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40ter atelier parisien
Bustes en plâtre pour artistes
Paris, vers 1855
Deux négatifs sur verre au collodion humide, 265x210 mm
«The advent of photography in 1839, when aesthetic experience was firmly
rooted in Romanticist tenets of originality, brought into focus the critical role
that the copy plays in the perception of art. But if the photograph’s reproduci-
bility challenged the aura attributed to the original, it also reflected a very
personal form of perception and offered a model for dissemination that would
transform the entire nature of art. The distinctive expression of the photograph,
the archival value of a document bearing the trace of history, and the combi-
natory capacity of the image, open to be edited into sequences in which it mixes
with others—all these contribute to the status of photography as both an art
form and a medium of communication.
The Original Copy presents a critical examination of the intersections between
photography and sculpture, exploring how the one medium has been implicated
in the analysis and creative redefinition of the other. Bringing together three
hundred pictures, magazines, and journals 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 what
sculpture is.» (MOMA press release).
A pair of collodion glass negatives