The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today

Since its birth in the first half of the nineteenth century, photography has offered an unprecedented way to analyze works of art for further study. 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 the works they record but create stunning reinventions.

The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today presents a critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how the one medium has become implicated in the understanding of the other. Through a selection of nearly three hundred outstanding pictures by more than one hundred artists from the dawn of modernism to the present, the exhibition looks at the ways in which photography at once informs and challenges our understanding of sculpture. Addressing how and why sculpture became a photographic subject, the exhibition examines pictures that range in subject from inanimate objects to performing bodies.

The show’s earliest picture, an 1839 daguerreotype by Alphonse Eugène Hubert, is basically a still life, but one composed entirely of bits and pieces of Classical sculpture, including a plaster bust of the Venus de Milo. Some images from the exhibit can be seen here.

The exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography.

The exhibition is made possible by The William Randolph Hearst Endowment Fund.

Accompanying lectures and panel discussions can be found here.