The Photographic Detail and Sculptural Seeing

In what ways can a photographic detail be a repository of knowledge about the material surface of a sculpture? In the 1880s, Fratelli Alinari introduced detailed views of sculptures, one of the first photographic firms to do so. Yet the Alinari details were still taken from a fixed and frontal vantage point, several meters from the object –– resulting in images that synthesized a portion of a sculpture in a stable view. Responding to these commercial reproductions, the American scholar-photographer Clarence Kennedy made the close detail a central component of his seven-volume series of folios entitled Studies in the History and Criticism of Sculpture, published between 1928 and 1932 with funding from the Carnegie Corporation. For Kennedy, the photographic detail was a morphological clue for connoisseurship, akin to Giovanni Morelli’s Grundformen. But it also transmitted data about a sculpture’s haptic qualities, or as Kennedy wrote, a close-up conveyed “the sense that you can touch the sculpture – that you can feel its bulk and see the chisel-stroke.” This paper returns to Kennedy’s photographic folios as a means of introducing an argument about the sculptural gaze tied to the informational data of the photographic detail. I show how Kennedy’s photographs revel in a dizzying and immersive aesthetic of proximity that teaches the beholder how to look –– how to see a sculpture’s material surface, its process of carving.