Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center is presenting Solid Pictures: Photosculpture and the Making of Modern Likeness, the first major exhibition devoted to a largely forgotten 19th-century technology that promised to revolutionise sculpture. The show runs from 17 September 2026 to 18 January 2027.

The exhibition centres on François Willème, a French artist and inventor who introduced photosculpture in Paris in the early 1860s. His process placed a sitter on a platform inside a 10-metre-wide glass-domed rotunda, where 24 cameras hidden in the walls fired simultaneously. Assistants projected the negatives onto frosted glass, traced the silhouettes and used a pantograph to cut each profile into a clay block on a turntable, promising a finished portrait sculpture within 48 hours at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.

Curator Patrick R. Crowley has assembled 26 surviving photosculptures, including 12 from the Cantor's own collection, alongside patents, prints, lantern slides and glass negatives. Among them is Willème's own self-portrait from around 1863, a mechanically produced wooden bust assembled from about 100 wedge-shaped sections, and a bisque porcelain portrait of Matilde de Aguilera y Gamboa from around 1865, made after the inventor was summoned to Madrid by Queen Isabella II.

Despite its promise, the venture failed commercially. Willème's firm went through two reorganisations before shareholders ousted him in May 1867. The exhibition argues that his invention nevertheless anticipated the scanning, machining and printing technologies of today, and pairs the historical material with contemporary artists including Oliver Laric, Aria Dean and Charles Ray. Laric's Self-Portrait from 2026 presents a 3D-printed Willème in aluminium in diminishing sizes, echoing what the original pantograph could do.