periods of time while a hand-held light was
directed over the surface ofthe sculpture: the resulting black
of the gelatin silver print is denser, richer, and more
delectable than normally seen in the interior shadows of a
church like S. Croce, and the illumination is spread more
evenly than interior conditions would typically permit.7H
Kennedy's photographs, like those of Moore, Coolidge,
Braun, Van Deman, Moscioni, and even the less. personally
driven Arthur Kingsley Porter and Max Hirmer, once again
argue against the possibility that a photograph can serve as a
transparent windowpane that simply opens upon the referent
as it "is" or "was."?" Kennedy's photographs are superbly
crafted and profound. But they do little to inform the viewer
as to the "cognitive style," in Michael Baxandall's phrase, of
7x For Kennedy's technique, see Swenson, 2-3;~. Kennedy, "Photographing
Sculpture," in Encyclopedia of PhotoKraphy, New York, 1964, XVIII,
3346-57.
79 Sontag, in Colombo and Sontag: "Photographs are not windows which
supply a transparent view of the world as it is, or more exactly, as it was"
(p.12).
17 Aurelio Amendola, Giovanni Pisano, Massacre ofthe Innocents,
pulpit, S.Andrea, Pistoia, from Carli and Amendola, Giovanni
Pisano: Il Pulpito di Pistoia, 1986.
a contemporary participant in the native culture for which
the portrayed objects were made.f" It might be argued,
however, whether a documentary photographer of sculpture
can or should attempt to re-create a particular cognitive
approach or conceptual situation. Most ofus would say yes to
this ideal, but no to any resulting codification of practice,
simply because the photographer visualizes, at least to some
extent, in the "cognitive style" of his or her own moment;
and photographs are woven, like other images, into the
fabric of their own time.f"
Heinrich W61fHin came closest to advocating cognitive
authenticity in the photography of sculpture, when he
proposed, in a series ofarticles written around the turn ofthe
last century ("Wie Man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soll?"), that
norms for correct lighting could be determined by looking at
paintings and drawings from the same period: for instance a
Madonna and Child in relief by Verrocchio should be illuminated
according to the lighting system in drawings and
XO M. Baxandall, Painting ami Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Oxford
and New York, rev. ed. 19119, 36-40.
XI See ibid., passim: and C. Geertz, "Art as a Cultural System" (1st published
in Modem Language Notes, XCI, 1976) in Local Knowledge, New
York, 1983,94-120.
"2 H. Wiilffiin, "Wie Man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soli," ZeitschriftfUr
bildende Kunst, N.F. VlIl, 11l96, 294-297; N.F. VII, 1897,224-228; "Wie
ON THE DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY OF SCULPTURE 491
paintings of that subject by the same artist.82 For W61fHin,
the problem of the presentation of sculpture in photographs
(in lighting and vantage point) was analogous to that of the
presentation of sculpture in museum installations.s" Perhaps
an analogy can be drawn from the physical presentation of
real sculpture: few of us would, for the sake of cognitive
authenticity, give up the opportunity to view Donatello's
Prophet statues, for instance, in the artificial environment ofa
museum so that they could be placed some sixty feet above
the ground in their original niches of the Florentine belltower.
Likewise, few would flatly refuse the intervention of
the telephoto lens in viewing architectural sculpture in place
on large buildings.
Clarence Kennedy's photographs occupy an aesthetic
place all their own, but his oeuvre is not outside the historical
continuum of the photography of Italian sculpture, which
over time has telescoped, so to speak, from a distant, static
panorama, to a more emotionally agitated close view, to the
enlargement of separate microcosmic elements within the
whole. In other words, the overriding change in interpretive
theme from the 1840s to the present in the photography of
Italian monuments in situ has occurred in terms of relative
distance in vantage points.s" In this history Kennedy's work
stands for deliberate stylization, and blends the traditional
long exposure time with the advancing importance of the
modernist close-up. At the beginnings of photography,
works of figurative sculpture as well as architecture were
commonly used as photographer's subjects precisely because
they did not move, and because the whiteness of marble or
plaster enhanced luminosity; hence the implied "silence" of
old photographs is frequently determined by the inanimate
nature of the subject.85 This sense of silence and physical
distance was altered to some extent by the English photographer
James Anderson, who was originally a painter: his
photograph of Michelangelo's Moses at S. Pietro in Vincoli,
Rome, an albumen print from the 1850s, for example,
embodies a spiritual response to a work of sculpture known
for its terribilita, and may be the first emotively close view in
the photographic representation of Renaissance sculpture
Man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soli? (Problem der Italienische Renaissance),"
Zeitschrift fur bildende Kunst, N.F. XXVI, 1915,237-244; trans. V.
Barras as "Comment photographier les sculptures," and "Comment
photographier les sculptures? (Problernes de la Renaissance italienne),"
in Pygmalion photographe, 127-136.
N3 Wiilffiin, 1896 and 1897 (as in n. 82), passim.
N4 Veraci's calotype of Michelangelo's David (1853), for example, reveals
a group of carabinieri moving in the background as if they were shades:
the living soldiers virtually disappear as trajectory wisps behind the static
white colossus; see Falzone del Barbaro, Maffioli, and Sesti, eds. (as in n.
36), 41; Bechetri (as in n. 36), 20, 68, 280. Moving figures created
"ghosts" in early photographs because of the long exposure times,
whereas posed and motionless animate figures suggested scale and
mood; see J. van Haaften, ed., From Talbot to Stieglitz: Masterpieces ofEarly
Photography from the New York Public Library, exh, cat., New York Public
Library, New York, 1982,32.
N5 Ballerini, passim; Janis (in Fraenkel), 9: "The languor of its sublime
intimacy made the decision ofwhat to photograph easy." The relationship
was reciprocal because archaeologists sought rapid means for visual
documentation of their objects; see F. Schubert and S. Grunauer-von
Hoerschelmann, Archaologie und Photographie: Funfzig Beispiele zur Geschichte
und Methods, Berlin, 1978, 29-37.
492 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1992 VOLLME LXXIV NUMBER :1
(Fig. 16).86 This visionary, rather decontextualizing presentation
announced a specific direction for the photography of
sculpture in Italy.
The now-accepted habit of making pictures of sculpture
more emotionally charged than the original by means of a
decontextualized close view, in either black and white or
color, bleeding to the limits of the page, has been taken up
by many contemporary photographers who work in what we
might call a "virtuoso" style for art books. One such is the
Pistoiese photographer Aurelio Amendola, whose rich color
pictures of Giovanni Pisano's pulpit at S. Andrea, Pistoia, for
example, are meaningfully framed, cropped, and bled in a
Mondadori publication of 1986, with an accompanying text
by Enzo Carli.f? The publisher's preface to this volume
praises Carli's expository text, and extolls Amendola's photographs,
which present the figures as "... sweet and disturbed,
recaptured in their lights and shadows.v'" Amendola's
vision is an active one, and he makes a series ofchoices to
bring the viewer closer to the sculpture than normal on-site
experience would permit. And his warmth of color seems
particularly suitable to his tactile scope. In his representation
ofthe Pistoia pulpit, Amendola's photographs capture tangible
shadows, volumes, and the patination of time; they reveal
drill holes and chisel marks; they breathe the warmth of
worked stone as well as the sheer weight of sculptural forms.
His close-up detail of a mother and child from Giovanni
Pisano's Massacre ofthe Innocents relief, for instance, shows us
how the sculptor translated the human drama into stone with
punches, drills, and files (Fig. 17). Amendola understands
Giovanni Pisano's understanding of his subject-the emotional
distortion of the mother's face, the gravitational
weight of her hair and breasts, and the broken passivity of
her dead child.s?
In the spirit of Violette de Mazia's "tainted ambrosia,"
however, I would ask whether Amendola's photographs in
fact give us too much ofa good thing. Perhaps these brilliant,
frameless visions of narrative relief sculpture are simply
made in the spirit of current cinematic taste. Indeed, the
glamourous warmth ofthe chroma ofthese slick pages seems
to beg for transformation into slides. To rephotograph and
project any detail of this book as a color slide magnified
exponentially in a lecture hall creates a sensational overstatement
ofwhat fourteenth-century sculpture is about. Still, art
historians will be of two minds, because Amendola's is the
kind of work that creates a certain reassurance: if Giovanni
86 W. Watson, ed., Images of Italy: Photography in the Nineteenth Century,
exh. cat., Mt. Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Mass., 1980,
13, no. 19. Anderson (b. Isaac Atkinson), who was active in Italy in
1849-77, made watercolors and small bronze casts for the tourist trade;
by mid-century he sold photographic reproductions of works of art as
well as panoramic views.
87 E. Carli with A. Amendola, Giovanni Pisano: Il Pulpito di Pistoia, Milan,
1986. Amendola has produced books of high quality with several art
historians: e.g., L. Gai, L'aliare argenteo di SanJacopo nel Duomo di Pistoia:
Contributo alla storia dell'oreficeria gotica e rinascimentale italiana, Turin,
1984: J.Beck, Ilaria del Carretto diJacopo della Quercia, Milan, 1988.
88 Carli with Amendola (as in n. 87): "... soavi ed inquiete, riprese nelle
loro luci ed ombre" (unpag.): my trans. in text.
89 Ibid., pI. LXIX.
90 Finn, 7-9.
Pisano's pulpit crumbled to shards tomorrow, we would have
a brilliant memory of it preserved in a book on the shelf.
David Finn: "Prophet of Modern Vision"
David Finn is perhaps the most self-conscious modernist
auteur in the world of art-book photography. His vita can be
found in the preface to his How to Look at Sculpture (1989), a
sort of personal credo about sculpture as an art and a
retrospective sampling ofhis own photographic work. 90 Finn
states that he has been involved with sculpture all his life and
has taken "tens of thousands of photographs of sculpture for
over twenty-five books," which, he admits, "is probably something
ofa record."9I Most ofus have encountered his work in
book format at some point, whether as the photographic
illustration' of a text, as in the Braziller edition of Meyer
Schapiro's The Sculpture ofMoissac, or as a relatively independent
photographic essay such as Donatello: Prophet ofModem
Vision, for which Frederick Hartt produced the text.92 Finn
has also worked with Kenneth Clark, John Pope-Hennessy,'
Fred Licht,John Boardman, Charles Avery, Stephen Spender,
Sam Hunter, and Caroline Houser.P" The problem-a problem
I consider both historiographic and critical-with Finn's
work is that he assumes the role of a proponent of modern
vision no matter what the subject of his photographs.
The Abrams extravaganza Donatello: Prophet of Modern
Vision (1973) is an extreme example of Finn's patently
modernist interpretation of sculpture. On occasion matching
Hartt's descriptive prose (composed, in any event, as an
obbligato to the pictures) Finn seems to strive for an
equation between Donatello's art and expressionisrn.P' Someone
gave the book a sensational, ahistorical title-as though
Donatello could possibly have foreseen the phenomenon of
modernism: the "modern vision" here is all in the eye of the
photographer.l" Modernist art is highly self-referential and
typically separated from a specific sense of place, but here a
deliberate negation or alteration of the material qualities of
Renaissance sculpture is effected in the name of a supposed
quattrocento proto-modernism.!Hi In his visual hyperbole,
Finn dematerializes form through blow-ups of details, a
method that reaches a state of absurdity in his unfocused
views of Donatello's bronze David: in an image of David's
elbow, for example, the beholder is presented with the
haunting nihilism of total vagueness on an oversized pagey7
The photographer's composition is dimensionless.
John Pope-Hennessy's "Shots of Donatello," published in
The New York Review ofBooks in 1974, is the definitive review
91 Ibid., 7.
92 M. Schapiro with D. Finn, The Sculpture ojMoissac, New York, 1985; D.
Finn, with F. Hartt, Donatello: Prophet o(Modem Vision, New York, 197:-\.
93 Finn, 7-9.
94 Hartt claims, for instance, that Donatello's Lille Feast of Herod was
"conceived in passion and carved in fury"; in Finn, with Hartt (as in n.
92),5.
95 I wish to thank a former student, Caroline Levine, for an incisive
review of this book (see n. 77).
96 For the self-referential aesthetic of modernist sculpture, see R.
Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," October, VIII, Spring, 1979,
31-44.
97 Finn, with Hartl (as in n. 92), unpag.
18 Photograph by David Finn, Michelangelo, RondaniniPieta
(courtesy: David Finn)
of Finn's volume.f" Pope-Hennessy condemned Finn's use of
Donatello's sculpture as "camera fodder," and stated that,
"on the evidence of this book Mr. Finn is an excitable, rather
self-indulgent photographer, whose concern is less with
truth than with photography as a record of emotional
response.t'P? He went on to object to the photographs' "color
blindness;" insensitivity to texture, obfuscation of style,
smudgy illegibility, "horrifying" blow-ups, and lack of historical
sense, the sum of which "deprives the book of all
I'd' "100 .va I tty. Pope-Hennessy disclosed rather archly in his
review that he had been approached to collaborate on the
project, but upon seeing how "insensitive and meretricious"
the pictures were, he "turned the crazy project down."IOl
Some years later, however, Pope-Hennessy's own Benvenuto
Cellini (1985) was produced with "principal photography"
contributed by David Finn, and according to Finn, PopeHennessy
thought the photographs were among the best
ever taken of the works of a Renaissance sculptor.l'P PopeYX.J.
Pope-Hennessy, "Shots of Donatello," review of D. Finn and F.
Hartt, Donatello: Prophet ofModern Vision, New York, 1973, in New York
Review ofBooks,January 24, 1974,7-9.
YY Ibid., 7.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid.
102.1. Pope-Hennessy, Benvenuto Cellini, New York, 1985; Finn, 7-8.
1(1:\ Pope-Hennessy (as in n. 102),8.
104 Ibul.: I refer to Finn's pis. 85, 44, 45 respectively; Liberman's pis.
109-112; Okamura's pIs. 115-118, 127, 128, 155.
ON THE DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY OF SCULPTURE 493
19 Photograph by David Finn, Bernini, RapeofPersephone
(courtesy: David Finn)
Hennessy's preface betrays a certain volte-face on the subject
of Finn's approach to sculpture: "His [Finn's] remarkable
photographs are acknowledged elsewhere in the book, but it
should be mentioned that he is responsible for the detailed
coverage of the Nymph of Fontainebleau, ofCellini's marble
statues in the Bargello, and of the Perseus and the bronzes
from its base."103 It seems fair to me to say that Finn's images
of Cellini's Perseus in situ and a number of his other color
photographs (especially the views of a medal of Pietro
Bembo with Pegasus on the verso, shown in a lustrous raking
light) are effective; but in truth they are no more "remarkable"
than the ones contributed by Ralph Liberman or Takashi
Okamura.l'" It is plain that Finn suppresses his preference
for expressionistic photography when he works with art
historians such as Pope-Hennessy, Charles Avery, Michael
Boardman, and Meyer Schapiro. (For whatever reason he
was most free with modernist interpretation when he collaborated
with Frederick Hartt, and where he tried his hand at a
non-Western subject, such as the Metropolitan Museum of
Art's Oceanic Images.) 105 Nevertheless, when readers of PopeIU5
Cf. C. Avery, Giambologna, the Complete Sculptor, Oxford, 1987;.J.
Boardman and D. Finn, The Parthenon and Its Sculptures, London, 1985;
F. Hartt, with D. Finn, Michelangelo's Three Pietas, New York, 1975; F.
Hartt, with D. Finn, David by the Hand ofMichelangelo: The Original Model
Rediscovered, New York, 1987; D. Finn and D. Newton, Oceanic Images,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1978 (and cr. the Walker Evans
photographic portfolio of "Exhibition of African Negro Art," made for
travel~n~ exhibitions in 1936 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York;
see Williams, 4, and nos. 33, 30, 42, 41,25).
494 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1992 VOLUME LXXIV NUMBER 3
Hennessy's Benvenuto Celliniturn to a spectacular color detail
of the famous Saltcellar of Francis I, they may wonder why it
is so out of focus. 106 And, despite his more restrained documentary
style with Avery, Boardman and Pope-Hennessy, a
glance at How to Lookat Sculpture betrays the fact that Finn's
vision had not changed as of 1989, and his philosophy,
stated as it is in very full words, had if anything, congealed.
For example:
Touching the works [of sculpture] is often prohibited in
public places, yet physical contact produces a powerful
response to the work. This is because the art of making
sculpture is a sensual form ofcreativity. It grows primarily
out of the emotional relationship we have to the human
figure-our own to begin with, and more importantly
those of others who arouse in us the passions associated
with physical love. 107
Before readers arrive at this passage they may wonder
whether How to Lookat Sculpturewas intended as a children's
book. It is pitched at a very general audience, but this is not a
critique of Finn's literary style. He is oddly squeamish about
the nude and protests too much: for instance, "It is not
enough to say 'naked' when describing sculptures of the
human figure; naked beauty [his italics] is closer to the
mark."108 In much of Finn's photography, this squeamishness
is transformed into a strategy of revelation through
defamiliarization; it can be seen as a kind of modernist
"Ostranenie," or "making strange," as if to compensate for
our supposedly impoverished, humdrum ways of seeing the
body in sculpture. 109 Finn as a proponent of modern vision is
just that-a categorically modernist photographer, whose
works aspire to the condition of images like those of Edward
Weston, who can make a nude look like a pepper or a cloud,
and vice versa. I 10 In Weston's universe all photographed
subject matter is suggestively organic and the viewer is
challenged to ascertain whether the model was a woman or a
pear: Finn takes this idiom of photographic modernism into
the realm of Donatello, Michelangelo, and Bernini, and the
resulting representations are flagrantly falsifying.
Finn tells us, for example, that when he photographs
Michelangelo he works "feverishly," and indeed a case in
point is a representation of Michelangelo's Rondanini Pieta
(first published in Michelangelo's Three Pietas, in which the
photographic view expresses a disorientation nearing delirium;
Fig. 18).111 Even an expert in Renaissance art would be
hard pressed to fathom exactly which portion of the sculpture
is presented here, so abstracted, out of focus, and
two-dimensional are the linear traces of white that flash
across the blackness of the page. Equally bereft of any frame
106 Pope-Hennessy (as in n. 102), pl. 55.
107 Finn, 15.
lOR Ibid., 69.
109 For the modernist concept of "making strange" in photography, see
S. Watney, "Making Strange: The Shattered Mirror," in V. Burgin, ed.,
Thinking Photography, London, 1982, 154-176.
110 For a trenchant discussion of Edward Weston's photographs, see.J.
Malcolm, Diana and Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, Boston,
1980,20-21 and figs. 12, 13.
ofreference is a detail of Bernini's Rape ofPersephone, where a
few softened white contours emerge without significance
from a dense black ground (Fig. 19).112
I have already observed that David Finn's published statements
correspond with his personal photographic style: he
aims to make photographs that reveal secrets about the
sculpture instead of presenting a mere "series of descriptive
archaeological details."I!:1 In Finn's "Notes on Photographing
Primitive Sculptures," the introduction to his portfolio
Oceanic Images, for instance, he advocates the Brancusian
idea of letting the camera's eye roam in the "sculptural
landscape."114 Finn's modernist point ofview, which leads to
a modernist "technique," is also revealed in his statement
that, "Primitive sculptures are often most effective when seen
under spotlights, because these works were carved in tropical
zones...." Under these conditions, "Extraordinary designs
appear, sometimes as great as those by Brancusi, Modigliani,
and Moore."115 After the fashion ofAndre Malraux, he states
that, "A small work demonstrates its monumental qualities
when enlarged photographs ofits details reveal harmonies of
lines and shapes as striking as those in the sculpture as a
whole.t'U"
These pictorially obscure, temperamentally abstract expressionist
visions typify David Finn's photography: he wants to
reveal the unknown in a work of sculpture. Finn as a
cameraman is curiously intrusive about the representation of
the body, but Donatello, Michelangelo, and Bernini were
not. Bellies, buttocks, and genitals all have their place in
figurative sculpture, but to set them apart as Finn frequently
does, in series of either framed details or voyeuristic blowups,
traduces the seriousness of the sculpture in favor of a
childish Schaulust. Finn's personal style is emotive, and the
vaguely morbid, high emotional temperature of some of his
compositions does perceptual damage to figures made by
Donatello, Michelangelo, and Bernini, artists who themselves
had an emotionally charged relationship with their
materials as well as a profound understanding of human
corporeality. Donatello, Michelangelo, and Bernini are sculptors
whose visions would be compromised, if not falsified,
were we to rely exclusively on Finn to teach us how to look at
sculpture.
Photography and Nonfigurative Sculpture
David Finn's photography may emerge from an excessively
modernist stance, representing figurative Renaissance and
Baroque sculpture as if it were abstract and placeless. But by
the same token, sculpture that was fabricated in an abstract
formalist language-modern sculpture-thrives on an interpretive
counterpart in photography. (Incidentally, Finn phoIII
Finn, 18. pI. 14.
112 Ibid., pl. 2:~.
I D D. Finn, "A Note on the Photography," in Hartl, with Finn, 1975 (as
in n. 105), 138-139.
114 Finn and Newton (as in n. 105), unpag.; and see below for Brancusi as
a photographer.
II'> Ibid.
116 Ibid.
20 Constantin Brancusi,
View oftheStudio,
ca. 1920 (courtesy:
New York Public Li-
brary)
ON THE DOCL:MENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY OF SCULPTURE 495
tographs the work of Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti,
and John Chamberlain most effectively, possibly
because he doesn't have to contrive to make the sculpture
look modern.}'!? With modernism as an operative premise,
photographers and sculptors became participants in the
same ethos; the result is a synthetic overarching conceptual
matrix, a continuity of design that becomes the real content
of the picture. Photography and sculpture interlock with a
117 E.g., Finn, 106-144.
IIX See M. Nesbit, "Photography, Art, and Modernity," in.J.-C. Lemagny
and A. Rouille, eds., A History of Photograph», New York, 1987, 103-
123.
familiarity that is not possible when the camera is forced to
"look back" at figurative objects made in a pre-photographic
era or "look across" at objects made in non-photographing
cultures. The Vorticists, Surrealists, and Constructivists, for
example, created photographs that were in effect sculpturesque
constructions in the photographic medium. Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and many other photographers
actually conceptualized sculptural forms through their pho-
tography.'!"
Constantin Brancusi was an artist who deliberately reworked
his sculpture in photography through the manipulation
of light: his prints of the studio environment and of his
series The Golden Bird and Mlle. Pagany, for example, fuse
496 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1992 VOl.UME l.XXIV NL:MBER 3
21 Gianfranco
Gorgoni, Robert
Smithson's Spiral
Jetty (photo: Con-
tact)
sculpture and photography in a modernist unity, with the
synthetic relationship as the real referent, so that the photograph
is consciously all about itself, sentient in intention and
effect (Fig. 20).119 Brancusi creates the sculptural landscape,
and lets his camera's eye travel through it, so the work of
sculpture is not merely transformed in representation. It is a
component in an environment rather than a solitary pretext;
and the process itself becomes an intuitive, placeless essay
undertaken in the formalist vocabulary of modernity. The
modern photograph of modern sculpture depicts nothing if
not its own iconographic and formal autonomy.F? A sense of
synthetic alchemy replaces the notion of documentation so
that the medium ofphotography is absorbed, as it were, back
into the work of sculpture like a fine coalescing vapor rather
than remaining a separable transparent lamination.
If the modernist aesthetic fused photography with sculpture
in an apparently effortless, seamless, formal synthesis,
Postmodernist sculpture reversed that premise, and called
upon the medium of photography as its documentary agent.
In a denial ofthe "inherent," traditionally perceived qualities
of sculpture as permanent monumental statuary, some Postmodern
sculpture is deliberately outsized and ephemeral; it
is therefore meaningless without documentation, whether it
119Janis (in Fraenkel), 11; lor Brancusi's studio as an environment of
ideal intimacy, "a world apart," see H. Kramer, Brancusi:The Sculptoras
Photographer, London, 1979, unpag.
120 For modernist sculpture that "depicts its own autonomy," see Krauss
(as in n. 96), 31-44.
be documentation in memory, writing, or photography.l'"
Site-specific Postmodernist sculpture-gestural, prankish
works that challenge any notion of permanence, such as
Christo's Running Fence, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, or
Walter de Maria's Lightning Field-were constructed to be
photographed, or at least with the independent photographic
referent in mind (Fig. 21).122 Such Postmodern
sculptors were secure in the knowledge that most people
would know their works only in photographic representations:
in an artistic system where sculpture is assembled or
installed for camera "documentation," a word that loomed
large in art-school jargon of the late 1960s and early
seventies, the issue of the photographic image as a separate
transparent recording apparatus resurfaced.
Photography as a documentary instrument ofPostmodernist
sculpture revalidated the role of the photographic image
as a quasi-journalistic screen through which the object is
apprehended. All processes ofvisual representation contrive
to distinguish between nature (that which is discovered) and
art (that which is invented): sculptors like Smithson and
Christo, among others, compose in the gap between discovery
and invention, with the collusion of the camera as Barthes's
pseudo-historical "clock for seeing."
121 lbul., 31-44; and R. Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in
America," October, Ill, Spring, 1977, 6/l-H I.
122 Krauss, 1977, 1979 (as in n. 96), passim; Sontag, 1977, I47-4/l; P.
Dubois, "Photography and Contemporary Art," in Lemagny and Rouille
(as in n. 11H),2:{ 1-245.
An extreme and conceptually rather eccentric instance of
the Postmodernist ethos of the role of photographyphotography
that is used to justify its subject sculpture---ean
be found in the work of Dan Graham, an artist who was characterized
by Marcel Duchamp as a "photo-journalist." 123 Selections
ofGraham's photographs were published in 1968 in
Minimal Art: A CriticalAnthology, edited by Gregory Battcock,
where the photographic essay (with images apparently put
together ad hoc) was meant to illustrate what Battcock calls
"minimal-type surfaces and structures as they are found by
the artist [photographer, sculptor] in nature...."124 Battcock
states that the minimal forms are "found" by the
photographer, and yet, at the same time, are "divorced from
nature ... subjective and social." 125 Bland, innocuous, accidental-looking
compositions based on the American suburban
landscape are offered as transparent "proof' that
minimalism is a "natural" way of seeing (Fig. 22). Graham's
photographs, placed in this volume as a visual analogue for
minimalist sculpture, are characterized by an intentional lack
of what we might call conviction. Unlike Harry Callahan's
spare, intrinsically pleasing, minimal images of ordinary
houses in Providence, Rhode Island, for instance, Graham's
pictures of similar subjects float in an ambience between
harmony and drabness: they address the viewer with the
startling discontinuity of a joke.12fi
For the past hundred years or so, photography and
sculpture have danced together. Relative socio-cultural preferences
have continuously reformulated the point of view
from which photography is made to apprehend sculpture,
and have redefined the possibility of its documentary role.
For the historian of sculpture, then, can any firm criteria of
method be established for making and using photographs of
three-dimensional works ofart?
Conclusion: A Movable Critique
Turning for a moment from theory to practice, I would like
to consider the procedures that some twentieth-century
documentary photographers of sculpture have prescribed.
Most of their instructions conform to what would be expected
from people who have a scholarly affinity for the
history of art: in their variety of styles, academic photographers
ofsculpture consistently advocate a sympathetic deference
to the original referent. Heinrich Wolfflin, Clarence
Kennedy, S.K. Matthews, Bernard Bothmer, Ernst Langlotz,
and Klaus Fittschen all favor what they consider to be an
informational rather than interpretive approach: depth of
field, illumination, vantage point, and other factors ought to
render the work as legibly as possible with a minimum loss of
what may be taken as historical authenticity.127 Sensational
viewpoints, airbrushing for sfumato, overly picturesque chiaroscuro,
and spectacular contrasts are rejected in favor of a
more inquisitive "critical focus." Fastidious, empirically tested
instructions such as those recommended by Kennedy or
mG. Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. New York, 1968,
175.
124 Ibid., 175.
12'> Ibid.
126 For remarks on Callahan's Providence photographs, see Malcolm (as
in n. 110), 122-128.
ON THE lJOCl:MENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY OF SCl:LPTURE 497
22 Dan Graham, untitled photographs, from MinimalArt:A
Critical Anthology, 1968
Bothmer are meant to help art historians, archaeologists,
and epigraphers who need to make photographs as aidesmemoire
and to publish them as striking or at least goodlooking
reproductions. Still, the scholar-photographers' consensus
is that norms for vantage point, depth of field, and
lighting are to be determined by means of an educated
intuition; the photography of sculpture is considered an
active art as opposed to a mechanically transcriptive science.
12MThose who represent sculpture in photography will
127 Wolfllin (as in n. 82) believed that the documentary photographer of
sculpture had the responsibility to choose a vantage point and lighting
system that were historically accurate. Clarence Kennedy called for a
"critical focus" in terms of shadows and depth of field (as in n. 78,
3346-51). See also C. Kennedy, "The Selection ofCopy for Illustrations,"
(Art Bulletin, xxxi.june. 1949, 135-38); S.K. Matthews, Photography in
Archaeology and Art, London, 1968, 101-104; Bothmer (as in n. 51); idem,
"On Photographing Egyptian Art," in Studien zur Altiigyptischen Kultur,
(Festschrift Hans Wolfgang Maller), VI, 1978,51-53; E. Langlotz, "Uber
das Photographieren Griechischer Skulpturen," Jahrbuch des Deutschen
Archaaologischeu Institutes, XCIV, 1979, 1-17; K. Fittschen, "Uber das
Photographieren Romischer Portrats," Archdologischer Anzeiger, LXXXIX,
3, 1974,484-494.
12M Like Wolfllin. Kennedy, Matthews, and Bothmer, Langlotz (see
above, n. 127) believed that the photography of Greek sculpture was an
art, rather than a transcriptive science-an art that can be learned if the
photographer enters into the mentality ("cognitive style") in which the
work of sculpture was originally created.
498 THE ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 1992 VOLUME LXXIV NUMBER 3
always argue that the photographer must understand his or
her subject, but understanding, as has been seen in this
chronological survey oftaste, from Braun to Finn, is a largely
historiographic affair, a movable criterion. I 29
To establish a codified program of scrupulous norms for
the documentary photography ofsculpture appears impossible
given the slippery nature of visual perception. And even
if it were possible to prescribe such a method, would we want
it? Since every photograph is necessarily determined by the
photographer's vision as well as the aesthetic and iconographic
ethos of the society from which it springs, can we
entertain the idea of some fictitious neutrality? Even if we
could, would we want to iron away the particular cultural
moment, the visual "accidents" and intertextual intervention,
the iconography and visual style of the photographer's
choices?
We may assume that all fabricated visual images, including
photographs, even as they function as representations, are
primary cultural conceptions rather than simple illustrations
or reflections ofideas already in force. As such, images are as
fundamental as words in the formation ofwhat people think
and believe.P'' Since it is agreed that photographs are
problematic and dense rather than factual records of an
absolute exterior reality, an ongoing critique ofthe formative
issues raised by the documentary photography ofsculpture is
desirable. The historian of sculpture must consider the
historiographic spectrum of the photography of sculpture;
only then can richer critical evaluations be made, even if not
according to any fixed set of immutable criteria.
Stated synthetically, the photography of sculpture is an
area of prismatic visual complexity in the historiography of
art. As with the entire documentary tradition of photography,
the documentation of sculpture has shifted around
changing ideals of objectivity, transparency, and subjective
interpretation. Art historians who use photographs for research
would be well advised to listen to the voices ofcurrent
theorists of photography, such as those of Shelley Armitage,
William E. Tydernan, James A.C. Kaufmann, Joel Snyder,
and Neil Walsh Allen in the anthology Reading into Photography.
The collective message ofthese writers is that any scholar
who is tempted to use the photograph as factual "evidence"
129 A recent issue of the magazine Sculpture (November-December,
1990), featured an article entitled "Lighten Up" by A. Rokeach and A.
Millman, a brief technical piece devoted to "how to" photograph
sculpture. Their freewheeling advice seems to reflect a venerable
consensus: "By all means photograph your work in the light you find
most compatible with its spirit" (p. 85).
130 This idea is presented, for instance, in R. Goldwater, "Art and
Anthropology: Some Comparisons of Methodology," in Primitive Art and
Society, ed. A. Forge, London and New York, 1973, 1-10.
131 In Reading into Photography, see Armitage and Tydeman, 3-6;
Kaufmann, 193-199; Snyder and Allen, 61-91; and see n. 29 above.
or "proof' will necessarily risk using it in ways that ignore the
accepted scruples of historical scholarship. Scholars whose
methods depend upon the authenticity of written primary
source material and the integral quality of secondary textual
or visual analysis rarely bring the same rigorous intensity of
questioning to the reliability, or quality, of the photograph
that they routinely bring to the written document.P! Thus,
art historians should be as critically attentive to the photograph
as to written art history, to archival apparatuses, and
to the contextual aura of social history. Photographs of
sculpture are as culturally determined, as "datable," as
self-referential, and as individual as the verbal art-historical
essays that accompany them; and they will vary as much in
imagination and enduring quality. The message is cautionary-but
not negative. Attention to historiographic issues
arising from the photography ofworks ofart can bring a new
richness to art-historical inquiry. The photography of sculpture,
therefore, deserves a flexible, ongoing critique.
Mary Bergstein, who earned her Ph.D. from Columbia, isAssistant
Professor at Rhode Island School of Design. Her articles on
Renaissance sculpture have appeared in the Burlington Magazine,
Rivista d'arte, and other periodicals; she is currently
completing a book on Nanni di Banco [Rhode Island School of
Design, 2 College Street, Providence, R.I. 02903}.
Frequently Cited Sources
Ballerini, .J., "Pygmalion Revisited: Reproductions of Sculpture as
Pictured by Three Inventors of Photography-Bayard, Daguerre, and
Talbot," paper delivered at Annual Meeting of the College Art Association,
Washington, D.C., 1991, currently in press.
Colombo, C., and S. Sontag, eds., Italy: One Hundred Years ofPhotography,
New York, 1988.
Finn, D., How to Look at Sculpture, New York, 1989.
Fraenkelv].. ed., The Kiss ofApollo: Plwtofiraphy and Sculpture 1845 to the
Present, intro. E.P.janis, San Francisco, 1991.
Lullies, R., and M. Hirmer, Greek Sculpture (I st German ed. Munich,
1956), trans. M. Bullock, London and Munich, 1957.
Preziosi, D., Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science, New
Haven, 1989.
Pvgmalum photographe: La Sculpture devant la camera, /844-1936, texts R.
Mason, H. Pinet, H. Wolffiin, exh. cat., Cabinet d'Estampes, Musee
d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva, 1985.
Reading into Photography: Selected Essays /959-1980, ed. S. Armitage, T. F.
Barrow, W.E. Tydeman, Albuquerque, N.M., 1982.
Swenson, C., ed., The Experience of Sculptural Form: Photographs by
Clarence Kennedy, exh. cat., Detroit Institute ofArts, Detroit, 1987.
Williams, W.E., ed., Adolphe Braun, Walker Evans, Andre Kertesz: Photographers
of Sculpture; Other Photographers of Sculpture, exh. cat., Comfort
Gallery, Haverford College, Haverford, Pa., 1988.