My initial entry into photography allowed me to engage with the medium as multidimensional – even when it is so clearly two-dimensional in final form. That position may seem like a conundrum, yet both history and the present moment can attest to the truth that photography and sculpture have a clear relationship. Currently, I am investigating the correlation between sculpture and “off the wall” photography. I follow, of course, in the footsteps of the seminal 1970 Museum of Modern Art exhibition that initially planted the flag, Photography into Sculpture, among other contemporary discussions ruminating on where photography is headed.
In bringing photography, the photo hybrid, and sculptural objects together in one mental space, my intent is to illuminate the ways in which photography can embrace abstraction, temporality, and dimensionality – constructs more often centred in the world of sculpture.
Pairing two media popularly viewed as oppositional, I propose to make visible their inherent common ground. Said common ground begins with the concept of positive and negative space, which is as integral to the photographic practice as it is to the multidimensional world of sculpture. Until recently, photography involved the use of a celluloid negative to create a positive image on paper. That internal spatial awareness – grounded in negative but envisioned as positive – is hard-wired into many photographic makers. Despite the shift to digital over analogue, the idea of spatially building an image in three dimensions is still in play – even more so now with a certain amount of digital backlash driving lens-based artists to move away from their screens to create hybrid work that disregards standard photo sizes or papers. This shift is what I have termed “off the wall.” From the perspective of the sculptor, their work can be addressed as either additive or subtractive: commencing from nothing (negative) and building out (positive), or beginning with a solid mass (positive) and inserting voided (negative) space.
One reason I am walking down a similar path to said seminal 1970 exhibition lies in the fact that, like the majority of artists included then, many current photo experimenters are once again based in Southern California. Both the earlier and later generations of photo hybridists form a core component of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s collection, where I work; the lineage is one asking to be explored. Beyond my SoCal backyard, I have brought or will be bringing into our collection a range of works under this umbrella. Stitched or sewn work (Bea Nettles, Carolle Bénitah) and landscapes interrupted with yarn dyed from the natural resources of their location (Ana Teresa Barboza). Photographs on shaped, layered, or folded metal (Susan Rankaitis, Letha Wilson, Charlotte María Hauksdóttir); photo objects that incorporate elements of the “real” world (Michael Stone, Sandi Haber Fifield, Leslie Hewitt); or photographs of architectural spaces printed to scale on free-standing glass (Veronika Kellndorfer). One of my favourites is an irreverent photo-sculpture by Josephine Pryde: a silver hand reads all at once as a human, robotic, and consumer display item, and it holds a snow globe in which floats a photograph of a hand clutching a mobile phone that is ready to take a picture.
One specific early example is by Los Angeles-based Sheila Pinkel, whose work from the late 1970s and early 1980s inherited a new acceptance of what a photograph could be. Back in 1973 at the University of California, Los Angeles – one year after the nationwide tour of Photography into Sculpture wrapped up – Pinkel began physically sculpting a series of photograms, shaping and folding oversized photo paper and sensitized canvases in the darkroom and exposing the newly dimensional forms to a raking light source. The manipulated photos were then developed in photochemical baths, during which the paper naturally flattened out. Each of the resultant artworks is an uncanny two-dimensional representation of itself as a three-dimensional object. In Pinkel’s words, the works became “time-space paradoxes.”
Time-space paradoxes. A photograph free of its decisive moment, not defined by its capture of a blink in time, and instead inhabiting a realm of abstracted time and holding space in such a way that one physically navigates the image (its dimensionality), is what I was pursuing in my initial thinking when envisioning photo work alongside sculpture.
Sheila Pinkel, Grand Glory, circa 1976–82, gelatin silver print, 137.1 × 271.7 × 35.5 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art Photographic Arts Council, 2011. Courtesy of Museum Associates/LACMA
Fast-forward to 2022, to navigate Jackie Castillo’s photo-sculpture-floor installation, a hardscape reality in Los Angeles: the last element standing from the demolition site of a single-family home, an image of a hearth without a home. Segmented into brick-sized images and fused to a topographic stack of reclaimed bricks from the very same hearth, Turning No°2 is an excavation into the historical and material loss of Los Angeles’ built environment and the fast-changing demographics of those placed and those displaced. The uneven levels of the work replicate the tension of a changing dynamic (or an earthquake), the edges of the photographic frame fragmented, undoing our expectations of photography as fixed and truthful and holding still the transience of the modern metropolis. Important to the work is the visual language of labour recalled in hefting the reclaimed bricks and in the physical act of the artist reassembling them, while also reflecting on the labouring class that built the structures around us.
Clearly, photo hybrids come to their sculptural state through quite a range of conceptual constructs, embracing the essence of light or reflecting a more socio-politically motivated art practice, as in these two case studies. I gravitate toward this work for an equally wide range of appreciation: formal, conceptual, spatial – but mostly in appreciation of their desire to escape the tyranny of photo paper, sizes, mats, frames, and fixed processes.
