In the introduction to her edited collection Sculpture and Photography, Geraldine A. Johnson wrote that ‘Images of sculptures have played an important but often unexamined role in the history of photography’.Footnote1 Since then, and partly stimulated by Johnson’s own contributions,Footnote2 the topic has attracted more attention from historians of both media. Survey exhibitions such as Pygmalion Photographe: La sculpture devant la camera 1844–1936, or, more recently, The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, together with focused displays such as Thomas Woolner: Seeing Sculpture through Photography, have established sculpture as an important genre in the history of photography, and the importance of photography in the historiography of sculpture.Footnote3 Other publications such as Anthony Hamber’s historical survey of how and why paintings and sculptures were photographed in nineteenth-century England; Mary Bergstein’s essay on the history and historiography of the ‘Documentary Photography of Sculpture’; Julia Ballerini’s article on early photographers’ fascination with statues and statuettes; or Elizabeth Anne McCauley’s in-depth study of Robert and Gerardine MacPherson’s photographs of the sculptures in the Vatican collection, have explored different aspects and case studies of the relationship between the two media.Footnote4
For many of these writers, photography is interesting because of how it affects and expands ‘the ways in which we encounter and understand sculpture’,Footnote5 by appearing to ‘endow the activity of looking at art with a calculable impartiality’.Footnote6 In contrast, this special issue of History of Photography is interested in how sculpture has affected and expanded the reception and understanding of photography, endowing the act of looking at photographs with cultural meanings. Written by scholars from a variety of backgrounds – literature, aesthetics, and the histories of art, photography and nineteenth-century visual culture – this issue explores how sculpture provided nineteenth-century photographers not only with a patient, still,Footnote7 and ‘highly photogenic’ subject,Footnote8 or a way to exploit an existing market for art reproductions,Footnote9 but also informed the conditions under which photography was first understood and conceptualised by the public.
Histories of early photography have emphasised its continuities with pre-existing drawing machines – the camera obscura and camera lucida, the physionotrace, and the various other arrangements to make silhouettes.Footnote10 Nineteenth-century writings on the new invention, however, were just as likely to compare it to sculpting machines, or to discuss photography in relation to other new mechanical methods to produce and multiply three-dimensional objects. David Brewster, for example, in his 1843 essay on ‘Photogenic Drawing’, placed the new medium in the context of other ‘great inventions and discoveries in the arts and sciences [that] either abridge or supersede labour’,Footnote11 such as ‘The art of multiplying statues by machinery, which we owe to the celebrated James Watt’, and ‘the splendid process of copying all sorts of sculpture, by the voltaic deposition of metals from their solutions’.Footnote12 By the time Brewster’s article was published, Watt had died and a number of machines for reproducing sculpture were in use, one developed in France by Achille Collas (1795–1859),Footnote13 the other in Britain by Benjamin Cheverton (1794–1876).Footnote14 In both, the process is guided by a blunt pointer touching the original, connected via a pantographic arm to another pointer, armed with a drill bit or cutting tool to carve the copy. In Watt’s and Cheverton’s machines, original and copy are clamped to plates connected by geared arrangements that keep them in the correct spatial relationship as they rotate to carve new portions of the copy, layer by layer. This enables the manufacture of exact copies in different sizes but in the right proportion, which is impossible with moulding and casting alone. The ‘voltaic deposition of metals from their solutions’ in Brewster’s article is a reference to Electrotyping, the process of making a wide range of metallic objects – sculptures, silver-ware, or printing plates – by coating a plaster prototype in an even layer of metal.Footnote15 For Brewster, however, all of these methods had been ‘surpassed by the art of Photography, by which we obtain perfect representations of all objects, whether animate or inanimate, through the agency of the light which they emit or reflect’.Footnote16
All the machines discussed by Brewster are indexical: an original or prototype, rather than a human hand, guides the copying process by direct physical connection. Photography surpasses the others because it uses light instead of arrangements of pointers, pantographic arms and cutting tools; and does not need plaster casts as prototypes to be immersed in metal baths for electrotyping. In photography, subject and copy are kept in proportion by the lens focusing the rays of light reflected off the subject inside the dark interior of the camera, where they are harnessed by the protean properties of silver also used in electrotyping. Portraits could therefore be copied from living subjects rather than sculptural busts, the statues most commonly copied by sculptural machines, because in photography ‘The picture is connected with its prototype’ by light. Brewster’s writing becomes rather poetic here, as he describes the ‘peculiarly touching’ quality of a photograph of a child for his ‘parent’: ‘the very light which radiated from his brow – the identical gleam which lighted up his eye – the pallid hue which hung upon his cheek […] penciled [sic.] the cherished image, and fixed themselves forever there’,Footnote17 in a framework of rays of light reminiscent of Watt’s celebrated linkages that allowed the metal arms of his machines to perform precise, delicate movements.
Brewster was not the only one to introduce photography in the context of sculpting machines. In August 1839, for example, the editor of the Literary Gazette, compared ‘photogenic copying’ using Daguerre’s method to Collas’s machine describing the latter’s ‘method of copying busts, statues, or other solid objects, with mathematical precision […] as remarkable a discovery as the photogenic’.Footnote18 More widely, throughout the 1840s and 1850s, photography was discussed and seen in contexts that invited comparison with sculptural machines, such as the events organised by the president of the Royal Society, where Cheverton’s ivories, ‘mechanically sculptured’ using his reducing machine, could be admired next to displays of ‘excellent […] Talbotypes’,Footnote19 or ‘M. Claudet’s photographic specimen’.Footnote20 At a soirée in February 1847, machine carvings, electrotypes, daguerreotypes and negatives, could be seen and compared by a large audience that was keen to attend ‘in spite of the severity of the weather’ and included ‘all ranks of the community’ as well as ‘Prince Albert’.Footnote21 In the same year, Robert Hunt started what became a long-running series in the pages of the Art-Union Monthly Journal (later the Art Journal) on ‘The Application of Science to the Fine and Useful Arts’, which, as he explained in the first article, was to include features ‘on the Electrotype in all its modified applications; on Photography in its most simple and its most refined processes’ and so on.Footnote22 These articles went on to include ‘The Electrotype’ in April, ‘Photography’ in May, and ‘Carving by Machinery’ in June, 1847, in a sequence consonant with Brewster’s analysis in using sculptural machines to contextualise photography.Footnote23
This mode of thinking about photography in relation to sculpture became even more explicit and literal in writings on the stereoscope, discussed in this issue by John Plunkett in his article on nineteenth-century debates on the relationship between touch, vision and the stereoscope. Brewster emphasised how stereoscopic photographs, images physically flat yet visually three-dimensional, would allow any sculptor to ‘virtually carry in his portfolio […] all the statuary and sculpture which adorn the galleries and museums of civilised nations’,Footnote24 in an insight presaging André Malraux’s 1940s understanding of the effects of photographic reproductions in creating a ‘Museum Without Walls’.Footnote25 The very title of Brewster’s paper, furthermore, highlights how the stereoscope established equivalence between ‘statues’ and ‘living bodies’ once they were photographed and ‘exhibited as solids by the stereoscope’.Footnote26 By stripping living bodies of colour and movement, but not their three dimensions, stereoscopy petrified its subjects – as argued here by Lindsay Smith – into a sculptural image. Different modes and degrees of this equivalence is one of the issues explored throughout this issue.
To viewers today, used to seeing stereoscopic photographs as single images without the use of a stereoscope, describing stereoscopy as ‘Sun Sculpture’Footnote27 or as enabling photography to be ‘a sculptor’,Footnote28 might seem an exaggeration to gloss over the reduction of the rich materiality of sculpture into monochrome tones on a flat surface. Yet, as I discuss in my article on stereoscopic photographs of sculpture at the 1862 International Exhibition, experiencing sculptures through the stereoscope has a sensual and material richness all of its own. The stereoscope itself, which could be as decorated and sumptuous as the Venetian masks some models resemble, was one of the objects decorating well-appointed drawing rooms, competing for space on tables and shelves with busts and statuettes, as well as albums, books and portfolios of prints.Footnote29 The materiality of photography itself is another concern shared by the articles in this issue – how the photograph is never just ‘image’ but also ‘object’.Footnote30 In the nineteenth century, photographic books and albums, stereoscopic viewers and their cards and, later, postcards, were as shiningly new and exciting as touch screens and tablet computers seem today, opening new vistas and possibilities, engendering new relationships between image and text, and creating new physical experiences and dynamics of viewing and reading.Footnote31 As reproductions of works of art, they also allowed a possessive tactility that was impossible in art galleries and museums, outside a small circle of art collectors and curators.
If, as Tobia Bezzola argues, what he calls ‘photographisms’ – aesthetic perceptions of sculpture generated by photography – began to influence the work of some sculptors in the late nineteenth century,Footnote32 the case studies discussed in this issue suggest currents in the opposite direction, from sculpture to photographers, as ‘sculpturalisms’ influenced photographers, scientists and writers on photography throughout the century. The two media shared problems and characteristics, from the role of vision and touch in understanding forms in space, to the lack of control over background. The overcrowded environments against which statues were viewed in International Exhibitions or in city squares, become the backgrounds photographers had to deal with when photographing sculptures in situ, as Marjan Sterckx and Leen Engelen discuss in their study of the strategies used in Belgian Belle-Epoque photographic postcards; or the distracting material from which sculptures had to be isolated to be properly re-contextualised in books where photograph and text on the page, rather than exhibition displays, were tools to direct the attention of the viewer, as discussed here by Magnus Bremmer in his article on Sweden’s first book with original photographs, Johannes Jaeger’s Molin’s Fountain in Photographs, with text (1866), on a sculptural fountain exhibited in the overcrowded interior of the first Scandinavian Art and Industrial Exhibition in 1866. As both articles suggest, grappling with these issues, albeit in different ways, contributed to the elaboration of a modernist photographic aesthetic, exploring the use of unexpected and uncontrollable background details, or exploiting the close-up and the fragment to engender otherwise impossible close, focused encounters with statues.
More fundamentally, both sculpture and photography had to deal with being arts of mechanical production and reproduction – even if sculpture, unlike photography, could claim that an ‘original’ object, the maquette made by the hands of the artist, was the originating point of every mechanically re-produced iteration, from marble statue to Parian statuette. As Catherine Moriarty argues in a recent article, ‘Though sculpture might seem an entirely different kind of object from the two-dimensional photograph, both were realized by an interaction of positive and negative’ – a reference to the moulds and casts routinely used to make as well as reproduce statues – and both involved ‘technical procedures, chemical transformations, and had the potential for further replications’.Footnote33 In the nineteenth century and beyond, photography and sculpture shared a business model that involved the artist – whether as an individual, the head of a firm or a brand name – in the production, legal protection, dissemination and reproduction of different iterations of their works,Footnote34 to a larger extent than painters would have been required to do,Footnote35 and within a less clear legal framework than printers seem to have enjoyed.Footnote36
Most surveys of the relationship between sculpture and photography emphasise a difference between the nineteenth century, when the medium grappled with how to take and circulate photographs of sculpture, and the twentieth, when photographs eventually replaced sculptural objects, as artists working after Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) questioned the role of the artist as a maker of objects by his or her own hands. In contrast, this issue explores how, already in the nineteenth century, photography and sculpture posed the problem of the nature of the ‘work’ involved in making a work of art, and the role of the artist’s own hands in the process. As Marta Weiss shows in her analysis of the photographic productions by sculptor Richard Cockle Lucas, mainly carte-de-visite albums and scrapbooks, his work suggests that in the 1860s he was already experimenting with photography as a way to demonstrate his skills in sculpting the body, bypassing the need to make sculptures in order to photograph them. And Roger Fenton was already using photography to blur distinctions between natural and sculpted objects, using it to ‘petrify’ rather than ‘re-present’ living bodies and the natural world, in a process of ‘metamorphosis’ that Lindsay Smith explores in her article on Fenton’s photographs of sculptures, picturesque landscapes and still lifes. By exploring a small but significant selection of nineteenth-century sculptural photographs, this issue of History of Photography, then, complicates histories of photography and sculpture that state that it was only in the twentieth century that artists began to realise that photography could be used not only to record or disseminate existing sculptures, but also to ‘make’ sculptures.Footnote37
Notes
1 Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. Geraldine A. Johnson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, 1.
2 Geraldine A. Johnson, ‘The Very Impress of the Object’: Photographing Sculpture from Fox Talbot to the Present Day, Leeds: Henry Moore Institute 1995, published on the occasion of the exhibition at University College London, 5 – 30 June and Leeds City Art Gallery, 8 July – 5 August 1995.
3 Musée d’Art et Historie, Cabinet des Estampes, Geneva, 28 June – 3 September 1985; Rainer Michael Mason, Hélène Pinet, Pygmalion Photographe: La sculpture devant la camera 1844–1936, Geneva: Musée d’Art et Historie 1985. Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1 August – 1 November 2010, Kunsthaus Zürich, 25 February – 15 May 2011; The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, ed. Roxana Marcoci, New York: The Museum of Modern Art 2010. Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 5 November 2005 – 5 January 2006; Joanne Lukitsh, Thomas Woolner: Seeing Sculpture Through Photography, Leeds: Henry Moore Institute 2005.
4 See, respectively, Anthony Hamber, ‘A Higher Branch of the Art’: Photographing the Fine Arts in England, 1839–1880, Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach 1996; Mary Bergstein, ‘Lonely Aphrodite: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture’, Art Bulletin, 74:3 (1992), 475–98; Julia Ballerini, ‘Recasting Ancestry: Statuettes as Imaged by Three Inventors of Photography’, in The Object as Subject: Studies in the Interpretation of Still Life, ed. Anne W. Lowenthal, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1996, 41–59; and Elizabeth Anne McCauley, ‘Fawning over Marbles: Robert and Gerardine MacPherson’s Vatican Sculptures and the Role of Photographs in the Reception of the Antique’, in Art and the Early Photographic Album, ed. Stephen Bann, Washington: National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press 2011, 94–122. See also Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Light and Dark: The Daguerreotype and Art History’, Art Bulletin 86:4 (2004), 764–776. A further recent ‘Bibliography: Sculpture and Photography’ by Denise Raine can be found in a special issue on the topic of the Sculpture Journal, 15:2 (2006), 296–298.
5 The Original Copy, ed. Marcoci, 12.
6 Bergstein, ‘Lonely Aphrodite’, 477.
7 Larry Schaaf emphasises that the ‘patience (and high light reflectivity)’ of busts and statuettes was crucial to their usefulness as subject matter in Henry Talbot’s early photographic experiments, given the long shutter speeds required by his ‘primitive’ materials. See Larry J. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000, 148.
8 Bergstein, ‘Lonely Aphrodite’, 475.
9 Joel Snyder, ‘Nineteenth-Century Photography of Sculpture and the Rhetoric of Substitution’, in Sculpture and Photography, ed. Johnson, 21–34; Geoffrey Batchen, ‘An Almost Unlimited Variety: Photography and Sculpture in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Original Copy, ed. Marcoci, 20–26.
10 See for example Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, ‘The Pre-History of Photography’, A Concise History of Photography, London: Thames and Hudson 1965, 9–16; or Beaumont Newhall, ‘The Elusive Image’, The History of Photography: from 1839 to the Present, New York: Museum of Modern Art 1994, 8–11. See also Peter Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, New York: Museum of Modern Art 1991.
11 David Brewster, ‘Photogenic Drawing, or Drawing by the Agency of Light’, Edinburgh Review, 76 (January 1843), 310.
12 Ibid., 312. In his retirement, James Watt, the developer of steam engines, had worked on two sculpting machines to make accurate three-dimensional copies of small statues and busts, one in same-size, the other proportionally reduced. Although these were working prototypes by 1814, Watt never patented them or tried to develop them commercially. They can now be seen at the Science Museum in London. See also H. W. Dickinson, James Watt, Craftsman and Engineer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1935, 191–97.
13 Robert A. Sobieszek, ‘Sculpture as the Sum of Its Profiles: François Willème and Photosculpture in France, 1859–1868’, Art Bulletin, 62:4 (1980), 624
14 See ‘Machine for Reproducing Sculpture, Made in 1926 by Benjamin Cheverton’, Science Museum, former gallery label, in the ‘Technical File’ linked to Inventory Number t/1924-292. Thanks to Rory Cook, Collections Information Officer, Science Museum, London, for retrieving and sending me a copy of this label. Cheverton’s relationship to Watt’s machines and to Collas’s is not clear, but they look similar and exploit similar principles. The advantage of Cheverton’s design over Watt’s is that it allows undercutting. Thanks to Ben Russell, Curator of Mechanical Engineering at the Science Museum, London, for showing me Watt’s machines, the statuettes he copied using them, and explaining how they work. See also J. C. Cheverton Shrewsbury and Anthony Burton, Benjamin Cheverton (1794–1876) in the Thomson Collection: Artist in Ivory, London: Paul Holberton 2012.
15 A range of objects made or copied using this system are in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and can be explored online at www.vam.ac.uk. Thanks to Alistair Grant, University of Sussex, who gave a paper on ‘Galvanic Engraving in Relief: The Origins and the Art of Electro-Metallurgy’ at the conference Art versus Industry, Leeds City Museum, 23 and 24 March 2012.
16 Brewster, ‘Photogenic Drawing’, 312.
17 Ibid., 331.
18 ‘Ed. L. G.’ [William Jerdan?], footnote added to ‘Fine Arts: The Daguerre Secret’, Literary Gazette (24 August 1839), 539. The Collas machine referred to here, however, was used to copy from medallion busts to make two-dimensional representations; see the anonymous review of ‘The Authors of England: A Series of Medallion Portraits of Modern Literary Characters by Achilles Collas’, Literary Gazette (28 October 1837), 683. This method was in competition with another machine to copy medallions patented by the English R. Bate in 1832 as Anaglyptography, also mentioned by Brewster in his article, in a footnote to page 312; for a discussion with diagrams explaining Collas’s and Bate’s machines see ‘Fine Arts. Medallic Engraving’, Literary Gazette (11 February 1837), 89–95; Jennings, ‘Fine Arts. New Publications. Anaglyptography. Portrait of the Duke of Wellington’, Literary Gazette (23 September 1837), 613; and ‘Art and Sciences. Society of Arts’, Literary Gazette (17 February1838), 104. Later in the century, the principles of Collas’s flat copying machine were adapted into a procedure to use photographs taken from all around a head to produce a sculpted portrait bust; Sobieszek, ‘Sculpture as the Sum of Its Profiles’, 619–24. Photography, then, was not the only process in competition with the Collas machine, as Batchen writes in ‘An Almost Unlimited Variety’, 21.
19 ‘Sketches of Society. The Marquis of Northampton’s Soirée’, Literary Gazette (15 March 1845), 171.
20 ‘The Marquis of Northampton’s Soirée’, Literary Gazette (28 March 1846), 289.
21 ‘Sketches of Society. The Marquis of Northampton’s Soirée’, Literary Gazette (20 February 1847), 151.
22 Robert Hunt, ‘The Application of Science to the Fine and Useful Arts’, Art-Union Monthly Journal (January 1847), 17–18. The series continued into the early 1860s.
23 Robert Hunt, ‘The Application of Science to the Fine and Useful Arts. The Electrotype’, Art-Union Monthly Journal (April 1847), 101–3; Robert Hunt, ‘The Application of Science to the Fine and Useful Arts. Photography’, Art-Union Monthly Journal (May 1847), 133–6; Robert Hunt, ‘The Application of Science to the Fine and Useful Arts. Carving by Machinery’, Art-Union Monthly Journal (June 1847), 193–5.
24 David Brewster, ‘Account of a Binocular Camera, and of a Method of Obtaining Drawings of Full Length and Colossal Statues, and of Living Bodies, which can be Exhibited as Solids by the Stereoscope’, Transactions of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts, vol. 3 (1851), 259–64, reprinted in Brewster and Wheatstone on Vision, ed. Nicholas J. Wade, London: Academic Press 1983, 221.
25 André Malraux, ‘Museum Without Walls’ (first published as Essais de psychologie de l’art. Le musée imaginaire, 1947), in The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978, 13–127.
26 Brewster, ‘Account of a Binocular Camera, and of a Method of Obtaining Drawings of Full Length and Colossal Statues, and of Living Bodies, which can be Exhibited as Solids by the Stereoscope’.
27 Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘Sun Painting and Sun Sculpture; with a Stereoscopic trip across the Atlantic’, The Atlantic Monthly, 3:20 (1859), 738–49.
28 M. A. Belloc, ‘The Future of Photography’, Photographic News (17 September 1859), 13.
29 An extreme example is the stereoscope commissioned by Abdul Medjid [Abdülmecid I], Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and exhibited at the 1862 International Exhibition by the London jeweller Harry Emanuel, which attracted much attention (and some criticism) because it was made in ivory and ‘set all over, as thickly as plums in a pudding, with diamonds, emeralds, and rubies’. ‘The International Exhibition’, The Times (23 June 1862), 9. The stereoscope features, together with a mirror and a statuette, in one of the stereoscopic photographs taken at the Exhibition by the London Stereoscopic Company, ‘No. 31. The Sultan’s Jewelled Mirror, etc., value 20,000 pounds. (Emanuel)’.
30 For different perspectives on photography as object, see for example Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, Amsterdam and New York: Van Gogh Museum and Princeton Architectural Press 2004; Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images, ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, London: Routledge 2004; Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2012.
31 As Snyder argues, in the nineteenth century the shine of photographic prints on albumen papers differentiated them as ‘new’ from other prints. Snyder, ‘Nineteenth-Century Photography of Sculpture’, 28.
32 Bezzola, ‘From Sculpture in Photography to Photography as Plastic Art’, in The Original Copy, ed. Marcoci, 29.
33 Catherine Moriarty, ‘The Place of Photography in the Life and Work of Paul Montfort’, Sculpture Journal, 15:2 (2006), 255.
34 For a wealth of examples, see The Sculpture Business: Documents from the Archive, ed. Penelope Curtis, Leeds: Centre for the Study of Sculpture, Henry Moore Institute 1997.
35 Jeremy Maas, Gambart: Prince of the Victorian Art World, London: Barrie & Jenkins 1975, shows how nineteenth-century painters such as William Holman Hunt, would rely on this print dealer and art entrepreneur to exploit their work commercially, providing a regular income that allowed them to concentrate on painting.
36 This can be gauged, for example, by a comparison of the sculpture patents in Board of Trade, Records of the Board of Trade, Patents, Design and Trade Marks Office: Provisional and Sculpture Design Act 1850; with print copyrights registered at Stationers’ Company, Records of the Copyright Office, Stationers’ Company, 1837–1924, both in the National Archives, Kew. See also Lionel Bently, ‘Art and the Making of Modern Copyright Law’, in Dear Images: Art, Copyright and Culture, ed. Daniel McClean and Karsten Schubert, London: ICA and Ridinghouse 2002, 330–51.
37 Bezzola, ‘From Sculpture in Photography to Photography as Plastic Art’, 30, emphasis in the original.