Conservator, Lee Ann Daffner: His engagement with photography is highly personal. And he explores it in a way that is completely unfettered.
I’m Lee Ann Daffner. And I’m the Conservator of Photographs here at MoMA.
Brancusi turns to photography early on because somebody had suggested, “Oh, you should go get a studio to photograph your sculptures.” And he saw the results, and he’s like, “This is not my sculpture.” So he decides that he wants to do it himself. He simply doesn’t want anybody else to interpret his work.
Photography flattens the image. And for an artist working in 3D, this is a wonderful opportunity to look at the shapes, to look at the line, the textures, the way the light is hitting the surface, and not be concerned with the three-dimensional aspects of a work. With Timidity, the light is very soft and really brings you in to look at the silhouette and how smooth those surfaces are.
The other work, Child in the World, we see fingerprints. There’s some surface abrasions. Those are all from handling the negative and leaving marks. When I see these photographs, I’m not surprised, because when you look at his sculptures, you can see evidence of his hand also.
Brancusi was working with a number of different camera formats. His favorite one seems to have been 13 by 18 centimeters—that’s about five by seven inches—but he is enlarging from there. He wanted a photograph that can be displayed, shared, carried around. And that, to me, says that he’s very committed to photography. He’s trying to see, what can the medium do for him in his work?