Keynote Lecture: “The more photographs, the better”:
Sculpture as Subject and Object of the Camera’s Lens

Bernard Berenson once claimed that it was difficult to analyze works of art without resorting to photographs, saying “the more photographs, the better.” Similarly, André Malraux asserted that art history was nothing more than the “history of that which can be photographed.” Malraux was especially interested in the photography of sculpture, where the shift from three to two dimensions can be particularly revealing. Significantly, photographs by early practitioners such as Daguerre and Talbot often featured sculptural subjects. This was due in part to the extended exposure times required by early photographic processes, which favored immobile sculpture as subject matter. But right from the beginning, photographs of sculpture also revealed the interests of their creators, from early photographers’ fascination with Classical antiquity to Steichen’s self-consciously avant-garde photographs of Rodin’s sculpture, or even Mapplethorpe’s seductive images of life-like statues and statuesque sitters. The camera not only records sculptural works but can also produce them, for instance when found objects are transformed into “involuntary sculptures”, to use Dalí’s description of photographs by Brassaï — a phenomenon which can be seen also in Sudek’s sculptural photographs of apples and eggshells. Photographs themselves are inevitably three-dimensional objects, whether embedded in Victorian jewelry or displayed on a lightbox by Jeff Wall. Art historians’ engagement with the photography of sculpture is also revealing, as Wölfflin suggested when he asked rhetorically: “How should one photograph sculpture?” By considering the photography-sculpture rubric from historical, theoretical and historiographical perspectives, this lecture proposes to deepen, as well as challenge, our understanding of what both photography and sculpture actually are.