The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today

Since its birth in the first half of the nineteenth century, photography has offered an unprecedented way to analyze works of art for further study. Through crop, focus, angle of view, degree of close-up, and lighting, as well as through ex post facto techniques of darkroom manipulation, collage, montage, and assemblage, photographers not only interpret the works they record but create stunning reinventions. 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 three hundred outstanding pictures by more than one hundred artists from the dawn of modernism to the present, the exhibition looks at the ways in which photography at once informs and challenges our understanding of sculpture. Addressing how and why sculpture became a photographic subject, the exhibition examines pictures that range in subject from inanimate objects to performing bodies within specific historical and political contexts. The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today features major works by Eugène Atget, Hans Bellmer, Herbert Beyer, Constantin Brancusi, Brassaï, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Claude Cahun, Marcel Duchamp, Fischli & Weiss, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, David Goldblatt, Rachel Harrison, Hannah Höch, André Kertész, Man Ray, Bruce Nauman, Charles Nègre, Gillian Wearing, Hannah Wilke, and Iwao Yamawaki, among others. The exhibition will travel to Kunsthaus Zürich, where it will be on view from February 25 through May 13, 2011. MoMA