‘The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today’

‘The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today’ at the Museum of Modern Art presents a wide array of odd, fabulous and unfamiliar images that tell a tale of two art forms meet, marry, reproduce and virtually merge. It shows how photography and sculpture become one.

A curator in the photography department, Roxana Marcoci, has organized the show. It takes off where photography officially began, with the debuts of the daguerreotype first in France in 1839 and, later, the paper-print picture in the UK. Of course, sculpture as an art form had already a very ancient history by this time. Yet the two mediums became aligned almost immediately.

Both technology and timing played a role in their meticulous merging. A burgeoning middle class could access art once the preserve of the rich thanks to museums. Members of the new emerging art audience sought a piece of the cultural heritage for themselves. Photographs offered it to them. Among the earliest picture of the show - Alphonse Eugène’s daguerreotype Hubert (1839) is a still life, albeit composed entirely of Classical sculpture’s bits & pieces, comprising a plaster bust of the Venus de Milo.

The liaison between photography and sculpture had both formal and social advantages. With its long exposure time, early photography needed motionless subjects. If an individual seated for a portrait so much as twitched, the image got blurred. On the other hand, sculpture was far easier to photograph; it did not twitch! It also did not travel if it was fixed in place. Daredevil photographers had to go to where it was, as Charles Nègre and Maxime Du Camp did. Early photography served as an art form and as a recording instrument.

Incidentally, the curator devotes considerable space to the relationship of photography and sculpture in the show’s largest gallery. ‘The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture is on view at MoMA, New York.