My first experiment was an attempt to translate photography into sculpture, in which the two-dimensional photographic print would become a three-dimensional photographic object with physical properties. François Willème’s photosculpture process proved to be an interesting method of visual abstraction that had the potential to do exactly this, while simultaneously negotiating the emotionally loaded content of my photographs.

One of the great paradoxes of photography lies in its ability to turn a real three-dimensional world into a photographic two-dimensional world. This two-dimensional illusion seems to evoke a three-dimensional world, despite the fact that the image is little more than a photosensitive chemical substance on the surface of a three-dimensional support. But it is this paradox that enables the precise spatial dimensions of a sculpture to be rendered on a two-dimensional surface. It is possible for perceived depths within the image to be translated in real, correct dimensions, simply by measuring the distances on the photograph. This act of translation from two to three dimensions later evolved into a technique called photosculpture, which enabled spatial forms to protrude out of a flat image.

Photosculpture — which, when it began, meant simply the practice of photographing sculptures — suggested a distinctive union between photography and sculpture. This concept was advanced by the French sculptor and photographer François Willème (1830–1905). In the late 1850s, he aimed to accurately reproduce sculpture with the help of photography. Willème developed a shadowing apparatus for mapping the surface of an inanimate object. A sculpture would be placed onto a revolving turntable marked by 24 different points; at each of these points, during the objects revolution, a camera ‘successively recorded the shadows cast by the apparatus.’² The resulting 24 photographic profiles would then be individually projected onto a screen, and each profile could then be transferred onto a three-dimensional model using a pantograph measuring device.³ The model, or prototype, was a ‘sum of profiles’ to be ‘modelled out in plaster.’⁴ This was done without any artistic pretence and as accurately as possible.

By the 1860s, photosculpture had radically changed, as Willème patented and commercialised his practice under the same term. Around this time, he moved on to a greater challenge: turning portrait photography into sculptures. Portrait photography had been made possible by improved lenses, cameras, accelerating substances to reduce exposure times, and glasshouse studios. For this experiment, Willème’s device had to go beyond a turntable and camera. In order to register the sitter’s profile correctly and without their becoming impatient and moving, he needed to take 24 photographs completely surrounding the model at exactly the same moment. For this reason, he constructed a glass-domed circular pavilion in which he embedded 24 synchronised cameras. [fig. 11] The entire figure of the posing sitter could be captured in a few seconds, after which the same profiling procedure as described above was used to convert the images into an accurate likeness. With the aid of Achille Collas’s réduction méchanique — a machine similar to a pantograph that could copy objects at various scales — Willème had successfully invented a photography-based, mechanical method of producing portrait sculptures. [fig. 12]

With the subject centred in the middle, encircled by cameras to register volume information, this elaborate device resembled the modern-day 3D scanner. This method was capable of collecting unprecedentedly accurate and precise information on volume. However, the process of reconstruction into sculpture was corrupted by manual intervention: details were lost as photographs were converted into profiles, followed by profiles converted into clay, then finally, clay into plaster.⁵ The differences between the two-dimensional photographic image and the three-dimensional cast were finely attuned but cannot be compared to the computerised accuracy of the modern-day 3D printer. Ahead of its time, this prototype 3D scanner had to wait for the precision of the 3D printer.

Another challenge lay in photographing moving subjects and visualising the physiology of a living organism in motion. A body cast of a figure in motion was — and still is —impossible, but the next generation of scientist-photographers looked to Willème’s photographic scanner for the next best thing. By the 1880s, the shutter speed of a photographic recording had surpassed both the speed of zoological movement and the speed of human vision. These years saw developments in both micro- and macro-photography, and a growing interest in what lay beyond the visible spectrum. Here Willème’s photosculpture practice became valuable again, as researchers looked to find ways to visualise motion in three-dimensions. Since photography was a physical imprint of reality, and the physiology of movement was captured on such an imprint, it would be possible to extract, using Willème’s technique, a physical and tangible object in motion.

When scientist and cardiologist Étienne-Jules Marey started using photography to record his physiological experiments, he turned to Willème’s photosculpture process to simulate and, more importantly, solidify motion as a three-dimensional, sculptural animation. Fascinated by bird flight and the movement of wings, he set out in 1886–87 to record the flight of a seagull. [fig. 13] Influenced by Eadweard Muybridge, who had made synchronised photographs of the same subject from three different angles of view, Marey came up with the idea of taking synchronised photographs from the lateral, frontal, and vertical view. In order to retrieve accurate information about movement from a series of photographs, Marey built two darkened pavilions flanked by two chronophotographic cameras, with a third camera fixed to the roof facing downwards onto an area of black cloth rolled out on the ground.⁶ These three synchronised cameras could simultaneously capture three different angles of the same subject. Much like the contemporary 3D scanner, and reminiscent of Willème’s technique, the chronophotographs made along the X, Y, Z axis collected all the information needed to subtract a three-dimensional object from a real bird in flight. [fig. 14] ‘We have been able, using these three images, to build a series of figures in relief showing the successive positions of the bird’, Marey wrote. He created ten three-dimensional sculptures showing the various positions of a seagull during flight, separated from each other according to the real distances between each recorded position. [fig. 15] Finally, he merged the bodies of 24 birds into a single sculpture, hereby creating an exact three-dimensional figure that would correspond exactly to the physical distances between positions spaced at one fiftieth of a second intervals.⁷ [fig. 16] [fig. 17] In this, Marey had expanded on Willème’s photosculpture process to create a solidified volume of motion. On the one hand, he translated a photograph’s frozen moment of time and space into sculpture, and on the other, he developed new techniques that laid the foundations for cinema.

In 1900, only a few years later, the Exposition Universelle de Paris focused entirely on film and the moving image, during which Marey’s photosculptural experiments received modest attention in a small window display. The influence of Willème and Marey’s work was more strongly felt in Cubist and Futurist circles, especially in the work of Boccioni and Duchamp. Their sculptural techniques were copied and adapted in the twentieth century by Pötschke, Reissig, Selke, Givaudan, and others.

It was only in the twenty-first century that a true reconstruction of tangible spatial information from a flat photograph could be fully realised. Willème and Marey’s early attempts to reproduce objects from light can trace a lineage to the present, in cinema and 3D scanning and printing. We are now at a point in history where 3D printers can make this imprecise sculpture perfect, and I have attempted to reconstruct and adapt their experiments for my own visual work using these contemporary technologies.