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How does photography shape the way we see sculpture? In "David
Smith in Two Dimensions," Sarah Hamill broaches this question
through an in-depth consideration of the photography of American
sculptor David Smith (1906-1965). Smith was a modernist known for
radically shifting the terms of sculpture, a medium traditionally
defined by casting, modeling, and carving. He was the first to use
industrial welding as a sustained technique for large-scale
sculpture, influencing a generation of minimalists to come. What is
less known about Smith is his use of the camera to document his own
sculptures as well as everyday objects, spaces, and bodies. His
photographs of sculptures were published in countless exhibition
catalogs, journals, and newspapers, often as anonymous
illustrations. Far from being neutral images, these photographs
direct a pictorial encounter with spatial form and structure the
public display of his work.
"David Smith in Two Dimensions" looks at the sculptor's adoption of
unconventional backdrops, alternative vantage points, and unusual
lighting effects and exposures to show how he used photography to
dramatize and distance objects. This comprehensive and penetrating
account also introduces Smith's expansive archive of copy prints,
slides, and negatives, many of which are seen here for the first
time. Hamill proposes a new understanding of Smith's sculpture
through photography, exploring issues that are in turn vital to
discourses of modern sculpture, sculptural aesthetics, and postwar
art. In Smith's photography, we see an artist moving fluidly
between media to define what a sculptural object was and how it
would be encountered publicly.
Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when the new medium of
photography was pressed into service to illustrate sculpture,
photographs of sculptural objects have directed viewers as to just
when, in the course of ambling around a sculpture, was the single
perfect moment to stop and look. What is the photograph's place in
writing the history of sculpture? How has it changed according to
culture, generation, critical conviction, and changes in media?
Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction studies
aspects of these questions from the perspectives of sixteen leading
art historians. Chapters on such varied topics as picturing
Conceptual art, manipulating sacred images in India to be
nonphotographs, and framing Roman art with an iPad illustrate the
latent visual and narrative powers and ever-expanding potential of
these images of sculpture.
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