The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture: 1839 to Today

Since its birth in the first half of the nineteenth century, photography has offered extraordinary possibilities of documenting, redefining and disseminating works of art. Through crop, focus, angle of view, degree of close-up and lighting, as well as through expostfacto techniques of dark room manipulation, collage, montage and assemblage, artists not only interpret the works they record but create stunning reinventions of them. The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today presents a critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture, exploring how the one medium has become implicated in the understanding of the other. Through a selection of nearly 300 outstanding pictures by more than 100 artists from the nineteenth century to the present, The Original Copy looks at how and why sculpture became a photographic subject and how photography at once informs and challenges our knowledge of sculpture. The images range in subject from inanimate objects to performing bodies, and include major works by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Eugène Atget, Herbert Bayer, Hans Bellmer, Constantin Brancusi, Brassaï, Claude Cahun, Ken Domon, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli/Weiss, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, David Goldblatt, Rachel Harrison, Hannah Höch, André Kertész, Louise Lawler, Man Ray, Bruce Nauman, Charles Nègre, David Smith, Alina Szapocznikow, Gillian Wearing, Hannah Wilke and Iwao Yamawaki, among others.