In the early to middle years of the twentieth cen-
tury, a number of highly regarded sculptors, includ-
ing Constantin Brancusi, British sculptor Beverly
Pepper, and the American David Smith used photo-
graphy to extend their sculptural investigations, and
in intervening years have become celebrated for their
photographicoeuvresas well as for their three-dimen-
sional output. The most intensive period of interac-
tion between sculpture and photography, however,
began in the 1960s when in the context of conceptual
art, the photograph was used to record performances
or present visual materials to address and examine
ideas pertaining to society, politics, and art itself.
This reinterpretation of photography’s ‘‘place’’ em-
phasized its documentary properties, making it ideal
as a method to record increasingly ephemeral sculp-
tural practices. Concurrent with (and partly resulting
from) conceptual art’s dematerialization of the art
object (facilitated by photography), expanded no-
tions of sculpture began to emerge that placed greater
emphasis on an aesthetic experience associated with
the process rather than that of the resulting sculpture.
These sculptural manifestations often consisted of
performance, architectural constructions, and inter-
ventions with the natural environment, and drew art
further from the gallery space and into what art
historian Rosalind Krauss defined as the ‘‘expanded
field.’’ Thus the only surviving record of much of this
work exists in photographs, films, and videos, which
have assumed a greater importance due to the critical
stature that these works have achieved in art history
in the postwar era.
One of the first artists to incorporate photogra-
phy within a sculptural work was Robert Smithson,
whose work brought elements of the natural world
into the gallery space and, conversely, made sculp-
tural use of the environment to realize large-scale
projects. Works that create a dialogue between the
aesthetic space of the gallery and the world outside
includeNonsite (Franklin, New Jersey), 1968, in
which stones from the site named in the title are
arranged in a geometric series of containers, the
shape of which is represented in the accompanying
aerial photograph of the site. The photograph thus
becomes an integral part of the overall sculptural
installation, pictorially describing the ‘‘site’’
(Franklin, New Jersey) within the ‘‘non-site’’ of
the work (the position of which varies with each
successive presentation in a different gallery,
domestic, or museum space). Smithson’s larger
and more ambitious projects, such asPartially Bur-
ied Woodshed, 1970, andSpiral Jetty, 1973, made
direct interactions with architectural structures and
natural formations, and existed only as long as the
course of nature would allow. Photographing these
ephemeral works thus became crucial in recording
their very existence and in conveying some sense of
the experience of the particular work.
Other artists used photography to represent a
different kind of interaction with nature, one that
emphasized not so much the structure that resulted
but the artist’s experience in the world outside.
Artists such as Christo, Hamish Fulton, Richard
Long, and Ana Mendieta in particular used photo-
graphy to document their forays and excursions
into nature to do performances, erect sculptural
structures, or recover materials that were later
incorporated into sculptural works in the gallery.
Mendieta’sSiluetaseries of 1973–1980 is perhaps
the most striking example of the photographic doc-
umentation; the artist uses her body to create
imprints, traces, or other interactions with natural
materials in natural settings. The photographs thus
work together with the sculptures to recreate the
process of the works’ creation. This emphasis on
process also characterized the work of artists such
as Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, and Richard Serra,
who used photography as a documentary record of
ephemeral works created in the studio in the late
1960s and early 1970s.
Gordon Matta-Clark’s work similarly documen-
ted sculptural manifestations in the outside world,
specifically, his interventions with architectural
structures in the 1970s and early 1980s. These
works featured strategic evisceration and destruc-
tion of a building to create a particular aesthetic
effect. In his 1978 work,CircusorThe Caribbean
Orange, for example, a townhouse soon to be
adjoined to the existing Museum of Contemporary
Art in Chicago, was sliced through from floor to
floor with large, circular cuts. The large cibachrome
works document this installation from numerous,
unconventional angles and are pieced together in a
manner that mimics the sculptural sense of displa-
cement within the installation itself. Matta-Clark’s
work is thus an important transition between the
work of the 1960s and 1970s, in which photography
was used primarily as a documentary tool and not
as part of the sculptural object.
Artists working in the 1980s availed themselves of
technological advances that allowed them to incor-
porate images into three-dimensional structures.
Thisformalshiftwasaccompaniedbyanincreasing
tendency of artists to mimic the appearances of the
mass media as a critique of its pervasive effect on
shaping culture. Dennis Adams often created archi-
tectural structures that featured appropriations of
photographic images from history. InBus Shelter
II, 1984–1986, for example, he outfitted a bus shelter
with a lightbox image of Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg,PHOTOGRAPHY AND SCULPTURE