Geraldine A.

Johnson
“The Life of Objects”: Sculpture as Subject
and Object of the Camera’s Lens
A chair, a slab of granite, a ball of stone: at first glance, this is not the most
obvious image to put at the beginning of an essay on sculpture and pho-
tography. (Fig. 1) It is, however, a more plausible choice for a volume inspired
by the work of the influential Czech photographer, Josef Sudek, given that
it reproduces a gelatin silver print made by Sudek with a panoramic camera
similar to the one he used to take photographs in and around Prague in the
s. In the present image, however, it is not the grand façade of Prague’s
National Theatre, nor the wide-open banks of the Vltava River that Sudek
records, but rather the intimate, mysterious, even magical garden of the villa
in the hills above Prague that belonged to his great friend and supporter, the
architect Otto Rothmayer.

At first glance, the objects in the photograph seem grouped together as if by

chance. But familiarity with the conventions of both modernist sculpture
and modernist photography suggest that this is actually an image of sculp-
tural subjects, if not of traditional figurative sculpture. Spot-lit against a
shadowy background of grass and trees, the plinth-like platform transforms
the smooth ball of stone into an abstract carving, a scene reminiscent of one
of Constantin Brancusi’s studio installations as photographed by the artist
himself – and a good example of the phenomenon by which an abstract or
found object is transformed into something sculptural by the very act of
being photographed. (Fig. 2) The second focal point of the composition is
another modernist object, the metal chair that sits slightly to the left of the
plinth – empty, as if waiting for an absent occupier to return to be seated,
statue-like, on the nocturnal throne. The sculptural qualities of the chair it-
self would have been evident to Sudek and his contemporaries given that it
had been designed by Rothmayer in collaboration with the sculptor Hana
Wichterlová, in whose garden Sudek also photographed statues and other
sculptural artefacts half-hidden amongst the foliage.

That we are indeed looking at a photograph intended by Sudek to be read in

sculptural terms is confirmed by other images from the same series produced
in – such as one showing, alongside the same stone ball and metal
chair, a worn and damaged head from a broken statue tied up in a piece of
rope lying on the granite plinth, one of the many sculptural fragments col-
lected by Rothmayer over the years while restoring historic buildings like
Prague Castle. Significantly, the scene recalls once again photographs tak-
en by Brancusi of his own sculpted heads, while the rope wrapped roughly
around the stone fragment gives it the disquieting air of a Surrealist object
photographed by Man Ray.

But Sudek’s photograph of Rothmayer’s magic garden isn’t only sculptural

in its subject matter – it is also an object with sculptural qualities of its own.
While any photographic print is inevitably both an image and a three-dimen-
sional object, in the case of Sudek’s panorama, the objecthood of the photo-
graph is particularly insistent thanks to the multi-media mount Sudek crafted Fig. 1 Josef Sudek, A Walk in the Magic Garden, 1954–59, gelatin silver print in a mount made by Sudek, silvered paper and
reddish-purple fabric between two glass plates sealed with lead along the edges, 10 × 30 cm (photograph), 39.4 × 48.2 cm
for the print in about , possibly with some assistance from Rothmayer. (glass), The Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, Collection of Photography, inv. no. GF 31576 © The Estate of Josef Sudek.

18 19
First, he laid the photograph on an irregularly-cut scrap of silvered paper, then
he placed this pairing on a piece of reddish-purple fabric, which he in turn
sandwiched between two sheets of glass sealed along the edges with strips
of lead. Sudek coined a term for this type of construction, puřidla, or, when
using second-hand, rather than hand-made frames, veteš, meaning bric-a-
brac or junk, which emphasises the materiality of the photographic object.
Sudek’s photograph, with its formal, iconographic and material complexi-
ties, hints at the wide range of issues raised by the sculpture-photography
rubric: sculpture as a photographic subject, but also photography’s ability to
produce new sculptural objects – like the ball of stone – by the very act of
taking a picture. The empty chair, meanwhile, recalls the role played by the
statuesque body, whether absent or present, in the photography of sculpture.
Sudek’s panorama in its tactile mount also reminds us of the photograph’s
own sculptural objecthood. Finally, the fact that the present essay’s arguments
rely on photographs of photographs – including a printed reproduction of
Sudek’s intriguing photo-object – reminds us of the crucial role played by
photography, both analogue and now digital, in the disciplinary practices of
Art History itself. In what follows, all these issues will be further explored by
considering examples by other photographers working from the mid-nine-
teenth century to the present day, examples that suggest the many fascinating
intersections of sculpture and photography and, to use Sudek’s words, “the
life of objects” animated by and through the photographic medium.
Sculpture as Subject: From Document to Work of Art
The theme of sculpture as subject of the camera’s lens is alluded to in Sudek’s
photograph by the carved ball of stone on the plinth-like platform. (see Fig. 1)
But the history of sculpture as a photographic subject can be dated back to
the very origins of the photographic medium in the later s in images
made by pioneers such as William Henry Fox Talbot and Louis-Jacques-
Mandé Daguerre. Particularly revealing is another panoramic view once
again taken in a garden, albeit one located in Reading, England, rather than
in Prague. (Fig. 3) In this joined pair of salted paper prints made in , we
see for the first time a sculpture in the act of being photographed. Standing
in the middle of the scene is Talbot, who had encouraged his former butler
and fellow photographer, Nicolaas Henneman, to set up what became known
as the “Reading Establishment”, the world’s first commercial enterprise for
printing photographs from negatives. In light of the initiative’s profit-mak-
ing ambitions, it is not surprising that the lucrative practice of portrait pho-
tography was positioned at the very centre of the scene, with Talbot shown
photographing a man seated in front of his camera.
Perhaps somewhat less expected are the photographic activities taking place
on either side of the portrait photography vignette. On the left, a man pho-
tographs a reproductive engraving of a Baroque portrait hanging on an easel
covered in black cloth, while on the right, Henneman stands in a black suit
20
behind yet another camera, apparently about to photograph a reduced-size
plaster cast of Canova’s Three Graces (London, Victoria & Albert Museum)
set on a small table. In this context, it is worth noting that reproductions
of works of art were as much a part of early photography’s commercial cal-
culus as were photographic portraits. Throughout the scene, the technical
requirements of early photography are also evident, as suggested by the part-
ly-covered clock balanced on Henneman’s camera used to time the exposure
and the apparatus being manipulated by the man kneeling on the far right,
probably used to measure distance as part of the focusing process.
The earliest commercial publication to include photographic illustrations is
usually thought to be Talbot’s landmark volume, The Pencil of Nature, which
appeared in six parts beginning in . Significantly, the photographs for
this book were being produced at the Reading Establishment at the same time
that the panoramic scene was being photographed. Among the twenty-four
illustrations in The Pencil of Nature were ones showing two different views of
a plaster cast (based on a marble original in the British Museum) owned by
Talbot that he identified as the ancient Greek hero Patroclus. (Fig. 4) The bust
seems to have been Talbot’s “favourite sitter”, in Larry Schaaf ’s words, with as
many as fifty different photographs of the cast surviving to this day. In The
Pencil of Nature, Talbot explained why this bust and other three-dimensional
works of art were ideal subjects for the camera:
Statues, busts, and other specimens of sculpture, are generally well
represented by the Photographic Art; and also very rapidly, in con-
sequence of their whiteness. These delineations are susceptible of
an almost unlimited variety: since in the first place, a statue may be
placed in any position with regard to the sun […]. And when a choice
has been made of the direction in which the sun’s rays shall fall, the
statue may be then turned round on its pedestal, which produces a
second set of variations […]. And when to this is added the change of
size which is produced in the image by bringing the Camera Obscura
nearer to the statue or removing it further off, it becomes evident how
very great a number of different effects may be obtained from a single
specimen of sculpture.
The Art-Union journal concurred with Talbot’s claims, agreeing that the
Patroclus bust in particular was “an excellent subject for photography, in con-
sequence of the whiteness of the material; hence all casts and busts are well
adapted for representation [in photographs]”. In other words, a sculpture made
of white marble or plaster was a particularly suitable photographic subject be-
cause it did not move, it could be photographed from a variety of angles and
distances, and it required shorter exposure times than darker, less luminous
objects. By highlighting these aspects of the photography of sculpture in his
text and through the inclusion of the technical apparatus of early photography
in the Reading Establishment scene, Talbot encouraged contemporaries to see
The Pencil of Nature – and photography more generally – as being not “about”
21 Geraldine A. Johnson
Fig. 2 Constantin Brancusi, The Artist’s Studio, 1922, gelatin silver print, 23 × 17 cm, New York, The Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) (Gift of Elizabeth Lorentz, acc. no. 865.1996). © 2017. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala,
Florence.

Fig. 3 Attributed to William Henry Fox Talbot (right) and Nicolaas Henneman (left), The Reading Establishment, 1846, two salted
paper prints from paper negatives joined together, 19.9 × 49.1 cm (combined dimensions), New York, The Metropolitan Museum
of Art (Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005).

Fig. 4 William Henry Fox Talbot, Plaster bust of Patroclus (two views), Plate V and Plate XVII in: Talbot, The Pencil of Nature,
published in 1844 (negative for Plate V made on 9 August 1842 and negative for Plate XVII made on 9 August 1843), two salted
paper prints from paper negatives, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Gift of Jean Horblit, in memory of Harrison
D. Horblit, 1994).

22 23
the specific content of individual images, but rather as demonstrating the sci-
entific problems and possibilities of photography itself. The Pencil of Nature
and the Reading Establishment panorama, in other words, could be understood
as defining photography as a technical practice, rather than being concerned
with the particular subject depicted within a given image.
But there is another way to interpret the Reading Establishment panorama and
Talbot’s images of the Patroclus bust. In the panorama, as already noted, two
of the three objects being photographed are reproductions of works of art: a
plaster cast of Canova’s Three Graces and an engraving of a Baroque portrait.
Similarly, a significant number of the twenty-four illustrations in The Pencil of
Nature depicted works of art (broadly defined) or their reproductions, includ-
ing the two views of the Patroclus bust, several architectural scenes, decora-
tive art objects (such as white china teacups), a lithograph by a contemporary
French artist, and a facsimile of an Italian Baroque drawing. From a purely
technical point of view, all these objects were equally immobile and helpful-
ly light-coloured. At the same time, Talbot’s decision to depict works of art
in so many of the illustrations suggested photography’s potential to develop
into a useful tool for artists and scholars, and perhaps even to turn it into an
artistic medium in its own right, rather than serving merely as an interesting
demonstration of scientific principles. Indeed, already in an article of  in
the Literary Gazette, Talbot had emphasised that his photographs, which he
called “photogenic drawing”, were not the products of “mere mechanical la-
bour”, but rather allowed “ample room for the exercise of skill and judgment”,
which “fall[s] within the artist’s province to combine and regulate”.
It is therefore significant that the Patroclus bust and the cast of the Three
Graces in the Reading Establishment panorama were not just any works of
sculpture, but rather objects with a direct connection to antiquity, the most
prestigious of all historical periods for a person of Talbot’s class and gender
in the mid-nineteenth century. Talbot himself was fascinated by the an-
cient world, even winning a medal for his aptitude in Classics as a student at
Cambridge University and translating Assyrian cuneiform tablets in his spare
time. In fact, at the same time that Talbot was photographing the Patroclus
bust to illustrate The Pencil of Nature, he also suggested that the new medium
of photography could be used to study ancient sculpture, writing in  to
the archaeologist Charles Fellows that:
Nothing excels the photographic method in its power of delineating
such objects as form your researches, [such] as ruins, statues, basre-
liefs &c. And I should think it would be highly interesting to take a
[photographic] view of each remnant of antiquity before removing
it, & while it still remains in situ.
It was not just that photographs of sculpture could involve artistic judgments
or be of interest to antiquarian scholars. Photographing ancient sculpture and
its later derivatives could also be used to define photography itself as a medium
24
with the cultural prestige associated with the Classical tradition. So while on
the one hand any light-coloured, immobile object could serve as an ideal pho-
tographic subject from a technical point of view, the fact that a plaster cast de-
picting the ancient Graces was one of three iconic subjects chosen to represent
photography’s potential in the Reading Establishment panorama and a bust of
an ancient hero was the only object illustrated more than once in The Pencil
of Nature suggest that the cultural associations of such sculpture – especially
white sculpture that instantly recalled the marble statuary of Greco-Roman
antiquity – must have had particular significance for Talbot.
This was undoubtedly the case for other early photographers as well who
would have seen still, white statues as conveniently immobile and luminous
objects, but also as subjects with instantly-recognisable Classical pedigrees
that lent dignity, gravitas, even a kind of legitimacy to the new medium both
for their own benefit and for that of their aspirational clients. Photography’s
ability to negate differences of scale and elide distinctions between me-
dia such as marble and plaster – and thus differences between original and
copy – meant that the prestige of the ancient world could be evoked not
only by a work like James Anderson’s albumen silver print of circa –
of the original Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican, but also by a photograph tak-
en by Hippolyte Bayard in the early s of a reduced-size plaster cast of
the same statue posed within one of his ever-changing sculptural tableaux.
Any photograph of a Classical or classicising sculpture, whether an original
marble or a small-scale plaster reproduction, could thus define and elevate
photography not just as a scientific and technical pursuit, but as an artistic
and humanistic one as well. Of course, a photograph of a plaster cast was
itself a reproduction of a reproduction, as were the photographs of prints
made after paintings or drawings, as seen in the print after a Baroque por-
trait that is being photographed on the left side of the Reading Establishment
panorama or the reproduction of a lithograph after a Baroque drawing that
is illustrated in the Pencil of Nature. (see Fig. 3)
Photographs of Classical and classicizing statues were also crucial in estab-
lishing visual conventions for how to photograph any type of sculpture for
documentary purposes. In prints made from the s onwards, such as one
taken by Talbot of the same plaster cast seen in the Reading Establishment
panorama, statues are photographed head-on from an elevated viewpoint and
set against neutral monochromatic backgrounds, in effect presenting each ob-
ject as the artistic equivalent of a scientific specimen pinned on a piece of card
or displayed on a glass slide for scholarly scrutiny. (Fig. 5) These conventions
continue to be deployed today in documentary photographs made or select-
ed for monographs, museums, teaching purposes, auction houses, and online
databases, though usually with little thought as to their origins. In fact, it is
precisely this type of photographic reproduction that currently serves as the
“headline” image for Canova’s full-size marble Three Graces on the Victoria &
Albert Museum’s website. Like Talbot’s photograph of the plaster cast of the
sculpture, the digital image likewise shows the work photographed head-on
25 Geraldine A. Johnson
and set against a black background, even though visitors to the museum ac-
tually encounter the object from below and within the context of a busy pub-
lic space. This type of photographic strategy, with its illusion of disinterested
“scientific” objectivity, is fundamental to the practice and professionalisation
of Art History as a discipline, as will be discussed later in this essay.
Of course, documentary photographs of sculpture do not only involve individ-
ual objects isolated against monochromatic backgrounds like scientific speci-
mens – one need only think of the many photographs of sculptural decoration
on buildings, a popular subject already in the first decades of the new medi-
um’s development. Significantly, photographs of both sculptural ensembles
and individual works, many taken for surveys of national patrimonies of art
and architecture from the mid-nineteenth century onwards by companies like
Alinari, Braun, Anderson and Goupil, tapped into more general assumptions
about the presumed objectivity and indexicality of photography itself – or,
as the Reverend F.A.S. Marshall put it in  when discussing a photograph
of the sculptural decoration on the façade of the cathedral of Notre Dame in
Paris: “What could be more truthful than this, the very impress of the object?”.
Assumptions about the essential “truthfulness” or objectivity of photography
are, however, deeply problematic, not least when considering documentary
photographs of non-European statuary. This is suggested by a photograph
taken in  by the British army officer Linneaus Tripe of sculptures collect-
ed by colonial authorities for a new imperial museum in the Indian province
of Madras. (Fig. 6) While the indexicality of photography is meant to reassure
the viewer about such an image’s scientific objectivity, the fact that the sculp-
tures are framed by devices of colonial administration and authority, such
as the inventory numbers attached to the smaller objects and the yardstick
at the centre that literally subjects the works to imperial standards of meas-
urement, echoes the controls imposed by British occupiers on local Indian
populations, as well as on their sculptural patrimony. The carvings displayed
in this particular photograph, a group known as the “Elliot Marbles” after the
Scottish archaeologist, Walter Elliot, who appropriated them from various
sites, date from the second to the eighth century. Grouping them together
in this photograph with no regard for chronology or for their original lo-
cations or functions inevitably confirms Orientalist assumptions about the
supposed “timelessness” and unchanging nature of non-European cultures
as discussed by Linda Nochlin.
Colonial aesthetics seem to be similarly evident in a photograph taken about
thirty years after Tripe’s image in the region of Hyderabad in Southern India
of a group of damaged stone nandis (bulls associated with the Hindu god
Shiva) scattered haphazardly on the dusty ground. (Fig. 7) At first glance, the
scene appears to conform perfectly to the visual clichés of nineteenth-century
Orientalist painting as described by Nochlin: time seems to stand still, monu-
ments crumble due to their neglect by indigenous people, and European mo-
dernity is conspicuously absent, with everything depicted in a photo-realistic
26
manner in order to convince the viewer that the fantasy is not merely a fiction.
Except, of course, that the present image actually is a photograph, rather than a
hyper-realistic Orientalist painting. But this, if anything, reinforces Orientalist
fantasies precisely because of the apparent transparency of the photographic
medium. However, familiarity with the visual conventions of colonial photogra-
phy makes it clear that the focus on picturesque ruins and an exotic landscape
reflects an imperialist agenda as much as any painted Orientalist composition.
But assumptions about “colonial” modes of viewing have to be reassessed once
one realises that this particular photograph was not, in fact, the product of a
British government survey, but instead the work of the Indian photographer
Lala (a.k.a. Raja) Deen Dayal, who held a royal warrant from Queen Victoria,
as well as the title of “Musawwir Jung Raja Bahadur” or “The Bold Warrior of
Photography” from the ruler of Hyderabad, the Nizam, Mir Mahboob Ali Khan.
And it was for the Nizam, not the British government, that Dayal took this pho-
tograph as part of an album completed in  that was intended to document
the Nizam’s vast domains. Although Dayal’s visual aesthetic undoubtedly echoes
that of colonial photographers, its deployment in the service of an indigenous
agenda that sought to use images of India’s rich artistic past to prove both the
longevity and legitimacy of local rule therefore complicates how one assesses
such an image. It is neither a blind emulation of Victorian photographic tropes,
nor a self-conscious attempt to overturn them, but rather deploys a visual rheto-
ric of “nestling against” and that subtly de-centres colonial photographic norms.
In Europe by the end of the nineteenth century, documentary photographs of
sculpture had also expanded well beyond statuary in a classicising mode and
instead increasingly included the work of avant-garde artists. Auguste Rodin,
for instance, used photography not only to document and publicise his artis-
tic production, but also incorporated photographs into his working practices
in the studio. But the boundaries between “pure” documentation and more
self-consciously artistic depictions of sculpture can often be difficult to de-
fine. For instance Jacques Bulloz, Rodin’s in-house photographer from 
onwards, adopted what had by this date become the standard visual conven-
tions of documentary photographs of sculpture in images of iconic works like
Rodin’s The Kiss, which he photographed silhouetted against a monochromatic
background that transformed the statue into a visual specimen located outside
any specific time or place. In contrast, a photograph of the same work taken
by Eugène Druet in about  seems to have had a more elastic agenda. (Fig. 8)
On the one hand, it clearly records the sculpture within Rodin’s workshop,
the mallet at its foot implying that it has only just been completed. But the
sculptor’s mallet can also be read as Rodin claiming authorship not only of
the sculpture, but, in collaboration with Druet, of the photograph itself, which
provides an excuse for a sophisticated exploration of light and shade, surface
and depth, and seems to bring the embracing couple to life, with photogra-
phy allowing the viewer to play Pygmalion to the sculpture’s Galatea. Such an
image thus appears to straddle the boundary between explicitly documentary
and more self-consciously “artistic” photographs.
27 Geraldine A. Johnson
Fig. 5 William Henry Fox Talbot, Reduced-size plaster cast of Canova’s “Three Graces”, 1840s, salted paper print from paper
negative, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Bequest of Maurice B. Sendak, 2012).

Fig. 6 Linnaeus Tripe, Elliot Marbles and Other Sculptures from the Central Museum Madras: Group 26, Plate 46 in Tripe,
Photographs of the Elliot Marbles and Other Subjects in the Central Museum Madras, published in ca. 1859 (photograph taken
May–June 1858), albumen silver print, 33.1 × 45 cm (image and mount), New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Purchase,
Cynthia Hazen Polsky Gift and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1991).

Fig. 7 Lala (a.k.a., Raja) Deen Dayal, Carved Nundees [Nandis], Warangal Fort, in Views of H.H. the Nizam’s Dominions, Hyderabad
(Deccan), published in 1892 (photograph taken in ca. 1885), albumen silver print, 20 × 26.8 cm, London, British Library.

28 29
Fig. 8 Eugène Druet, Rodin’s The Kiss in the studio, ca. 1898, gelatin silver print, 39.3 × 30 cm, Paris, Musée Rodin, inv. no. Ph 373.

Fig. 9 Edward Steichen, The Open Sky, 11 pm [Rodin’s “Balzac”], published in Camera Work, no. 34, 1911 (photograph taken in 1908).

30 31
This boundary completely evaporates in photographs taken by Edward Steichen
of another sculpture by Rodin, his controversial statue of Balzac, seen by the
light of the moon in a famous series of images made in . (Fig. 9) Given the
night-time setting, the technical advantages of photographing an immobile and
light-coloured sculpture are once again evident, as was the case for nineteenth-cen-
tury photographs of white marble and plaster statues with Classical subjects. But
by dematerialising the insistent materiality of Balzac’s hulking statue, Steichen
signals his desire to use sculptural subjects not for documentary purposes, but
rather as part of an avant-garde aesthetic agenda, one that echoes the avant-garde
literary experiments of Balzac himself. While nineteenth-century photographs of
Classical and neo-Classical sculpture used the prestige of the distant past to legiti-
mise photography as a serious mode of visual representation, here the work of an
avant-garde sculptor is deployed to support a Pictorialist photographer’s claims
about the photographic medium’s similarly avant-garde aesthetic possibilities.
Over the course of the twentieth century, sculpture from many different times
and places became an attractive subject for formal explorations of light and
shade, pattern and texture, surface and depth, abstraction and figuration, as
seen in a photograph of the carved hand of a wooden Buddha statue taken by
the Japanese photographer Ken Domon in – or a print made in  by
the Australian photographer Max Dupain of an equestrian statue at the top of
a stone staircase in Paris, the sculpture serving as a visual punctuation mark at
the apex of the grid-like composition. (Fig. 10) In Domon’s case, it is significant
that his photograph, for all its modernist visual aesthetic, nevertheless focuses
on a statue of the Buddha from a temple in Nara, Japan’s eighth-century cap-
ital, and was taken at the height of World War II when he also photographed
other overtly “Japanese” (and thus implicitly nationalistic) subjects such as
traditional bunraku puppet shows and contemporary Japanese intellectuals.
More recently, photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin have
turned once again to Classical sculpture not only for the formal possibilities
offered by the colours, textures and patterns of carved marble, but like many
nineteenth-century photographers, also for its cultural and historical associa-
tions. Now, however, the emphasis is on the psycho-sexual dramas of ancient
mythology and the homosocial connotations of ancient Greece in particular.
One can compare, for instance, Mapplethorpe’s portrait-like photograph of a
white marble Apollo () with the highly sculptural photographs he took of
equally exquisite living men in works like his paired profile portraits of Ken
Moody and Robert Sherman produced in . (Fig. 11) There are also clear
formal as well as homoerotic affinities between his back view of another living
model, Derrick Cross (), and a very similar photograph of a Neo-Classical
sculpture, Wrestler (), with both man and marble suggestively cropped
just below the buttocks. Likewise, Goldin’s surprisingly intimate photograph
taken in  in the Louvre Museum of a bi-gendered Hermaphrodite sculp-
ture – arm casually entangled in bedding in a way that is reminiscent of her
portraits of living sitters – uses Classical statuary to explore a very post-mod-
ern fascination with the fluidity of gender identity and sexuality.
32
Sculpted by Light: The Photographic Production of Sculpture
Sculpture is not only a passive subject for the camera’s lens, whether for osten-
sibly documentary purposes or more self-consciously artistic or socio-cultural
ones. Instead, photography can also actively produce its own sculptural objects,
as suggested once again by Sudek’s panorama, which encourages the beholder
to interpret the carved ball of stone on the plinth-like slab of granite as a piece
of abstract modernist art. (see Fig. 1) Plinths and pedestals also played a crucial
role in Brancusi’s artistic practices as both a sculptor and a photographer. In
the many photographs taken by Brancusi of his studio from about  on-
wards, his hand-crafted pedestals are often interchangeable with his cast and
carved sculptures. (see Fig. 2) In fact, Brancusi seems to have left intentional-
ly ambiguous the question of which of his objects are sculptures and which
pedestals. Significantly, Brancusi also used the medium of photography itself
to confer sculptural status onto his increasingly-abstract compositions. The
photograph thus serves as a kind of virtual pedestal that, like an actual ped-
estal, can transform the objects it hosts into pieces of modernist art.
In the s and early s, the German photographer and art professor Karl
Blossfeldt exploited the conventions associated with documentary photo-
graphs of individual sculpted objects to transform botanical specimens into
sculptural artefacts of great formal interest. (Fig. 12) The aesthetic qualities of
the plants he photographed head-on against monochromatic backgrounds
were further confirmed by publishing these images not in a scientific atlas,
but in a two-part volume entitled Art Forms in Nature. In the introduction
to the first volume, the German art dealer Karl Nierendorf confirms the ti-
tle’s implications by stating that these highly sculptural photographs were in-
deed intended to be interpreted in formal terms, rather than scientific ones.
In his text, Nierendorf further asserts that Blossfeldt’s photographs of plants
“compris[e] all forms of past styles”, from the Gothic to the Renaissance and
Rococo, with nature itself serving as the ultimate source for all artistic styles.
Perhaps the most well-known example of how a framing text combined with
the visual conventions of documentary photographs of sculpture can trans-
form almost any object into a sculpture are the crumpled bus tickets, scraps
of soap, and squirts of toothpaste photographed by Brassaï and then pub-
lished in  in the Surrealist journal Minotaure with captions by Salvador
Dalí. The title at the bottom of the page boldly proclaims in capital letters that
these found objects are, in fact, “Involuntary Sculptures”, a claim reinforced
visually by the levelling effects of black-and-white photography, which elides
differences in colour, scale and material, as well as by the decision to depict
the objects against monochromatic backgrounds reminiscent of documen-
tary photographs of sculpture. In the work of more recent photographers
like William Eggleston, the Surrealist fascination with the mysterious lives of
found objects shifts to a new focus on the intriguing detritus of mid-centu-
ry American consumerist culture. For example, in a dye transfer print from
the Los Alamos series begun by Eggleston in the mid-s, he positions a
33 Geraldine A. Johnson
Fig. 10 Ken Domon, Left Hand of the Sitting Image of Buddha Shakyamuini in the Hall of Miroku, Muro-Ji, Nara, 1942–43,
gelatin silver print, 32.7 × 24.2 cm. © The Estate of Ken Domon (photo courtesy of Ken Domon Foundation).

34
Fig. 11 Robert Mapplethorpe, Apollo, 1988, gelatin silver print, 48.9 × 49.1 cm © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.
Used by permission.

Fig. 12 Karl Blossfeldt, Blumenbachia hieronymi, 1915–25, gelatin silver print, 29.8 × 23.8, New York, The Metropolitan Museum
of Art (Gilman Collection, Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift, 2005).

36 37
luminous bottle half-filled with deep red cola at the centre of a plinth-like
car hood thereby transforming the found object into a sculptural artefact
worthy of sustained visual attention, albeit one informed by social as well as
formal concerns.

Petrified Bodies, Living Statues

Perhaps the most intriguing transformation of things into sculpture involves

not found objects, whether natural or man-made, but rather the human body
itself. This is hinted at in Sudek’s panorama by the body that is absent from the
empty chair. (see Fig. 1) When sculpted bodies actually are present, rather than
merely hinted at, photography can animate them by making stony flesh come
to life, as in the portrait-like photographs taken in the s of marble busts
of ancient emperors by Patrick Faigenbaum and of ancient gods by Robert
Mapplethorpe. (see Fig. 11) We see something similar at work in a number of
Eugène Atget’s early twentieth-century photographs of Paris in which man-
nequins in shop windows appear to be in conversation amongst themselves,
captured as if by chance by the passing photographer-as-flâneur. (Fig. 13)

Photographers are not only Pygmalions who can bring dead matter to life, but
also, like Medusa, can turn living sitters into stone. This was literally the case
with the objects produced by photo-sculpture machines, a device patented
in  by the French inventor François Willème. The process involved an
immobile sitter being photographed in the round by twenty-four separate
cameras simultaneously in order to produce a set of templates that could
be carved or cast into a sculpture. Although the production of photo-sculp-
tures proved to be a short-lived phenomenon, it is the most literal example
of how two-dimensional photographic reproductions of living bodies could
be transformed into three-dimensional sculptural objects.

The metamorphosis of the body into sculpture could also occur directly
on the surface of a photographic negative, as seen in the English photogra-
pher Paul Martin’s so-called living statues. (Fig. 14) These images were pro-
duced in the s from candid photographs taken by Martin of street life
in London, which he retouched in the darkroom using black ink to blot out
everything surrounding his figures except for a section of ground beneath
their feet that was converted into an approximation of a plinth or pedestal.
These images were then projected in life size as lantern slides at public lec-
tures. The silhouetted bodies set against black backgrounds and standing
on virtual plinths once again echo the conventions associated with docu-
mentary photographs of sculpture, thereby visually transforming shoppers,
street traders and market porters into statue-like tableaux, the figures frozen
first as photographic subjects and then as sculptural ones. Martin himself
confirmed that the inspiration for these images came from seeing photo-
graphs of statues: “When I first saw one of those slides [of statues with the
background blacked out], the idea struck me […] that living objects might
Fig. 13 Eugène Atget, Boulevard de Strasbourg, 1912, matte albumen silver print, 22.7 × 17.7 cm (image), New York,
be substituted for statues”. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005).

38 39
Fig. 14 Paul Martin, Fish Porters at Billingsgate Market, ca. mid-1890s, inverted negative with background blacked out
(used by Martin to produce a lantern slide), Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

40
Rather than relying on darkroom manipulations, advocates of the later nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century physical culture movement simply re-
made their bodybuilder pin-ups into Classicising statues before any pho-
tographs had even been taken. Sitters like the famous strongman Eugen
Sandow used poses, plinths and props, including paper leaves held up by
barely-visible threads and a dusting of talcum power, to approximate an-
cient sculptural prototypes. (Fig. 15) The plausibility of such images relied on
monochromatic photographs that could gloss over the very real differences
in colour and surface texture that existed between living bodies and sculpt-
ed ones. The clear visual references to photographs of Classical statuary also
provided a kind of aesthetic and scholarly legitimacy to the potentially ho-
moerotic gazes of the men who bought these types of images as individual
prints or in physical culture magazines.
The links between sculpture, photography and a desiring gaze are anything
but hidden in the photographs of sculpture and highly sculptural photo-
graphs taken by Mapplethorpe nearly a century later. While Mapplethorpe
used photography to animate marble statues depicting ancient figures like
Apollo, Antinous and Hermes in both full- and bust-length compositions, in
some of his photographs of living models he deployed the by-now familiar
visual conventions of a pedestal, a head-on viewing angle and a monochro-
matic background to transform living flesh into stony statuary. In a photo-
graph of a trio of naked figures, Ken, Lydia and Tyler (), Mapplethorpe’s
visual references to sculptural prototypes are even more explicit, in this case
alluding to Classical and Neo-Classical statues of the Three Graces, but now
transformed into an intriguing blend of male and female bodies. The liv-
ing models are once again isolated against the deep black background of
the gelatin silver print, an allusion not only to sculptural, but also to photo-
graphic predecessors like Talbot’s salted paper print of a plaster cast of the
Three Graces. (see Fig. 5)
The petrification of living bodies serves quite different purposes in photo-
graphs that document ephemeral performances by artists like Joseph Beuys
and Carolee Schneemann, each frozen, statue-like, in mid-action in black-
and-white images taken during these events and then circulated widely after-
wards. One of Schneemann’s best-known “happenings”, Interior Scroll (),
involved the artist pulling a long paper scroll from her vagina while standing
on a table top and reading from the text as it emerged from her body. (Fig. 16)
Not only is her pose on the pedestal-like platform statuesque in these images,
but the photographs themselves were transformed into sculptural artefacts
when displayed as framed prints alongside a custom-made plexiglas case
housing the original paper scroll. Some of the prints were treated in even
more “sculptural” ways by having the artist paste them alongside typescripts
based on the scroll’s text and then stain them with coffee, urine and beet
juice, the latter possibly recalling the red, blood-like paint Schneemann had
applied to her own body during the original performance. In such objects,
what distinguishes the sculpture from the photograph, and the performance
42
from its documentation, has become increasingly blurred. The photographic
prints and carefully-curated props associated with Schneemann and other
performance artists such as Beuys are thus not simply neutral documents
confirming past performances, but themselves sculptural artefacts, as well as
images of sculptural bodies, that continue to exist in the present.
Photo-Objects and the Sculptural Photograph
The materiality of the photographic prints associated with Schneemann’s
performance suggests – and Sudek’s panorama in its tacile mount confirms –
that photographs are inevitably objects with their own sculptural qualities.
(see Fig. 1) Until fairly recently, however, the materiality of photographs was
overlooked by many scholars, perhaps in part because photographs often
continue to be illustrated in books and online without their mounts and with
any rough edges or shadows carefully removed in order to create an illusion
of images floating free from time and space, from history and materiality.
These conventions echo those associated with the depiction of sculptures
within documentary photographs set against monochromatic backgrounds
that likewise detach the objects from their spatial and temporal circumstanc-
es. All photographic prints, however, have their own material histories, their
own biographies as objects, with an inevitable accumulation of nicks, scuffs,
tears and folds over time, not to mention chemical changes to the colours
and tonal qualities of the surface images themselves. From the first years of
the new medium the objecthood of the photograph has been acknowledged
in practice – if not always in theory – through actions such as having photo-
graphic prints and plates mounted on the pages of albums designed for inti-
mate handling, inserted into wearable objects like lockets, bracelets or badges,
and manoeuvred in and out of hand-held stereoscopic viewing machines.
The physical handling of photographs has also long been part of the work-
ing practices of sculptors. Rodin, for instance, not only used photographs to
document and publicise his sculptural output, but often sketched directly
onto photographs of his own statues and plaster models as part of his endless
re-working of individual compositions. More recent sculptors have contin-
ued to use photographs in their sculptural practices to test new configura-
tions and formal possibilities. For example, in the s and s, David Smith
combined and recombined his sculptures in almost balletic performances in
front of ever-changing landscape backgrounds that he then photographed.
Such images, like those made for and used by Rodin, seem to straddle the
boundaries between documentary images deployed as part of the design
process and more self-consciously “artistic” photographs intended to be ap-
preciated on their own aesthetic merits.
Artists have also produced – one could even say sculpted – completely new
works of art using photographic prints as their raw material, a phenomenon
already noted in relation to Schneemann’s handling of the photographs asso-
ciated with her performances. (see Fig. 16) Already in the later s, artists like
43 Geraldine A. Johnson
Fig. 15 Henry Van der Weyde, Eugen Sandow, 1889, carbon print, 14 × 9.7 cm, London, National Portrait Gallery
(Given by Terence Pepper, 1986).

Fig. 16 Carolee Schneemann, Interior Scroll, 1975, photo-collage (two screenprints on paper of photographs taken in 1975
by Anthony McCall, stained with beet juice, coffee and urine, and mounted beside typed transcripts based on the scroll’s text),
122 × 183 cm. © Carolee Schneemann.

44 45
László Moholy-Nagy had cut, pasted and then re-photographed found photo-
graphs to produce what he called “Fotoplastiken” (photoplastics). Similarly,
Richard Hamilton’s iconic pop-art collage of , Just what is it that makes
today’s homes so different, so appealing?, includes a photographic reproduction
of a body builder in a pose reminiscent of photographs of ancient statuary, as
well as later living imitators like Sandow. The image was carefully cut – one
could even say carved – from an American physical culture magazine before
being pasted into Hamilton’s new multi-media composition.
Walker Evans likewise sculpted a new photo-object from a gelatin silver
print of an African mask that he had photographed against a temporary stu-
dio backdrop. (Fig. 17) By removing all traces of the studio setting in the final
trimmed print (which is not illustrated in the present essay) – and thus all
evidence of the photograph’s making – Evans produced a much more tight-
ly-focused composition in which the sculpted object is once again shown
against a monochromatic background. The cropped print was then mount-
ed onto a board and transformed into a photo-sculptural object in its own
right. The cropped and mounted photograph was part of a much larger
project linked to a landmark exhibition of African sculpture inaugurated
in  at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; significantly, the carv-
ings were displayed not as ethnographic specimens, but as aesthetic works
of art. The sculptures had been borrowed from a veritable “who’s who” of
the contemporary art world, including leading artists like Henri Matisse and
collectors like the Parisian art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. The press
release issued by The Museum of Modern Art included a statement by the
exhibition’s director, the art critic James Johnson Sweeney:
The art of the primitive negro in its mastery of aesthetic forms, sen-
sitiveness to materials, freedom from naturalistic imitation and bold-
ness of imagination parallels many of the ideals of modern art. We
find [in it] many characteristics of…modern sculptors and painters
such as Picasso, Modigliani and Brancusi.
The supposed “parallels” between traditional African sculpture and the “ideals”
of modern European art were, of course, much easier to assert by relying on
head-on photographs of the former set against monochromatic backgrounds
that, once they had been carefully cropped, adopted the conventions of doc-
umentary photographs of European statuary and were thus rendered suita-
ble for similarly disinterested aesthetic contemplation and formal compar-
ison. While the works depicted within Evans’s photographs may have been
presented as though they existed outside time and space, the photo-objects
themselves were very firmly rooted in the socio-historical context of s
America. Most notably, while the sculpture exhibition travelled from New
York to galleries visited primarily by privileged white audiences in cities
like Baltimore, Chicago and San Francisco, the photographic reproductions
mounted on boards were sent for the most part to African-American insti-
tutions like Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and Shaw University in
46
Raleigh, North Carolina. The problematic implication was that supposedly
more visually-sophisticated white urban audiences would benefit from see-
ing the original objects, while black viewers could “make do” with their pho-
tographic substitutes.
The materiality of the photographic print has also been exploited in arte-
facts of popular culture, such as mid-twentieth-century Mexican-American
fotoesculturas that sandwich family portraits between two sheets of glass set
into elaborate and highly tactile frames. The material qualities of photo-
graphs are equally evident in the work of conceptual artists who produced
photo-objects for events like “Photography into Sculpture”, a ground-break-
ing exhibition organised by Peter Bunnell at The Museum of Modern Art in
New York in . More recently, digital photographs have been treated by
some scholars as though they were immaterial images existing only virtually
in an abstract binary code. But such images are inevitably re-materialised on
hardware of some kind, whether a computer, tablet or smartphone or, in the
case of Jeff Wall, enormous light boxes that cast their own shadows as they
hang, sculpture-like, in museums and galleries.
Photographic prints, digital images and videos have at times also been used
to de-materialise massive sculptural earthworks like Robert Smithson’s Spiral
Jetty () in Utah and large-scale sculptural installations like Ai Weiwei’s
Sunflower Seeds () at Tate Modern in London. But these images have
been subsequently re-materialised as printed illustrations in books, maga-
zines and journals very much intended to be held in the hand – for example,
Gianfranco Gorgoni’s well-known bird’s eye view of Spiral Jetty appears in
Rosalind Krauss’s The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths () and, tellingly, is one of the only illustrations in the volume to
include the photographer’s name in the caption. In other cases, the re-mate-
rialisation takes place on a handheld or desktop device that displays websites
that are almost as carefully curated as the original installations – witness the
wide range of still and moving images made available online by Tate in re-
lation to Sunflower Seeds. Whether in a book or on a device’s screen, such
images remain accessible in their new material forms long after the original
installations have been dismantled or weathered away. It seems, then, that
even in the digital age, photographic images continue to have a material –
and thus an implicitly sculptural – presence.
Photography, Sculpture and Art History
The issues considered thus far – the on-going fascination with sculpture as a
photographic subject, photographs that transform found objects and human
subjects into sculptures, the interplay between living statues and petrified
bodies, and photographs that are themselves handled in sculptural ways –
raise important questions about dimensionality and medium-specificity and
about whether one should rely on medium alone to define either the sculp-
tural or the photographic. But in addition to medium specificity, there is also
47 Geraldine A. Johnson
the question of disciplinary specificity. Even though photographs of sculpture
are works that can be interrogated in the same ways that one interrogates any
image or object, in practice most art historians treat the photographs they
rely on in their teaching and research as essentially transparent and objec-
tive – in the Reverend Marshall’s words, as “the very impress of the object”.

But Evans’s photograph of an African mask before it was cropped to conform

to art historical conventions exposes the seams of Art History and reveals the
mechanics that underlie the discipline’s imaging practices. (see Fig. 17) Those
seams were already visible in  when Henneman, Talbot’s collaborator, pho-
tographed two relief sculptures at the Reading Establishment for the first art
historical publication to include photographic reproductions, William Stirling
Maxwell’s Annals of the Artists of Spain. For technical reasons, the paintings
that made up the vast majority of Stirling’s illustrations had to be photographed
from printed reproductions, but the two reliefs could be photographed direct-
ly without any mediation. One of these objects, a relief by the Spanish sculp-
tor Juan Martínez Montañés depicting St Catherine of Siena, appears to have
caused the photographer inordinate difficulties. (Fig. 18) In a letter to Stirling,
Henneman explained that he had been unable to eliminate from his photo-
graph the shadow of the frame that fell across the top of the relief, apologising
profusely for the final, still unsatisfactory result. Just how frustrating this must
have been for Henneman is suggested by the fact that he photographed this one
relief at least seventeen times in his attempt to remove the offending shadow.
The implication is that an ideal photograph of an art object should never in-
clude the shadow of its frame, but should instead hide all traces of its making,
as well as of its existence in a particular time and place. However, photographs
of sculpture made for art historical purposes inevitably do divulge their origins,
both in space as material objects and in time through the deployment of visual
conventions associated with the era in which they were made.

Photographs focusing on details and fragments of sculpted objects, for in-

stance, can reveal much about when and why they were produced. This is seen
particularly clearly in the photographs of sculpture taken by the art histori-
an-cum-photographer Clarence Kennedy in the s and s. For example,
in a limited-edition portfolio published in  and dedicated to a marble
monument by the Renaissance sculptor Desiderio da Settignano, Kennedy
makes explicit his connoisseurial and formalist agenda: “Photographic details
of figure sculpture and architectural decoration [have been] taken express-
ly to facilitate the study of attributions and the critical analysis of style”.
Far from providing objective visual evidence for his scholarly arguments,
however, many of the photographs in the volume instead seem to reflect
contemporary Surrealist aesthetics through the use of dramatic chiaroscuro
lighting and almost hallucinatory close-ups. Similarly, an extreme close-up
of a Marian relief by Donatello published in  in a volume co-produced
by the specialist sculpture photographer David Finn seems to be primarily
an exercise in high modernist abstraction, as also confirmed by the book’s Fig. 17 Walker Evans, Banda Headdress, 1935, untrimmed gelatin silver print, 25.4 × 20.2 cm (sheet), Houston, The Museum
of Fine Arts (Museum purchase funded by the Brown Foundation Accessions Endowment Fund, the Manfred Heiting Collection,
title, Donatello: Prophet of Modern Vision. (Fig. 19) The image, which depicts acc. no. 2002.1005). © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

48 49

Fig. 18 Nicolaas Henneman, Juan Martínez Montañes’s “St Catherine of Siena receiving the Rosary”, published in: William Stirling
Maxwell, Annals of the Artists of Spain, Talbotype volume (photographic illustrations), 1848. © Digital image. Science and Society
Picture Library.
50
the Madonna and Child in profile pressing their faces together, is over life-
size and printed edge-to-edge on a full page, thereby further distancing the
photographic reproduction from the material and historical circumstances
of the original Renaissance relief.
Such images, which inevitably embed traces of the time when and purposes
for which they were made, suggest how fruitful it can be to consider what
one might call the “visual historiography” of Art History as a discipline.
Such an historiography might well begin with Heinrich Wölfflin, author of
the earliest meditation on the photography of sculpture within art historical
practices, a subject he considered in a trio of articles that appeared between
 and  in which he asked rhetorically: “How Should One Photograph
Sculpture?”  In the latter year, Wölfflin also published one of his most influ-
ential books, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History).
In a key chapter on the linear versus the painterly, Wölfflin considered two
marble statues, one by the Renaissance sculptor Jacopo Sansovino, the other
by the Baroque artist Pierre Puget. (Fig. 20) It soon becomes evident in Wölfflin’s
text that he is not actually analysing either sculpture, but rather their pho-
tographic reproductions:
For [a consideration of] the full-length [sculpted] figure we turn to a
comparison of Jacopo Sansovino and Puget. The reproduction is too
small for one to obtain a clear idea of the treatment of the individual
detail, yet the contrast of style makes itself felt very decisively. Firstly,
Sansovino’s [St] James is an example of the classic silhouette effect.
Unfortunately, the photograph – as is so often the case – is not taken
from the absolutely characteristic front view and hence the rhythm
looks somewhat vague. One sees where the mistake lies, [namely,]
in the slab at the feet: the photographer stood too far to the left. The
consequences of this mistake make themselves felt everywhere […].
This is, in effect, a formal analysis of a photograph of a statue more than of the
marble sculpture itself, a practice most art historians have engaged in regu-
larly – if usually unselfconsciously – ever since the mid-nineteenth century.
The connoisseur Bernard Berenson admitted as much when he claimed that
seeing art objects in the flesh could be distracting and that he therefore pre-
ferred submitting works “to the leisurely scrutiny of photography. The more
photographs of the same object, the better”.
A recent work by Andreas Gursky, Lehmbruck II (–), further exposes
the fictions that underlie Art History’s images. Gursky’s photograph recalls
many of the themes already encountered in the present essay. As a massive
inkjet print, it is undoubtedly an object in its own right – as is the light box
by Wall on the far right of the image. Sculpture as subject of the camera’s
lens is evident throughout the print, which includes works by figures such
as Alexander Calder, Damian Hirst, Yayoi Kusama and Wilhelm Lehmbruck,
the latter the early twentieth-century German sculptor in whose eponymous
51 Geraldine A. Johnson
Fig. 19 David Finn, Donatello’s “Pazzi Madonna” (detail), published in David Finn (photographs) – Frederick Hartt (text), Donatello,
Prophet of Modern Vision, Abrams, New York, 1972. © David Finn Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of
Art Library, Washington D.C.

Fig. 20 Page spread from Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren
Kunst, Bruckmann, Munich, 1915, pp. 64–65 (photographers unknown).

52 53
museum in Duisburg the scene is set. The felt suit by Joseph Beuys hanging
on a rear wall is a reminder of how photography, together with pedestals and
art-world institutions like the museum itself, can transform almost any ob-
ject into a sculpture. And photography’s ability to animate dead statues and
petrify living bodies is hinted at by the disturbingly life-like Duane Hanson
sculpture in the right foreground, as well as by the living art-world impresa-
rio Jay Jopling in the upper left who stands statue-like under a spotlight on
a granite plinth.
Perhaps most intriguing is the image’s meditation on Art History itself and
its inherent fictions. Despite the work’s initial illusion of providing a straight-
forward visual survey of twentieth- and twenty-first-century sculpture, the
photograph is actually a composite image made up of individual views of
sculpted objects that have been digitally inserted into the museum’s central
courtyard. The latter, however, is seen from an impossibly high viewpoint that
is as much a fiction as the collection of objects displayed within it. But art
historians similarly survey with their all-seeing and all-knowing eyes sculp-
tures made in all times and places in print and online in what André Malraux
famously called a “musée imaginaire” (imaginary museum) – although usually
without acknowledging the circumstances in which individual reproductions
were made. Gursky’s photograph thus exposes the fictions of art historical
omnificence and objectivity. At the same time, it confirms the interest and
value of assessing photographic reproductions of sculpture as critically as
one assesses what Sudek called the “life of [the] objects” themselves.
1. On the friendship between Sudek and Rothmayer, as well as the photographs Sudek took in the latter’s garden and
his panoramas of Prague, see Anna Fárová, Josef Sudek, Poet of Prague: A Photographer's Life, Murray, London,
1990, pp. 87– 88; Ian Jeffrey, “Bohemian Odyssey: Josef Sudek’s Publishing Projects”, in: Ann Thomas – Vladimír
Birgus – Ian Jeffrey, eds., The Intimate World of Josef Sudek, 5 Continents Editions – National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa, 2016, p. 36; and Jan Mlčoch, “The Mounted Photographs”, in: ibid., pp. 61– 62. Rothmayer’s villa, which he
designed, has recently been renovated. I would like to thank the villa’s curatorial staff for arranging a visit to the
building and garden in December 2016.
2. For recent overviews of Brancusi’s photographic practices, see Quentin Bajac – Clément Chéroux – Philippe–Alain
Michaud, “Brancusi, film, photographie: Images sans fin”, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2011; and Peter van der
Coelen – Francesco Stocchi, “Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray: Framing Sculpture”, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen,
Rotterdam, 2014.
3. Jeffrey, “Bohemian Odyssey”, op. cit., p. 36. There is almost nothing published on Wichterlová other than in Czech,
but she is a fascinating figure who undoubtedly merits further scholarly attention.
4. For this photograph, see Thomas – Birgus – Jeffrey, Josef Sudek, op. cit., p. 188, Fig. 83.
5. In addition to the head-like marble carving seen on the front-most pedestal in Fig. 2, see Constantin Brancusi, “Brancusi’s
‘Le Nouveau-Né II’” (Brancusi’s Newborn), circa 1920, Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne (accessed
1 November 2016), <https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/originalcopy/intro04.html>; and Man Ray,
“Venus restaurée” (Restored Venus), 1936, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum (accessed 1 November 2016),
<http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/54746/man-ray-venus-restauree-restored-venus-american-1936/>.
6. I would like to thank Hana Buddeus for discussing the interesting implications of both Czech terms with me.
On Sudek’s framing techniques, see Mlčoch, “Mounted Photographs”, op. cit., pp. 56–65.
7. Sudek’s phrase is quoted in Sonja Bullaty, Sudek, Imprint Society, Barre, 1978. Some of the material that follows
appears in a more condensed form in Geraldine A. Johnson, “Photographing Sculpture, Sculpting Photography”,
in: Sarah Hamill – Megan R. Luke, eds., Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction,
Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2017, pp. 277–291.
8. Talbot photographed a plaster bust of Patroclus, which will be discussed below, as early as November 1839, while
one of the first surviving daguerreotypes is a plate believed by many scholars to date to 1837, which depicts plaster
casts on a window ledge. See Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 1997, pp. 128–133, and Fig. 4.7; and Hans P. Kraus, “When Sculpture First Posed for a
Photograph”, Sculpture Review, vol. 54, 2005, pp. 10–11.
9. The Reading Establishment panorama has received surprisingly little in-depth scholarly attention. For a discussion
of the attribution of the two halves that make up the panorama and on the identity of the figures in the image, see
note 11 below and Larry J. Shaaf, Introductory Volume: Facsimile of William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature,
Hans P. Kraus, New York, 1989, p. 20; and Geoffrey Batchen, “The Labor of Photography”, Victorian Literature and
Culture, vol. 37, 2009, no. 1, pp. 292–296, here p. 294.
10. On the early development of commercial photography, see Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness:
Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848–1871, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994.
11. The man on the left has hitherto not been securely identified, but I believe that he may be Charles Porter, a servant
at Lacock Abbey who was also an assistant at the Reading Establishment and who is mentioned in correspondence
between Talbot and Henneman. The figure can be compared to known portraits of Porter: William Henry Fox Talbot,
“Nicolaas Henneman showing an album to Charles Porter”, circa 1845, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art
54
(accessed 1 September 2015), <http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/306349?rp-
p=30&pg=1&ft=henneman&pos=16>; and Idem, “Portrait of Charles Porter”, 7 April 1842 (printed in circa 2011 by
Hiroshi Sugimoto from a Talbot negative) (accessed 1 September 2015),
<https://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/past/hiroshi-sugimoto/photogenic-drawing>.
12. See McCauley, Industrial Madness, op. cit., pp. 265–300 (ch. 7: “Art Reproduction for the Masses”); and Anthony
Hamber, “Facsimile, Scholarship, and Commerce: Aspects of the Photographically Illustrated Art Book (1839–1880)”,
13.
in: Stephen Bann, ed., Art and the Early Photographic Album, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2011, pp. 91–122.
William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, London, 1844–46.
14. Schaaf, Introductory Volume: Pencil of Nature, op. cit., p. 48. See also Kraus, “When Sculpture First Posted for a
Photograph”, op. cit., pp. 10–11. On the identification of the bust, see Susan L. Taylor, “Fox Talbot as an Artist:
The ‘Patroclus’ Series”, Bulletin: The University of Michigan Museums of Art and Archaeology, vol. 8, 1986,
pp. 38–55. In the 1950s, Talbot’s first biographer, Harold White, discovered the bust dumped in a heap of rubbish in
a shed on Talbot’s estate of Lacock Abbey. Schaaf, Introductory Volume: Pencil of Nature, op. cit., p. 48. It is now
part of the Talbot Archive in the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford.
15.
16.
Talbot, Pencil of Nature, op. cit., pl. V.
Quoted in Schaaf, Introductory Volume: Pencil of Nature, op. cit., p. 48.
17. On photographing light-coloured sculpture, see Geraldine A. Johnson, “‘In consequence of their whiteness’:
Photographing Marble Sculpture from Talbot to Today”, in: J. Nicholas Napoli – William Tronzo, eds., Radical
18.
Marble, Taylor & Francis, Abingdon, forthcoming in 2018.
Quoted (with emphasis added) in Taylor, “The ‘Patroclus’ Series”, op. cit., p. 50. See also Larry J. Schaaf, Out of the
19.
Shadows: Herschel, Talbot, & the Invention of Photography, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1992, pp. 103–151.
For a more extensive discussion of the photography of ancient marble objects than what follows, as well as for
20.
further bibliography, see Johnson, “Photographing Marble Sculpture”, op. cit., forthcoming.
On Talbot’s interest in antiquity, see Mirjam Brusius, “From Photographic Science to Scientific Photography: Talbot
and Decipherment at the British Museum around 1850”, in: Mirjam Brusius – Katrina Dean – Chitra Ramalingam,
eds., William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2013, pp. 219–244.
21. Letter of 11 April 1843 to Charles Fellows (emphasis in the original), doc. 4799 in Larry J. Schaaf (general ed.),
“The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot”, (accessed 1 September 2015), <http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk>.
The letter is also discussed in Claire L. Lyons, “The Art and Science of Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century
Photography”, in: Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, ed., Antiquity & Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean
22.
Sites, Thames & Hudson, London, 2005, p. 33.
See James Anderson, “Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican Museum”, circa 1845–1855, Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty
Museum (accessed 1 September 2015), <http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/41151/james-anderson-apol-
lo-belvedere-british-about-1845-1855/?dz=0.5000,0.4829,0.94>; and Hippolyte Bayard, “Composition of reduced-size
plaster casts: Diana and Apollo Belvedere”, 1855 (accessed 1 September 2015) <http://www.artnet.de/künstler/
hippolyte-bayard/composition-aux-sculptures-diane-et-lapollon-du-zNDOSbrpCQRJsWE8NXYutw2>.
23. For the latter image, see Talbot, Pencil of Nature, op. cit., pl. XXIII. On photographing “original” sculptures versus
plaster casts, see Julia Ballerini, “Recasting Ancestry: Statuettes as Imaged by Three Inventors of Photography”,
in: Anne W. Lowenthal, ed., The Object as Subject: Studies in the Interpretation of Still Life, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, 1996, 41–58; Batchen, Burning with Desire, op. cit., pp. 58–62; Idem, “Light and Dark: The
Daguerreotype and Art History”, Art Bulletin, vol. 86, 2004, pp. 766–768; and Elizabeth Anne McCauley, “Fawning
over Marbles: Robert and Gerardine Macpherson’s Vatican Sculptures and the Role of Photographs in the
24.
Reception of the Antique”, in: Bann, Early Photographic Album, op. cit., pp. 93–110.
Unknown photographer, “Canova’s ‘Three Graces’ reproduced on the Victoria & Albert Museum’s website”, (accessed
25.
1 Novemeber 2016), <http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O70425/the-three-graces-group-canova-antonio/>.
See, for example, an albumen silver print like Bisson Frères, “Portico, Rheims Cathedral”, 1854–64 (accessed
26.
1 November 2016), <https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/dc/c4/c8/dcc4c83683adf3e29615849e7079c50d.jpg>.
Quoted in Geraldine A. Johnson, “The Very Impress of the Object”: Photographing Sculpture from Fox Talbot to the
Present Day, University College London (Strang Print Room) – Leeds City Art Gallery, London – Leeds, 1995, p. 1.
27. Roger Taylor – Crispin Branfoot, Captain Linnaeus Tripe: Photographer of India and Burma, 1852–1860, DelMonico,
München, 2014, cat. no. 56. On Tripe, see also Janet Dewan, The Photographs of Linnaeus Tripe: A Catalogue
Raisonné, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2003.
28. See Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient”, Art in America, May 1983, pp. 119–31, 187–91.
29. On the idea of “nestling against” (from Theodor Adorno) in a colonial context, see Zahid R. Chaudhary, Afterimage
of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2012, pp. 122–139.
On Dayal, see also Narendra Luther, Raja Deen Dayal: Prince of Photographers, Creative Point, Hyderabad, 2003;
and Shilpa Vijayakrishnan, “The Colonial Lens & Architecture II: Raja Deen Dayal and the Politics of Form”,
9 December 2014 (accessed 15 October 2016), <http://tasveerjournal.com/2014/12/09/deen-dayal/>.
30. See Hélène Pinet, “‘Montrer est la question vitale’: Rodin and Photography”, in: Geraldine A. Johnson, ed., Sculpture
and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 68–85.
31. See Jacques Bulloz, “Rodin’s ‘Le baiser’” (The Kiss), June 1903, Paris, Musée Rodin (accessed 1 November 2016),
<http://collections.musee-rodin.fr/fr/museum/rodin/le-baiser-marbre/Ph.03395?q=bulloz+baiser&media=1&position=4>.
32. On this series, see Geraldine A. Johnson, “‘All Concrete Shapes Dissolve in Light’: Photographing Sculpture from
Rodin to Brancusi”, Sculpture Journal, vol. 15, 2006, pp. 200–204.
33. For Dupain’s image, see Max Dupain, “Untitled (staircase and statue of Anne de Montmorency 1886, by Paul Dubois,
Domaine de Chantilly) [from the Paris ‘private’ series]”, Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1978 (accessed
1 November 2016), <https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/398.2012.12/>.
34. On Domon, see Lynne Warren, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, Routledge, London, 2006,
pp. 415–417.
35. Compare pl. 112 and pl. 81 in Germano Celant – Arkady Ippolitov – Karole Vail, Robert Mapplethorpe and the
Classical Tradition: Photographs and Mannerist Prints, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 2004.
See also Judith Benhamou-Huet, et al., Mapplethorpe Rodin, Actes Sud Editions, Paris, 2014, p. 118, cat. 2.
36. See Celant – Ippolitov – Vail, Mapplethorpe, op. cit., pl. 10 and pl. 4.
37. Goldin’s photograph is part of her Scopophilia series. See Johnson, “Photographing Marble Sculpture”, op. cit.,
Fig. 9. Nan Goldin, “Nan Goldin: Scopophilia”, 2011, New York, Matthew Marks Gallery (accessed 6 September
2014), <http://www.matthewmarks.com/new-york/exhibitions/2011-10-29_nan-goldin/>; and Karen Rosenberg,
“A Voyeur Makes Herself at Home in the Louvre”, The New York Times, 9 December 2011, sec. Weekend Arts, p. 1, 34.
38. See note 2 above.
39. Karl Blossfeldt, Art Forms in Nature: Examples from the Plant World, vol. 1–2, A. Zwemmer, London, 1929–32.
40. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. vi–vii. On Blossfeldt, see also Hans-Christian Adam, Karl Blossfeldt, 1865–1932, Taschen, Köln, 1999;
and Hanako Murata, “Material Forms in Nature: The Photographs of Karl Blossfeldt”, in: Mitra Abbaspour – Lee Ann
Daffner – Maria Morris Hambourg, eds., Object: Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection
1909–1949, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, pp. 1–13.
41. On Brassaï and Dalí’s Involuntary Sculptures and photographs of found objects in general, see Anna Dezeuze –
Julia Kelly, eds., Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art, Ashgate, Farnham, 2013.
42. See Elisabeth Sussman – Thomas Weski, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera. Photographs and Videos,
1961–2008, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008, p. 108. The Los Alamos series, begun in 1965, was eventually
published as William Eggleston – Thomas Weski, William Eggleston: Los Alamos, Scalo, Zürich, 2003.
43. For Faigenbaum’s photographs, see Leonard Barkan – Jean-François Chevrier, Patrick Faigenbaum: Roman
portraits, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 1988.
44. On Atget’s animating photographs of both mannequins and traditional figurative sculpture, see Molly Nesbit, Atget’s
Seven Albums, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1992; and Peter Barberie – Beth A. Price – Ken Sutherland,
Looking at Atget, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 2005.
55 Geraldine A. Johnson
45. See Robert A. Sobieszek, “Sculpture as the Sum of its Profiles: François Willème and Photosculpture in France, 80. Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts, Pantheon, New York, 1948, p. 204.
1859–1868”, Art Bulletin, vol. 62, 1980, pp. 617–630. 81. Gursky’s image can be found online at: <www.goo.gl/Bo4Ugh>. On his Lehmbruck I and Lehmbruck II, see Anna
46. On Martin, see Bill Jay, Victorian Candid Camera: Paul Martin, 1864–1944, David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1973, Gritz, “Andreas Gursky: Kontext vs. Sujet”, in: Veit Görner, ed., Gursky – Rauch – Wall, Verlag für Moderne Kunst,
Roy Flukinger – Larry J. Schaaf – Standish Meacham, Paul Martin: Victorian photographer, G. Fraser, London, 1978; Nuremberg, 2014, pp. 22–24.
and Lynda Nead, “Animating the Everyday: London on Camera circa 1900”, Journal of British Studies, vol. 43, 2004, 82. André Malraux, Psychologie de l’art: Le musée imaginaire, A. Skira, Paris, 1947.
pp. 65–90.
47. From an article published in 1896 by Martin and cited in ibid., p. 78. See also Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the
Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1999,
pp. 98–102.
48. On this type of imagery, see Johnson, “Photographing Marble Sculpture”, op. cit., forthcoming; Tamar Garb,
“Photography, Physical Culture, and the Classical Ideal”, in: Johnson, Sculpture and Photography, op. cit.,
pp. 86–100; and Michael Hatt, “Eakins’s Arcadia: Sculpture, Photography, and the Redefinition of the Classical
Body”, in: ibid., pp. 62–65.
49. Sandow’s role in the physical culture movement is discussed in David L. Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent:
Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1994.
50. See Mapplethorpe’s photographs of sitters such as Derrick Cross, Ajitto, Von Hackendahl and Philip Prioleau taken
between 1979 and the mid–1980s in Franca Falletti – Jonathan Nelson, eds., Robert Mapplethorpe: Perfection in
Form, teNeues, Kempen, 2009; and Benhamou-Huet, et al., Mapplethorpe Rodin, op. cit., pp. 160, 163 and 210,
cat. 48, 52–54 and 113.
51. Celant – Ippolitov – Vail, Mapplethorpe, op. cit., pl. 100.
52. On photographs of Beuys’ performances, see Johnson, “Photographing Sculpture”, op. cit., p. 286 and Fig. 3.
53. See Tracey Warr – Amelia Jones, The Artist’s Body, Phaidon, London, 2000, pp. 144–145.
54. Thirteen photographs from the performance were displayed in individual frames beside the similarly-encased
scroll at an exhibition held in Los Angeles in 2007. See unknown photographer, “Installation view of framed
photographs and paper scroll in a case from Carolee Schneemann’s 1975 performance, ‘Interior Scroll’, exhibited
at ‘WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution’”, 2007, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art (accessed 15
September 2014; n.b.: no longer available online),
<http://sites.moca.org/wack/files/2007/03/schneeman_install.jpg>.
55. See Carolee Schneemann, “Interior Scroll [two screenprints on paper of photographs taken in 1975 by Anthony
McCall; stained with beet juice, coffee and urine; and mounted beside typed transcripts based on the scroll’s text]”,
1975 (date of original performance), London, Tate (accessed 1 February 2017),
<http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/schneemann-interior-scroll-p13282>.
56. On the photographic documentation and subsequent re-materialisation of performance art and temporary
installations, see Amelia Jones, “‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation”, Art Journal,
vol. 56, 1997, pp. 11–18.
57. On photographs as material objects, see especially Geoffrey Batchen, “Vernacular Photographies”, in: idem, Each
Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001, pp. 56–80; and Elizabeth Edwards –
Janice Hart, “Introduction: Photographs as Objects”, Photographs Objects Histories. On the Materiality of Images,
Routledge, London – New York, 2004, pp. 1–15.
58. For example, see Pinet, “Rodin and Photography”, op. cit., pp. 73–74, Fig. 4.2 and 4.3.
59. See Sarah Hamill, David Smith in Two Dimensions: Photography and the Matter of Sculpture,
University of California Press, Oakland, 2015.
60. See Julie Saul, ed., Moholy-Nagy Fotoplastiks, the Bauhaus Years, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, 1983; and
Eleanor M. Hight, Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 1995, pp. 147ff.
61. See John-Paul Stonard, “Pop in the Age of Boom: Richard Hamilton’s ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so
different, so appealing?’”, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 149, 2007, no. 1254, pp. 607–620, here pp. 618–619.
62. On the exhibition, see Virginia-Lee Webb, Perfect Documents: Walker Evans and African Art, 1935, exhibition
catalogue, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000.
63. For the press release and list of lenders, see unknown author, “Press release for ‘Exhibtion of African Negro Art’”,
1935, New York, Museum of Modern Art (accessed 1 November 2016),
<https://www.moma.org/d/c/press_releases/W1siZiIsIjMyNTAzNCJdXQ.pdf?sha=640f4315112d8f36 >.
64. I would like to thank Suzanne Preston Blier for sharing her helpful suggestions about both travelling exhibitions.
Complete lists of the venues that hosted each exhibition are found in Webb, Evans and African Art, op. cit.,
pp. 101–104.
65. For examples of fotoesculturas and other photo-objects from popular culture, see Geoffrey Batchen,
Forget Me Not: Photography & Remembrance, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2004, pp. 61–73.
66. On the 1970 exhibition (which was partly restaged in 2014 at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in New York), see Mary
Statzer, The Photographic Object 1970, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2016.
67. See, for example, unknown photographer, “Installation view of ‘Jeff Wall 1978–2004’”, 2005, London, Tate Modern
(accessed 1 March 2017),
<http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/jeff-wall/jeff-wall-resources-and-biography>.
68. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.,
1985, p. 285.
69. See “The Unilever Series: Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds [exhibition website]”, 2010, London, Tate Modern
(accessed 1 March 2017),
<http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-ai-weiwei-sunflower-seeds>.
70. See note 26 above.
71. On this publication, see Hilary Macartney, “William Stirling and the Talbotype Volume of the Annals of the Artists of
Spain”, History of Photography, vol. 30, 2006, pp. 291–308; and idem, “Experiments in Photography as the Tool of Art
History, no. 1: William Stirling’s ‘Annals of the Artists of Spain’ (1848)”, The Journal of Art Historiography, vol. 5,
2011, pp. 1–17. For a facsimilie of the volume containing the photographic illlustrations, see Hilary Macartney and
José Manuel Matilla, eds., Copied by the Sun: Talbotype Illustrations to the ‘Annals of the Artists of Spain’ by Sir
William Stirling Maxwell, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 2016. I would like to thank Brian Liddy for bringing the
facsimile to my attention and Hilary Macartney and Brian Liddy for their help in sourcing an illustration from
Stirling’s publication.
72. Macartney, “William Stirling and the Talbotype Volume”, op. cit., p. 304.
73. Clarence Kennedy, The Tomb of Carlo Marsuppini by Desiderio da Settignano and Assistants, Smith College –
Carnegie Corporation, Northampton, 1928, title page. On Kennedy, see Melissa Beck Lemke, “A Connoisseur’s
Canvas: The Photographic Collection of Clarence Kennedy”, in: Costanza Caraffa, ed., Photo Archives and the
Photographic Memory of Art History, Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin – München, 2011, pp. 323–333; and Sarah
Hamill, “Photography as Carving: The Folios of Clarence Kennedy”, in: idem – Luke, Photography and Scupture,
op. cit., pp. 81–98. See also Hamill’s essay in the present volume.
74. On Surrealism and photography in general, see David Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and
Social Dissent, I. B. Tauris, London, 2003.
75. David Finn – Frederick Hartt, Donatello, Prophet of Modern Vision, Abrams, New York, 1972.
76. The term was coined in Geraldine A. Johnson, “‘(Un)richtige Aufnahme’: Renaissance Sculpture and the Visual
Historiography of Art History”, Art History, vol. 36, February 2013, no. 1, pp. 12–51.
77. Heinrich Wölfflin, “How one Should Photograph Sculpture” (trans. by the author), Art History, vol. 36, 2013, no. 1,
pp. 52–71.
78. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst,
Bruckmann, München, 1915.
79. Ibid., p. 64.

56 57 Geraldine A. Johnson
Instant Presence: Representing Art in Photography
Editors: Hana Buddeus, Vojtěch Lahoda, Katarína Mašterová

Texts: Hana Buddeus, Costanza Caraffa, Antonín Dufek, Sarah Hamill, Amy Hughes, Geraldine A. Johnson,
Mariana Kubištová, Vojtěch Lahoda, Megan R. Luke, Katarína Mašterová, Jan Mlčoch, Hélène Pinet, Rolf Sachsse

Editorial coordination: Hana Buddeus

Index and proof check: Vít Bohal

Design: Tim+Tim & Martin Groch

Printing and binding: Helbich a.s., Brno

Published by Artefactum, Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague
(1st edition, 2017)

www.udu.cas.cz
www.sudekproject.cz

ISBN 978–80–86890–09–8
Printed and bound in Czech Republic