277
PHOTOGRAPHING SCULPTURE,
SCULPTING PHOTOGRAPHY
Geraldine A. Johnson
One of the founding theorists of the discipline of art history, Heinrich Wölfflin,
was also one of the first scholars to write about the photography of sculpture in
a series of articles published from 1896 onward.1 It was only a century later in
the 1990s, however, that the subject began to attract more than passing interest
from art historians. In my own case, my initial interest in the topic developed
in response to a very practical problem: trying to illustrate my doctoral thesis
on the Renaissance beholders of Renaissance sculpture, but finding that almost
all available photographs were taken from vantage points completely unrelated
to the sculptures’ original viewing circumstances. I thus started taking dozens
of my own photographs, trying literally to recreate Michael Baxandall’s famous
“period eye” through the camera’s lens.2
Of course, trying to reconstruct a pre-modern period eye photographically
raises a number of thorny methodological issues, not least the conundrum of
disentangling physical and physiological viewing circumstances from cultural
and historical ones when trying to “see” a sculpture through the eyes of the past.
What began to dawn on me at the time, however, was that there were other eyes
to consider altogether, namely, those of the photographers who had taken the
images I found so problematic. It soon became obvious that these eyes were
as much situated in their own cultural and historical circumstances as were
those of the original beholders of Donatello’s and Michelangelo’s sculpture. As I
started to look at photographs of not just Renaissance sculpture but also objects
made in many other times and places, I found that the images themselves
could often be as visually compelling, conceptually complex, even beautiful
as the sculptures depicted within them. Thus while I have continued to study
sculpture-qua-sculpture over the past two decades, I have also explored the
equally fascinating photographic depictions of sculpture and the ways these
depictions—and our writings about them—have their own histories, their own
theories, their own aesthetics.3
EPILOGUE
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 277 4/3/17 10:23 AM
JOHNSON278
Growing interest by other scholars in the photography of sculpture is
evident from the great variety of approaches, images, and objects considered
by the contributors to the present volume. Indeed, the essays hint at many
intriguing avenues for future research, as well as highlight the urgent need to
look beyond Europe and North America for our subjects of study. Rather than
trying to address this galaxy of possibilities, in the present essay I will instead
focus on a single iconic image from the dawn of photography—an image that
is perhaps the earliest depiction of a sculpture posed before a camera and thus
the first moment in which the process of photographing sculpture is itself laid
bare for scrutiny—in order to reflect on some of the possible directions in
which the sculpture and photography rubric may lead us in the years to come,
directions that can broadly be defined in terms of historical, theoretical and
historiographical projects.
The touchstone image is a staged panoramic view taken in 1846 in Reading,
England, of the first commercial enterprise for printing photographs from
negatives. (fig. 1) The figure standing in the center and preparing a camera to
take a portrait of a seated man is probably William Henry Fox Talbot. On the
right, dressed in black and standing in profile, is Nicolaas Henneman, Talbot’s
former valet-turned-professional photographer and the founder of what
became known as the Reading Establishment.4 Given the commercial ambitions
of Talbot and especially professional photographers like Henneman, it is not
surprising to find the lucrative practice of portrait photography positioned in
the middle of the scene. Perhaps less expected are the photographic activities
taking place to either side: on the left, an engraving after a Baroque portrait
is being photographed on an easel, while on the right Henneman sets up a
camera to photograph a reduced-size plaster cast of Canova’s Three Graces. On
top of his camera, Henneman balances a clock to time the exposure needed to
photograph the sculpture. Farther to the right, a kneeling man tinkers with a
focusing instrument, while between Henneman and Talbot a young apprentice
places a photographic print or negative on a rack to dry the chemical solution
covering its surface. The emphasis on the mechanics, one could even say the
science, of early photography is made evident through such details.
The technical aspects of photographing sculptural subjects were also
highlighted by Talbot in his seminal publication The Pencil of Nature, which
appeared in six parts beginning in 1844. It included two photographic
illustrations showing full-face and profile views of a plaster bust identified
as the ancient Greek hero Patroclus that was owned by Talbot and that he
photographed at least thirty times.5 In this publication, Talbot explained that the
bust and similarly light-colored sculptures were ideal subjects for the camera
because they did not move, could be photographed from a variety of angles
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 278 4/3/17 10:23 AM
PHOTOGRAPHING SCULPTURE, SCULPTING PHOTOGRAPHY 279
and distances, and required shorter exposure times than darker, less luminous
objects.6 Highlighting these aspects of the photography of sculpture in The
Pencil of Nature and including the technical apparatus of early photography
in the Reading Establishment scene encouraged contemporaries to think of
photography as a technical and scientific endeavor, rather than focusing on the
content of individual images.
At the same time, the decision to photograph particular types of objects
was clearly not irrelevant. Significantly, in both the Reading Establishment
panorama and The Pencil of Nature, art works and their reproductions were
key subjects. The latter’s twenty-four illustrations included not only the two
views of the Patroclus bust, but also photographs of a contemporary lithograph,
a facsimile of a Baroque drawing, decorative art objects, and architectural
scenes. This hinted at photography’s potential to develop into a useful tool for
artists and scholars as Talbot also suggested elsewhere in his text,7 perhaps
even turning it into an artistic medium in its own right, rather than serving
merely as an interesting demonstration of scientific principles. Already in
1841, Talbot had emphasized that his photographs were not the products of
“mere mechanical labour,” but rather allowed “ample room for the exercise of
skill and judgment,” which he maintained “fall within the artist’s province to
combine and regulate.”8 Such claims in no way deny the scientific ambitions
and laborious demands of early photography. Rather, they suggest an inherent
tension in Talbot’s understanding of photography as both a science practiced by
scientists and technicians and, at least potentially, as an art form practiced by
artists and used by humanist scholars. I am certainly not the first to suggest that
this tension existed, but I would like to propose that it is particularly evident in
Talbot’s early images of and writings about sculpture. Indeed, it was precisely
because a photograph of a three-dimensional sculpture like the Patroclus bust
Fig. 1.
Attributed to Nicolaas
Henneman (Dutch, 1813–
1893/98) (left), and William
Henry Fox Talbot (English,
1800–1877) (right). The
Reading Establishment,
1846, two salted paper prints
from paper negatives joined
together, dimensions TK.
New York, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Gilman
Collection.
B&W
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 279 4/3/17 10:23 AM
JOHNSON280
placed particular technical demands on early photographers, but at the same
time reproduced what was clearly a work of “Art” (with a capital “A”), that these
tensions came to the surface in Talbot’s texts about and illustrations of sculpted
objects.
It is also significant that the Patroclus bust and the plaster cast in the
Reading Establishment panorama are not just any art works, but ones with
clear connections to antiquity, the most prestigious historical period for a man
of Talbot’s class and gender in the mid-nineteenth century. By photographing
ancient sculpture, as well as its plaster reproductions and neoclassical
derivatives, early practitioners like Talbot could link photography to the classical
tradition. While any light-colored, immobile object could serve as an ideal
photographic subject from a technical point of view, the fact that a statuette on
the classical theme of the Graces was one of three iconic subjects depicted in
the Reading Establishment panorama and a replica bust of an ancient hero was
illustrated twice in The Pencil of Nature suggests that the cultural associations
of such sculptures—especially white sculptures that evoked the marble statuary
of Greco-Roman antiquity9—must have had particular significance for Talbot
and other early photographers. The leveling effects of photography, which could
blur the distinctions between large and small, marble and plaster, original and
copy, also allowed photographs of classical sculpture and its reproductions
to define photography not just as a scientific and technical pursuit, but as an
artistic and humanistic one as well.10
The question of whether photography was an art form in its own right
would haunt writers and practitioners for many decades, with images of
sculptural subjects continuing to be used to make the case for photography
as a serious artistic pursuit. Edward Steichen, for instance, photographed
Rodin’s statue of Balzac in 1908 under changing light conditions to produce
a series of highly atmospheric images.11 Once again, the technical advantages
of photographing a sculpture were evident given that its immobility and lightcolored
surfaces could accommodate the extended exposure times needed for
the moonlit scenes. At the same time, the bulky mass of the sculpted figure,
rendered thrillingly immaterial through Steichen’s handling of the photographic
medium, confirmed the photographer’s artistic ambitions. While nineteenthcentury
photographs of classical sculpture reflected that period’s anxieties about
legitimizing the new medium by turning to the distant past, in subsequent
decades works by self-consciously avant-garde sculptors could be deployed to
support Pictorialist photographers’ claims for the medium’s equally avant-garde
visual aesthetic.
While some photographers used images of sculpture as part of an explicitly
artistic agenda, others continued to exploit the medium’s documentary
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 280 4/3/17 10:23 AM
PHOTOGRAPHING SCULPTURE, SCULPTING PHOTOGRAPHY 281
capabilities. We see this in the rise in the second half of the nineteenth
century of ambitious photographic enterprises like that of the Alinari in
Florence, which focused on systematically recording the art and architecture
of the Italian peninsula. A typical example is an Alinari photograph of the
Renaissance sculptor Verrocchio’s equestrian statue in the center of a Venetian
piazza, ostensibly documenting objectively the sculptural and architectural
scene in about 1880.12 It is worth noting, however, that the Venetian state had
been one of the last regions of Italy to become part of the new kingdom only
a dozen or so years before this photograph was taken. Incorporating the print
into the Alinari’s vast photographic archive therefore documented and, at
the same time, duplicated Venice’s own integration into a newly united Italy.
Although many photographers claimed that such images were, in Walker
Evans’s words, “pure record, not propaganda,”13 even the most apparently
neutral photograph of a sculptural subject inevitably reflected the cultural and
socio-political preoccupations of the photographers who produced them and,
in many cases, the private enterprises and public institutions that funded and
then archived them.
In the more rarefied world of art historical scholarship, the assumption
that photographs were “pure” and objective records of sculpted objects could
be just as much of a fiction. This is seen particularly clearly in the work of
photographers who specialized in sculptural subjects such as the art historian
Clarence Kennedy beginning in the 1920s and the public relations-man-turnedphotographer
David Finn from the late 1960s onwards.14 Although supposedly
providing images for “scientific” connoisseurship and systematic formal
analysis, their sometimes hallucinatory close-ups of sculpture actually reflected
contemporary aesthetic preoccupations, whether the secrets and shadows
of Surrealism hinted at in Kennedy’s images or the late flowering of high
modernist abstraction found in Finn’s work. In both cases, the photographers’
primary focus on Renaissance and classical sculpture once again allowed the
prestige of the past to rub off on the present, as had also been the case in
the choice of sculptural subjects by early practitioners such as Talbot and in the
photographic archives developed by the likes of the Alinari.
More recently, photographs of classical sculpture have been used
in postmodern explorations of gender and sexuality as seen in Robert
Mapplethorpe’s exquisitely sensuous encounters with ancient statues of Apollo
and Antinous or Nan Goldin’s intimate glimpse of a bi-gendered marble
hermaphrodite entangled in bedding from her “Scopophilia” series.15 As
much as a Talbot calotype of a classically inspired sculpture, these more recent
photographs once again respond to historically specific personal and cultural
circumstances. Now, however, ancient statues are no longer objects onto
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 281 4/3/17 10:23 AM
JOHNSON282
which the social, scientific and artistic hopes and anxieties of a new medium’s
practitioners are projected, but rather works that capture a photographer’s
dreams and desires when using a camera, Pygmalion-like, to awaken a
long-dormant Galatea with an ambiguous sexual allure. All these examples
confirm the intrinsic interest of pursuing an ongoing historical project in
which different kinds of sculptural objects and their photographic (and now
digital) representations become a way of mapping changing perceptions about
photography itself and its relation to the evolving preoccupations of individual
practitioners and the wider culture.
Photographs of sculpture not only help to map photography’s changing
ambitions and obsessions at different moments in its history; they can also help
to define and theorize sculpture itself. If we consider the kinds of photographs
of sculpture that were produced at the Reading Establishment and elsewhere
from the mid-1840s onward, we see that visual conventions were already being
formulated to signify that a particular object was worthy of concentrated visual
contemplation. Most significantly, sculptures were isolated against neutral dark
or light backgrounds as seen in Talbot’s illustrations of the Patroclus bust and
his own photographs of the cast of Canova’s Three Graces from the panorama.16
Other photographers doctored negatives of sculptural subjects with ink
or bleach in order to block out the surroundings completely.17 In the later
nineteenth and early twentieth century, these visual conventions proliferated
in the thousands of photographs of sculpture produced by the likes of Braun,
Anderson and Alinari, so much so that eventually any three-dimensional object
set against a neutral background could begin to be read sculpturally.
The ubiquity of these visual conventions meant that artists could produce
entirely new sculpted objects by photographic means alone. This phenomenon
can be seen at work in Karl Blossfeldt’s extreme close-up views of botanical
specimens set against neutral backgrounds, which are presented not as scientific
evidence, but as Art Forms in Nature, to quote the title of the volumes in which
they appeared.18 Walker Evans similarly used the visual conventions associated
with the photography of traditional sculpture to transform both handcrafted
ethnographic objects (such as a carved wooden figure from West Africa) and
mass-produced industrial specimens (such as scissors and crate-openers)
into sculptural artifacts that seem to float weightlessly on the surface of the
photographic print outside any identifiable place or time, each object presented
as being as worthy of aesthetic contemplation as a classically inspired sculpture
captured in a Talbot negative or an Alinari print.19
Explanatory text or captions could help to reinforce the transformation
of any object, at least potentially, into a sculptural artifact. The best-known
examples are the crumpled bus tickets, scraps of soap, and squirts of toothpaste
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 282 4/3/17 10:23 AM
PHOTOGRAPHING SCULPTURE, SCULPTING PHOTOGRAPHY 283
photographed by Brassaï and then published in 1933 in the Surrealist journal
Minotaure with captions by Salvador Dalí. The title at the bottom of the page
boldly declares in capital letters that these found objects are “Involuntary
Sculptures,” a claim reinforced visually by the leveling effects of black-andwhite
photography, which elides differences in color, scale, and texture among
the objects, and by silhouetting each item against a neutral background,
intentionally recalling the visual conventions associated with photographs of
“voluntary” sculptures.20
Perhaps the most intriguing transformation of things into sculpture
through the medium of photography involves not found objects, whether
natural or man-made, but the human body itself. This is already hinted at in
the Reading Establishment panorama. Here the central photographer adjusts
his camera while his undisciplined sitter fails to hold his head perfectly
still—unlike all the other figures in the scene, who clearly had a better
understanding of the technical demands of the early photographic apparatus
with its extended exposure times that required living bodies to be changed
temporarily into immobile statues in a kind of reverse Pygmalion effect.
The transformation of the body into sculpture could also occur directly on
the surface of a photographic negative, as seen in the English photographer
Paul Martin’s so-called “living statues.”21 These images were produced in the
1890s from candid photographs taken of street life, which Martin retouched
and then presented in life-size lantern slide shows. The silhouetted bodies set
against black backgrounds and standing on fictive plinths visually transformed
shoppers and street traders into a series of statue-like tableaux, the figures
frozen first as photographic subjects and then as sculptural ones.
Rather than relying on such darkroom manipulations, advocates of the
later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physical culture movement
simply remade their bodybuilder pin-ups into classicising statues before
any photographs were taken.22 Photographers deployed poses, plinths, and
props—including paper fig leaves and a dusting of talcum power—to change
living sitters into convincing approximations of ancient sculptural prototypes.
The plausibility of such images was once again reliant on the ability of
monochromatic photographs to gloss over the very real differences in color
and surface texture that existed between living bodies and sculpted ones. At the
same time, deliberately evoking photographs of classical statuary provided a
kind of legitimacy to the potentially homoerotic gazes of the men who bought
these images individually or in illustrated physical culture magazines.
The links between sculpture, photography and the sometimes guilty
pleasures of a desiring eye are anything but hidden in the highly sculptural
photographic portraits taken by Mapplethorpe a century later. In these images,
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 283 4/3/17 10:23 AM
JOHNSON284
nude models with taut bodies chiseled as if from stone are posed statue-like
on plinths using the by-now familiar visual convention of isolating the subject
against a neutral background.23 By deploying such art-world conventions,
the photographs once again provided a viewing context that legitimized the
beholder’s leisurely visual perusal of the living sitters’ very sculptural physiques.
Like Mapplethorpe, other modernist and postmodernist photographers also
reveled in producing images that willfully disorientated viewers by presenting
bodies that exist somewhere between petrified flesh and living sculpture. For
example, in an intriguing photograph by Erwin Blumenfeld taken in the mid-
1930s of Maillol’s Three Graces, the overlapping exposures make it difficult at
first glance to be sure whether we are looking at a group of naked women or
a trio of sculpted female figures.24 (fig. 2) Only the presence of a pointing pin
stuck into the central figure’s shoulder confirms that what we are seeing is, in
fact, a sculpture being prepared for casting. But this pin casts a shadow that
also punctures our certainties about dimensionality and the materiality of the
sculpted object. We initially assume that the pin is stuck into the statue, its
shadow falling on the object’s surface. Soon, however, one realizes that the pin
could equally well be embedded in a photograph of the sculpture tacked onto
a wall and then re-photographed, with the shadow in this case falling not on
hard stone or smooth plaster but on the surface of a photographic print. The
ambiguity is not just between living flesh and dead sculpture, but between that
which is sculptural and that which is photographic.
Photographs do not only create new forms of sculpture, whether through
found objects or petrified bodies; they are also themselves objects with
sculptural qualities.25 Turning once again to the Reading Establishment
panorama, the physical labor involved in early photographic processes and
the materiality of photographic prints are suggested in the detail of the young
apprentice handling a calotype print or negative while placing it on a rack to
dry in the Summer sun. Yet until fairly recently, the materiality of photographs
was often ignored, as suggested by the fact that the Reading Establishment
panorama was itself usually reproduced with its ragged edges cropped, thereby
transforming the material object into an uninterrupted transparent window
with implicitly direct, unmediated access to the past. The panorama, however,
is actually made up of two separate prints, each with its own material qualities
and handling history that attest to a solid and opaque objecthood. Even today,
most photographs still tend to be illustrated in books and online without their
mounts and with any rough edges carefully cropped to create an illusion of
images floating free from time and space, from history and materiality—
conventions that echo photographs taken from Talbot’s time onward of
Q. Ed:
Cap S OK
or not
?
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 284 4/3/17 10:23 AM
PHOTOGRAPHING SCULPTURE, SCULPTING PHOTOGRAPHY 285
sculpture set against neutral backgrounds that likewise detach sculptural
objects from their spatial and temporal circumstances.
The physical handling, one could even say sculpting, of photographs is
seen in the practices of a number of sculptors. Rodin, for instance, drew on
photographs of some of his statues, his pencil wielded like a virtual chisel in
order to rethink individual compositions.26 The materiality of photographic
prints has also long been exploited in artifacts of popular culture, from
Victorian mourning jewelry, which could incorporate photographs of the
deceased, to twentieth-century Mexican-American fotoesculturas, which
sandwich family portraits between two sheets of glass mounted in a highly
tactile frame.27 The questions of medium specificity raised by such objects—the
difficulties of differentiating the sculptural from the photographic—were dealt
with very self-consciously by artists who produced entirely new objects from
Fig. 2.
Erwin Blumenfeld (American,
1897–1969). The Three
Graces in the Studio of
Aristide Maillol, Marly-le-Roi,
heliogravure. From Verve 1,
no. 1 (1937): page/pl. TK.
B&W
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 285 4/3/17 10:23 AM
JOHNSON286
photographs, such as László Moholy-Nagy’s Fotoplastiks made by cutting and
recombining found photographic images, or the playfully-provocative photosculptural
works of 1960s conceptual artists like Robert Heinecken’s wooden
cube covered with photographic prints of a fragmented female nude.28
Questions of medium specificity and the camera’s ability to transform
living bodies into sculptural objects—issues already alluded to in the
Reading Establishment panorama—come together in another highly selfconscious
twentieth-century artistic practice, namely, performance art. Here,
the visual conventions of sculpture photography once again allowed living
bodies to metamorphose into sculptural ones in still photographs of these
happenings. The photographs themselves then often became permanent
material substitutes for both the ephemeral event and the absent artist. For
instance, in still shots of a 1972 performance of Joseph Beuys’s Arena taken
by the photographer Katharina Sieverding, the artist is frozen statuelike in
mid-action while surrounded by dozens of photographs mounted into bulky
metal frames propped theatrically—one could even say sculpturally—against
the walls (fig. 3).29 The framed photographs had been previously reworked in
very sculptural ways by Beuys who had bleached, scuffed, and added layers of
fat and wax to them. In a kind of mise-en-abyme, photographs of Arena were
then themselves transformed into new photographic objects to be displayed
alongside surviving props from the performance and the earlier framed
images. What distinguishes the sculptural from the photographic, the image
from the object, and the performance from its documentation is destabilized
through such practices. Photographic documentation and a variety of other
three-dimensional props could thus co-exist as semisculptural embodiments of
evanescent events, in the process contributing to what Amelia Jones describes as
an endless loop of signification in which a performance “needs the photograph
to confirm its having happened; [and] the photograph needs the . . . event as an
ontological ‘anchor’ of its indexicality.”30
Photographs that transform found objects and human subjects into
sculpture; the interplay between living statues and petrified bodies; and
photographs that are themselves handled in sculptural ways—all these issues,
which were already hinted at in the Reading Establishment panorama, raise
important questions about dimensionality and medium specificity, about how
we actually define a photograph or a sculpture. They also undermine a reliance
on medium alone to delineate what is photographic and what is sculptural.
Exploring such issues constitutes the second project of the sculpturephotography
rubric, one that is theoretical as opposed to historical.
There is one final project to discuss, which is neither primarily theoretical
nor historical, but rather historiographical—a project in which the photography
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 286 4/3/17 10:23 AM
PHOTOGRAPHING SCULPTURE, SCULPTING PHOTOGRAPHY 287
of sculpture is considered within the context of art history as a discipline. If
we turn yet again to the Reading Establishment scene, we realize that the
panorama hints at a number of absences and omissions at the very heart of
the stories we tell as art historians. At the center of the scene, hidden in plain
sight, yet obvious once we notice it, Talbot is present behind the camera in one
half of the panorama, but absent in the other. This is because it was most likely
Henneman who photographed the left-hand scene while Talbot took the image
Fig. 3.
Katharina Sieverding (Czech,
b. 1944). Beuys Arena, digital
image from 2014 slideshow of
ninety-eight photographs taken
in 1972.
B&W
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 287 4/3/17 10:23 AM
JOHNSON288
on the right, in which Henneman appears about to photograph the cast of The
Three Graces.31 Like Henneman, the art historian is also always present, either
in person or by proxy, in the making and selection of photographic images, but
like the vanishing Talbot, usually absent from considerations of the discipline’s
imaging practices. At the same time, it is possible that Henneman may not
even be actually photographing the cast at all since the sculpture is not placed
against a monochromatic backdrop, as was standard practice for Talbot and
his associates, nor is the camera set at a plausible focusing distance from the
object.32
The technical challenges of photographing a sculpture and the unavoidable
impact of individual art historians’ cultural contexts and personal
circumstances on the resulting images are essential issues to consider when
attempting to write what I call the “visual historiography” of art history.33 The
Reading Establishment panorama suggests that right from the start, art history
has been a “History of That Which Can Be Photographed,” as André Malraux
famously put it.34 At the same time, it reminds us that this history has until fairly
recently been overlooked by most art historians, who often have been seduced
by the easy assumptions of photographic transparency and objectivity in their
disciplinary practices. In the panorama, the mechanics—and fictions—of this
history are laid bare, if only we chose to see them. The Reading Establishment
panorama thus evokes all three projects I have proposed for the sculpturephotography
rubric, with the historical, theoretical, and historiographical
questions raised by the photography of sculpture already evident at the very
start of both the history of photography and the history of art history as we
know it today.
Notes
1. Geraldine A. Johnson (trans.), “Heinrich Wölfflin: ‘How One Should Photograph
Sculpture,’” Art History 36 (2013): 52–71.
2. On Baxandall’s “period eye,” see Allan Langdale, “Aspects of the Critical
Reception and Intellectual History of Baxandall’s Concept of the Period Eye,” in
About Michael Baxandall, ed. Adrian Rifkin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 479–97.
3. Among other publications, see: Geraldine A. Johnson, “The Very Impress of the
Object”: Photographing Sculpture from Fox Talbot to the Present Day (London
and Leeds: Strang Print Room, University College London, and Leeds City Art
Gallery, 1995); Geraldine A. Johnson ed. Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning
the Third Dimension (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Geraldine
A. Johnson, “‘All Concrete Shapes Dissolve in Light’: Photographing Sculpture
from Rodin to Brancusi,” Sculpture Journal 15 (2006), 199–222; Geraldine A.
Johnson, “Using the Photographic Archive: On the Life (and Death) of Images,”
in Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, ed. Costanza
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 288 4/3/17 10:23 AM
PHOTOGRAPHING SCULPTURE, SCULPTING PHOTOGRAPHY 289
Caraffa (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011), 145–56; Geraldine A. Johnson,
“(Un)richtige Aufnahme: Sculpture, Photography and the Visual Historiography
of Art History,” Art History 36 (2013), 12–51.
4. For two differing views about whether the central standing figure actually is
Talbot and on the attribution of the two halves of the panorama, see Larry J.
Schaaf, Introductory Volume: Facsimile of William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil
of Nature (New York: Hans P. Kraus, 1989), 20; Geoffrey Batchen, “The Labor of
Photography,” Victorian Literature and Culture 37 (2009), 294.
5. William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, facsim. of 1844–46 ed. (New
York: Hans P. Kraus, 1989), pllates V, XVII; Susan L. Taylor, “Fox Talbot as an
Artist: The ‘Patroclus’ Series,” Bulletin: The University of Michigan Museums of
Art and Archaeology 8 (1986), 38–55; Schaaf, Introductory Volume: The Pencil of
Nature, 48–49.
6. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, plate V.
7. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, plate VII.
8. Cited in Taylor, “Patroclus,” 50.
9. On the color of sculptural subjects, see Geraldine A. Johnson, “‘In Consequence
of Their Whiteness’: Photographing Marble Sculpture from Talbot to Today,” in
Radical Marble, ed. J. Nicholas Napoli and William Tronzo (Abingdon: Taylor &
Francis, forthcoming).
10. On photographing ancient sculpture and its reproductions, see esp.: Julia
Ballerini, “Recasting Ancestry: Statuettes as Imaged by Three Inventors of
Photography,” in The Object as Subject: Studies in the Interpretation of Still Life,
ed. Anne W. Lowenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 41–58;
Geoffrey Batchen, “Light and Dark: The Daguerreotype and Art History,”
Art Bulletin 86 (2004): 764–76; Elizabeth Anne McCauley, “Fawning over
Marbles: Robert and Gerardine Macpherson’s Vatican Sculptures and the Role of
Photographs in the Reception of the Antique,” in Art and the Early Photographic
Album, ed. Stephen Bann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 91–122.
11. Johnson, “Rodin to Brancusi,” 200–4.
12. Alinari, “Venezia, Campo dei SS Giovanni e Paolo (ca. 1880),” http://photoinventory.fr/photos/MH8158.png.
On the Alinari in general, see Filippo Zevi, Alinari,
Photographers of Florence, 1852–1920 (Florence and London: Alinari and Idea,
1978).
13. Cited in Gilles Mora and John T. Hill, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye (London:
Thames & Hudson, 1993), 134.
14. Images by Kennedy are reproduced in Sarah Hamill’s essay in the present volume.
Kennedy’s photographs have been the subject of several small exhibitions, including
at Smith College (1967), the Clark Art Institute (1980), the Detroit Institute
of Arts (1987), Wellesley College (2010) and Oberlin College (2012). Finn has
photographed sculpture for over sixty books, often receiving equal billing with
the author, e.g., David Finn (photographs) and Frederick Hartt (text), Donatello,
Prophet of Modern Vision (New York: Abrams, 1972).
15. Germano Celant, Arkady Ippolitov, and Karole Vail, Robert Mapplethorpe and
the Classical Tradition: Photographs and Mannerist Prints (New York: Solomon
R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2004–5), plates 112, 115; Nan Goldin, “Young
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 289 4/3/17 10:23 AM
JOHNSON290
Hermaphrodite Sleeping, le Louvre (2010),” Mathew Marks Gallery, New York,
http://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/exhibitions/2011-10-29_nan-goldin/
works-in-exhibition/.
16. Talbot, Pencil of Nature, plates V, XVII; Talbot, “Three Graces (1840s),”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, http://www.metmuseum.org/art/
collection/search/306345.
17. Joel Snyder, “Nineteenth-century Photography of Sculpture and the Rhetoric of
Substitution,” in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed.
Geraldine A. Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 29–30.
18. Karl Blossfeldt, Art Forms in Nature: Examples from the Plant World, 2 vols.
(London: A. Zwemmer, 1929–32).
19. See, for instance, Walker Evans, “Figure, French Guinea (1935),” Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/
search/265774; Walker Evans, “Beauties of the Common Tool,” Fortune July
(1955), 103–7.
20. For an illustration of Brassaï and Dalí’s collaboration, see Rosalind Krauss, “The
Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October 19 (Winter, 1981): 30. On photographing
found objects in general, see Anna Dezeuze and Julia Kelly, eds., Found
Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2013).
21. Roy Flukinger, Larry J. Schaaf, and Standish Meacham, Paul Martin: Victorian
Photographer (London: G. Fraser, 1978), 43–47.
22. Tamar Garb, “Photography, Physical Culture, and the Classical Ideal,”
86–100, and Michael Hatt, “Eakins’s Arcadia: Sculpture, Photography, and
the Redefinition of the Classical Body,” 62–65, in Sculpture and Photography:
Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
23. See, for example, Celant, Ippolitov, and Vail, Mapplethorpe, plates 15–18.
24. The photograph was published in the first issue of the influential avant-garde
French magazine Verve in 1937. On Blumenfeld, see Ute Eskildsen, ed. Erwin
Blumenfeld: Photographs, Drawings and Photomontages (Paris: Jeu de Paume/
Hazan, 2013).
25. On the materiality of photographs, see esp.: Geoffrey Batchen, “Vernacular
Photographies,” in Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2001), 56–81; Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs,
Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001). It is worth noting here
the short-lived mid-nineteenth-century phenomenon of the photosculpture
machine, which could literally turn a series of photographs of a sitter taken in the
round into a portrait sculpture. See Robert A. Sobieszek, “Sculpture as the Sum
of Its Profiles: François Willème and Photosculpture in France, 1859–1868,” Art
Bulletin 62 (1980): 617–30.
26. Hélène Pinet, “‘Montrer est la question vitale’: Rodin and Photography,” in
Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A.
Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 73–74.
27. For examples of such objects, see Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography
& Remembrance (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 61–73.
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 290 4/3/17 10:23 AM
PHOTOGRAPHING SCULPTURE, SCULPTING PHOTOGRAPHY 291
28. Heinecken’s piece was included in the ground-breaking exhibition Photography
into Sculpture, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1970, https://www.moma.org/
momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/4438/releases/MOMA_1970_JanJune_0035_36.pdf?2010.
On Fotoplastiks, see Julie Saul, ed. Moholy-Nagy
Fotoplastiks: The Bauhaus Years (Bronx: Bronx Museum of the Arts, 1983).
29. On the complicated history of Arena, see Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, eds.,
Joseph Beuys: Arena: Wo wäre ich hingekommen, wenn ich intelligent gewesen
wäre! (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1994). Sieverding’s photographs of a
1972 performance of this piece in Rome were shown as a digital slideshow in 2014
at the Centre of Contemporary Art “Znaki Czasu” in Torun, Poland.
30. Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as
Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (1997): 16.
31. See note 4, above, on the identity of the figures in the panorama and debates
about its attribution.
32. I am grateful to Anne McCauley for pointing out the problem of the camera’s
focusing distance in the panorama (personal communication, 27 September
2014).
33. For an example of such a history, see Johnson, “Visual Historiography,” 12–51.
34. André Malraux, Psychologie de l’art: Le musée imaginaire, 3 vols. (Paris: Skira,
1947), 32.
PROOF 1 2 3 4 5
Getty; Photos & Sculpture.indd 291 4/3/17 10:23 AM