If one were pressed to position a single artistic project at the center of the relationship between sculpture and photography, Brassaï’s Sculptures involontaires seems a good choice. Indeed, both volumes reviewed here—one a catalogue for an exhibition originating at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the other a collection of essays in Ashgate’s “Studies in Surrealism” series—pivot around Brassaï’s photographs, which were collaborations with Salvador Dalí, who supplied their captions and published them in the Surrealist journal Minotaure in December 1933. As Anna Dezeuze and Julia Kelly write in their introduction to Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art, the photos depict “scraps of everyday debris—including rolled-up bus tickets, a piece of a bread roll, a curl of soap, and a blob of toothpaste—featured in photographic close-up as ‘automatic’ sculptural configurations” (1). Whereas the Sculptures involontaires serve as the singular organizing principle for Dezeuze and Kelly’s collection of essays, they function as one of several key turning points in the catalogue for The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today.

The Original Copy contains three short essays: an introduction by Roxana Marcoci, an essay on photography and sculpture in the nineteenth century by Geoffrey Batchen, and an essay on photography as a plastic art by Tobia Bezzola. The plates that follow are organized in ten thematic groupings, oriented more or less chronologically, with introductions to each of the sections composed by Marcoci. In her introduction to the volume, Marcoci writes, “Photography’s creative potential lies in its power to bring forth or make manifest that which would go otherwise unnoticed. . . . Through crop, focus, angle of view, degree of close-up, and lighting, as well as through ex post facto techniques of darkroom manipulation, collage, montage, and assemblage, photographers not only interpret artworks but create stunning reinventions of them” (12). Much of the catalogue charts the history of such photographic reinventions, specifically as they pertain to the medium of sculpture.

Batchen expounds early moments from that history, including daguerreotypes of plaster casts after classical and medieval sculptures taken by Daguerre himself, Baron Armand-Pierre Séguier, and François-Alphonse Fortier; William Henry Fox Talbot’s salted-paper prints of his Bust of Patroclus (1839 and later); the photographs of Charles Nègre, which picture Gothic-style pinnacle and gargoyle sculptures previously out of view to “anyone but God” (25); and the expeditionary photographs of Maxime Du Camp, which abolished the distance between France and the colossal statuary of North Africa and the Middle East much as Nègre’s photos had abolished the interval between ground and rooftop.

Bezzola’s essay is especially rich in conceptual models for thinking through the relationships between sculpture and photography. He notes that there was never really a paragone-like rivalry of photography and sculpture; rather, there has been “a rich repertory,” an ongoing succession “of hybrid forms” (28). He summarizes fascinating polemics by Charles Baudelaire and Heinrich Wölfflin about, respectively, the “polyfocality” and “monofocality” of sculpture as a medium. He moves these earlier debates in the direction of what he calls the “postsculptural,” toward more recent definitions of sculpture “as ephemeral, performative, and conceptual” (33).

By the early twentieth century photography had become increasingly integral to the production and conceptualization of European sculpture. In the introductions that precede the third and fourth groupings of plates, Marcoci describes the importance of photography to, first, Auguste Rodin, and, second, Constantin Brancusi. She writes that Rodin “was probably the first sculptor to enlist the camera to record the changing stages through which his work passed from initial conception to realization” (85). In the 1890s Rodin also began to exhibit photographs along with his sculptures, “using the new medium to show more sculpture than the actual space would permit” (85). From the late 1890s Rodin’s relationship with photographers Eugène Druet and Jacques-Ernest Bulloz became more and more important, to the point that, as Albert Elsen has argued, “Rodin came to look upon [them] as being practiciens, like the highly skilled professional sculptors who assisted in the studio” (quoted in Marcoci; 85).

After 1900 Rodin worked with Pictorialists, including Edward Steichen, and he gave them greater freedom to interpret his sculptures photographically than he had when working with previous photographers. The radical viewing angles Druet deployed to photograph Rodin’s Main crispée (Clenched Hand) and the theatrical approach he used to depict Eve and Le Baiser (The Kiss) (photos ca. 1898) gave way to the soft focus of Steichen, who produced beautiful composite portraits of Rodin with his sculptures Victor Hugo and The Thinker (photos 1902). Steichen also created a breathtaking series of moonlight nocturnes featuring Rodin’s Balzac (photos 1908).

Brancusi’s sculpture studio, which Marcoci characterizes as an “experimental laboratory,” essentially doubled as a photography studio (97). She writes, “This dynamic space was articulated around hybrid, transitory configurations that Brancusi called ‘groupes mobiles’ (mobile groups), each comprising several pieces of sculpture, bases, and pedestals grouped in proximity” (97). By “assembling and reassembling his sculptures for the camera, he transformed each unique work into multiples” (97). For Brancusi, photography served as a “diary of his sculptural permutations” (97). Indeed, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine and Marielle Tabart have argued that Brancusi’s photographs are to his sculpture what “Delacroix’s journal or Van Gogh’s letters” are “to their painting” (quoted in Marcoci; 98). Unlike Rodin, Brancusi did not allow others to photograph his works. He made deliberately out-of-focus and over- or under-exposed photographs, scratched and spotty prints, as well as photos radieuses (radiant photos), which in their gleaming reflectivity emphasize the high polish of the bronze sculptures they picture. He “used photography and polishing techniques to dematerialize the static, monolithic materiality of traditional sculpture” (98).

Following this treatment of Brancusi’s photography, Marcoci introduces section 5, which is devoted to the interrelation of photography and sculpture in Marcel Duchamp’s practice, beginning with Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photograph of Fountain as displayed at 291, published in The Blind Man in May 1917. Section 6, “Cultural and Political Icons,” catalogues an assortment of photographs of public statuary and monuments created since the mid-nineteenth century. Thoughtful projects by Bruno Braquehais, Lee Friedlander, and Anselm Kiefer are illustrated but unfortunately are not explored in any critical depth. Section 7 addresses “sculpture in the expanded field” (following Rosalind Krauss), with concise analyses of works by Robert Smithson and others that engage the dialectic of “site” and “non-site” via photography. The section also includes discussion of the photographs and photocollages of Gordon Matta-Clark who, according to Joseph Kosuth, “used the camera like a buzz saw,” his photographic strategies paralleling his architectural-sculptural practices of splitting and cutting (quoted in Marcoci; 154).

Section 8 jumps back in time, to the era of World War I, and deals with some early works of Man Ray, before engaging the Sculptures involontaires as a bridge connecting early modernist photo-sculpture with later work. Marcoci writes, “Brassaï’s Sculptures involontaires provide an interesting precursor to a whole strand of postwar production based on compulsive processes and the diversification of object types” (168). Such later production includes the Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow’s Fotorzeźby (Photosculptures (1971)), “a series of twenty gelatin silver prints” that show “chewing gum marked by [the artist’s] teeth, making the simple act of mastication produce sculpture objects” (168). Other artists discussed by Marcoci include Robert Gober, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Marcel Broodthaers, Gabriel Orozco, and Rachel Harrison.

Section 9, “The Pygmalion Complex: Animate and Inanimate Figures,” strikes this reader as an under-theorized grab bag of photosculptural works that in some ways look alike but probably have little or nothing to do with one another. Stills from Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) picturing the Tramp interacting with a multi-figure civic sculpture are grouped with works involving mannequins, whole or in pieces; photographs of people with anatomically fragmentary sculpture (e.g., Man Ray’s Noire et blanche (1926) and Robert Mapplethorpe’s Louise Bourgeois (1982)); and an Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph of Alberto Giacometti in a gallery with examples of his iconic standing and striding figures. The catalogue’s final section, “The Performing Body as Sculptural Object,” makes up for the shortcomings of section 9; I discuss a thought-provoking passage from this section below.

In some ways The Original Copy suffers from an incomplete definition of what, precisely, the exhibition and its catalogue intended to address and achieve in bringing photography and sculpture together. Symptomatic of this are sections 6 and 9. They combine what might be called “mere” photography of sculpture with projects that constitute more thoroughgoing investigations of the interstices of the two mediums. These are places where Marcoci simply tried to include too much; further definition of the project’s goals by subtraction of what was covered would have enhanced the volume.

Because the project aspires to a more fully intermedial history of photography and sculpture, moreover, several gaps in its coverage are notable. Nineteenth-century “photosculpture,” which was invented in France during the late 1850s by François Willème and quickly became a cultural phenomenon in other parts of Europe and the United States, receives its only mention in Batchen’s essay (21). Photosculpture formed a three-dimensional image by synthesizing twenty-four different photographic profiles of a sitter, taken in a scope of 360 degrees. The Original Copy missed an opportunity to expand significantly upon the limited scholarship on the subject of photosculpture, discussed most recently in an excellent chapter about the Statue of Liberty in Darcy Grigsby’s Colossal: Engineering Modernity—Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal (Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2012). Peter Bunnell’s remarkable exhibition, Photography into Sculpture, organized at MoMA in 1970, is another topic neglected in The Original Copy. This exhibition, replete with bizarre amalgamations of photography and sculpture, primarily by West Coast artists, was restaged in 2011 at Cherry and Martin in Los Angeles as part of Pacific Standard Time (click here for review). The works in Photography into Sculpture were products of the technological curiosity of the young artists involved (Robert Heinecken is the best known), with many bold—if at times awkward—experiments in photographic printing and newer sculptural materials, particularly plastics. A volume devoted to the exhibition and the types of artworks it contained, edited by Mary Statzer, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.

One of the works from Photography into Sculpture, Carl Cheng’s Sculpture for Stereo Viewers (1968), explicitly refers to nineteenth-century stereography. Stereography receives passing mention in The Original Copy, but it too warrants greater attention. In an Atlantic Monthly article of 1861 Oliver Wendell Holmes had called stereography “sun-sculpture,” and together with photosculpture, stereography is an important early hybrid of the two mediums. The historical trajectory that needs tracing is not simply photography of sculpture to photography into or as sculpture, since relations between these mediums have always been more complicated than that. As Bezzola argues, “Photography does more than just depict sculpture; ever since its invention, it has influenced the practice of sculpture” (28; emphasis in original). Discussion of Photography into Sculpture would have improved this project in a number of ways—not least by showing how three-dimensional photosculptural object-making remained important in an era known for the innovation of photography as sculpture.

Found Sculpture and Photography from Surrealism to Contemporary Art comes out of a symposium, “Involuntary Sculpture,” hosted by the Henry Moore Institute in November 2004. Its introduction and nine essays treat a range of subjects in modern and contemporary art, all of which to some extent refer back to the Sculptures involontaires as models for rethinking sculptural production. The volume is animated by the question of whether sculpture—which “might be thought of as the most willed of artistic media”—is necessarily “made” rather than “found” (1). (Bezzola speaks to this issue in The Original Copy, asserting that the photograph “can as it were take a sculpture rather than make a sculpture” [30; emphasis in original].) Themes connecting the various essays include the everyday, chance, indexicality, irrationality, dematerialization, fragmentation, and extra-plasticity. For readers who are not specialists in Surrealism, particularly rewarding essays include Dezeuze on the British sculptor Richard Wentworth’s Making Do, Getting By (1970–present) in relation to Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), and Carrie Lambert-Beatty on the California artist Terry Fox’s Children’s Tapes (1974), in which the author provocatively triangulates the histories of experimental education, Minimalism/Postminimalism, and television. Simon Baker’s essay is also notable. He examines the work of American sculptor Melissa McGill in terms of how the mechanism of the camera models sculptural “foundness.” His discussion of “found space” and “involuntary figuration” in McGill’s practice is intellectually energizing (167).

Found Sculpture and Photography is likely to be of greatest interest to scholars of Surrealism, for whom relatively minor adjustments to the already existing literature might be seen as significant. To the non-specialist reader, though, its arguments can seem myopic, like the photographic close-ups so favored by the Surrealists themselves. And there is a tendency to move forward in time from the Sculptures involontaires while overlooking earlier moments in the interaction of photography and sculpture that may matter to the subjects under consideration. Marcoci mentions that Eugène Atget’s photographs of sculptures from the first quarter of the twentieth century were important sources for the Surrealists (71), for example, an idea not in evidence in Dezeuze and Kelly’s volume. What other earlier histories could be brought to bear on the topics covered in Found Sculpture and Photography?

To this reader, the most exciting moments in the two books arise when scholars suggest surprising imbrications of the histories of photography and sculpture. In her introduction to section 5, Marcoci ruminates on Man Ray’s Élevage de poussière (Dust Breeding (1920)), a magnificent one-hour exposure of Duchamp’s Large Glass “shot in angled close-up, conveying the strange effect of an aerial view of a desertscape.” She observes that it was not only Man Ray who took the Large Glass toward photography; Duchamp himself had “toyed with a subtitle for the Large Glass that would suggest a photographic analogy”: Delay in Glass. She goes on to quote Jean Clair, who in a 1978 article noted, “Duchamp’s reference to a ‘delay in glass’ is indicative of his view of the Large Glass as ‘a giant photographic plate’” (114) (Jean Clair, “Opticeries,” October 5 [Summer 1978]: 101–12). Marcoci later introduces section 10, which concerns “The Performing Body as Sculptural Object,” with the assertion that Man Ray’s photograph of Duchamp’s star- or comet-shaped haircut, Tonsure (1921), is a formative instance of photography acting not only to document but to constitute the performing body as sculpture. This photosculptural performance portends Bruce Nauman’s Eleven Color Photographs (1966–67/1970), Hannah Wilke’s S.O.S.—Starification Object Series (1974–82), as well as the works of Eleanor Antin, Valie Export, Ana Mendieta, and others. These insightful analyses of the collaborations of Man Ray and Duchamp persuade the reader that a history of photography and sculpture might fittingly place their collaborations, rather than that of Brassaï and Dalí, at the center.

One of the more striking moments in these volumes occurs in Dezeuze’s essay in Found Sculpture and Photography, in which she analyzes Wentworth’s Making Do, Getting By. According to Dezeuze, Wentworth’s photographic series, which pictures anonymous interventions in the everyday landscape—a window propped open by a coffee cup, a leather glove placed atop a wrought-iron street railing—is “an update” of the Sculptures involontaires (99). Dezeuze alludes to both the British photographic past and the recent history of sculpture to suggest that Wentworth’s series is as much in dialogue with the photographs of Talbot (his broomsticks leaning in doorways, in particular) as it is with the now canonical early sculptures of Richard Serra, such as Prop (1968). For me, what is wonderful about Dezeuze’s discussion is the implication—involuntary, perhaps—that the works of Talbot and Serra (strange bedfellows, to be sure) may have something to do with one another. The rich repertory of photosculptural hybrids is to be found as much in the creative thinking of the art historian as it is outside, in the world at large.