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also enabled the armchair traveller to experience these
attractions without having to leave home.
The ritual of purchasing photographic ‘spolia’
became an integral part of the ‘work’ of tourism, and
photographs of sculpture formed a signifi cant portion
of any representative collection of views of Florence,
Rome, and Venice, for example. Among the innumer-
able photographers that supplied such portable records
were—in addition to the Alinari—James Anderson,
Adolphe and Henri Braun, Giacomo Caneva, Robert
Macpherson, Carlo Naya, and Carlo Ponti. Photographs
of ancient sculptures excavated in Rome during the pon-
tifi cate of Pius IX contributed to the myth of the Papacy,
as did the lavish photographic albums documenting
the Vatican sculptures that Macpherson and the Brauns
published in the 1860s. Working farther afi eld in the
sphere of travel photography, including the photography
of sculpture, were, for instance, Felix Bonfi ls in Athens
and Constantinople; Maxime Du Camp, Francis Frith,
John B. Greene, Félix Teynard in Egypt; Lous De Clercq
in Syria; Auguste Salzmann in the Holy Land.
Travel photography and photography that was in-
tended to document the history of art and architecture
were closely related. In France in the early 1850s,
Charles Nègre, Em. Pec, and Henri Le Secq recorded
the sculpture at Chartres, for instance, in addition to
photographing the cathedral itself. In England, Roger
Fenton was employed in 1854 to document the ancient
sculpture in the British Museum. After constructing
a studio on the roof of the museum, Fenton set about
photographing dozens of Assyrian tablets and other
works of sculpture. In order to ensure that there was
suffi cient light, it was often necessary to have the
objects carried out on to the roof itself, a practice that
in turn required Fenton to devise ingenious ways of
controlling and modulating the natural light; occasion-
ally he would even dust the sculpture with powder to
make the surfaces more conducive to photography.
Between February 1854 and May 1856, Fenton and his
assistants produced over eight thousand salt prints of
sculpture. From these beginnings, the scholarly study
of sculpture became inseparable from the history of
the photography of sculpture, and understanding of
particular works of sculpture was shaped in signifi cant
part by the character of the photographs that were
available. Conversely, the interests and needs of art
historians might affect the nature—general views and
details—and particular viewpoints of the photographs
that were made.
Sir David Brewster’s invention in 1849 of the ste-
reoscope made it possible to produce photographs of
sculpture that more closely approximated the sensation
of relief and volume provided by the subject itself. Sir
David himself affi rmed that such views would enable
the student of sculpture to “avail himself of the labours
of all his predecessors.” He would “virtually carry in
his portfolio... the gigantic sphinxes of Egypt, the
Apollo, and Venuses of Grecian art, and all the statuary
and sculpture which adorns the galleries and museums
of civilized nations.” Indeed, such images came to be
perceived as accurate and true substitutes for the models
themselves. As a result of the publication of millions of
inexpensive stereoscopic prints and slides of ancient and
modern statuary, sculpture was literally “photographed
into... popularity.”
Talbot’s observations concerning the “almost un-
limited variety” that is possible when photographing
sculpture raises important questions concerning the
nature of the relationship between the two media. In
relation to the graphic arts and printing, for instance,
photography is a reproductive process in which the cor-
respondence between the matrix and the image appears
relatively straightforward. For a start, the subject and
the photograph are both two-dimensional. A photogenic
drawing of an engraving or a leaf is a direct impression
of the object made by the action of light. With sculpture,
however, the relationship between the object and the im-
age is exceedingly complex and is, as Talbot indicates,
“susceptible of an almost unlimited variety.”
Elements contributing to this variety are the three-
dimensional character of the matrix, the changing
nature of the sculpture’s ambience, and the character
of the photographer’s intervention. Rather than being
an impartial and objective impression of the subject, a
photograph of a sculpture is a discrete image, one that is
a visible record of dialogue between photographer and
object, a dialogue that took place at a particular place
and time. This dialogue may be affected signifi cantly by
the conditions under which the photographer is work-
ing and by the limitations of contemporary technology.
In order to produce a satisfactory plate of Alessandro
Vittoria’s St Jerome, for instance, the Venetian photog-
rapher Carlo Naya left his camera standing in the Frari
for several days.
That a photographer may take possession of a sculp-
ture is illustrated by the famous series of photographs
of Auguste Rodin’s Balzac created by Edward Steichen
in 1908. The ambivalent relationship between sculpture
and photography was also recognised by Constantin
Brancusi when he asked Man Ray to teach him how
to make his own photographs. Underlying this request
was Brancusi’s experience of seeing a photograph of his
work by Alfred Stieglitz. “It was a beautiful photograph,
[Brancusi] said, but it did not represent his work. Only
he himself would know how to photograph it.” Even
when the photographer is self-effacing, as the Ameri-
can art historian and photographer Clarence Kennedy
intended to be, the image is inevitably a record of a
dialogue between the photographer and the object.
Graham Smith