Even if you’ve never dated a girl who actually liked Tumblr, it’s hard to keep track of all the embarrassing things that happened during the Obama era. There is a breathless optimism about everything, even a relatively mundane technology like 3D printing. Some believe it could change sculpture forever, perhaps even disrupting standard ways of making it. Its most innovative user so far is Luigi Mangione.
A new exhibition at Stanford University’s Cantor Center for the Arts, “Solid Pictures: Photographic Sculpture and the Making of Modern Portraits,” suggests that the technology may have never been more conceptually revolutionary. This exhibition marks the first major exhibition of François Willème’s (1830-1905) creative process in Paris, which he inaugurated in 1861. In his photographic sculpture, the subject stands on a platform beneath the 10-meter-wide glass-domed rotunda, while 24 cameras hidden in the walls fire simultaneously at the prompt of a whistle. Assistants projected the negatives onto frosted glass, traced the outlines, and drew each outline through a pantograph cut into a piece of clay on a turntable. Pose for 10 seconds and a bust – made of plaster, bisque, terracotta or bronze – can be produced in 48 hours. The company that invented the invention went through two corporate reorganizations, and Willème was driven out by his shareholders in May 1867. Curator Patrick R. Crowley has collected 26 surviving photographic sculptures (12 of which belong to Cantor), as well as patents, prints, glass negatives, and some works by Oliver Laric, Aria Dean, Charles Ray, and others, arguing that this failure is a contemporary of CT printing, 3D printing artists. For Silicon Valley, it’s a cautionary tale about overleveraged startups.
As if he could see the future, self-portrait (c. 1863) Willem leaned back and crossed his arms tightly. The object on display is a replica of a replica, cast in 1924 by a former Willème employee who had retreated to his hometown of Sedan to run a modest photography studio in an attempt to save the inventor’s name. His overalls hung wide and hollow, like his own influence. Laric Offers self-portrait (2026): Willème was 3D printed in aluminum three times, gradually reducing in size, which is what a pantograph can do.
Mechanically produced bust (c.1860) is a somewhat scary proof of concept and reminds me of the work of Medardo Rosso (1858-1928). This sculpture of a female head is assembled from 100 wedge-shaped wooden blocks tied together with twine. Pendulum researcher Léon Foucault says it illustrates the problems with the technology that later led to the company’s collapse, but taken out of context it’s a fascinating artifact that shows how easily the brain can conjure a face out of just about anything and then give it an emotion – in this case, the emotion of sadness.
Photographic sculptures by Matilde de Aguilera Gamboa (c. 1865) in bisque shows what the technique could bring to the more elegant mind. The character in the painting is a Spanish aristocrat and the sister of the Marquis of Serralvo. Isabella II summoned Willem to Madrid to produce dozens of royal photo sculptures, which attracted the attention of the local nobility and earned him a knighthood in the Order of Charles III. Silicon Valley could learn a lot from this, too, because for all the technical claims, the most memorable parts of the work—the folded taffeta, the wrinkled gloves, the intricate hair—are carved by hand.