Sara VanDerBeek

VanDerBeek did not begin from an exclusively photographic training. She grew up in an environment where dance, visual art, and experimental film coexisted. Her father, Stan VanDerBeek, worked across experimental and expanded cinema, and after his death her mother, Louise, encouraged creative activities including dance and art. In a 2023 conversation, Sara recalled a family that respected art both as a profession and as a means of engaging society, and described her mother's encouragement to study at Cooper Union.^*22

No source establishes Stan VanDerBeek's work as the direct cause of Sara's temporary sculptural photographs. What she specifically describes inheriting is his refusal to confine images to a single fixed medium and his treatment of them as a “universal language” that could move through film, projection, and architectural environments.^*22 Sara similarly refuses to treat photography only as a final flat image: she builds objects, photographs them, prints the image, and later returns it to three-dimensional display. Her family background is therefore more accurately understood as an earlier model for thinking of images as mobile across media than as the source of a particular style.

In 2019 she co-organized VanDerBeek + VanDerBeek, placing her own work alongside Stan VanDerBeek's and treating the archive as material to be repositioned for present viewing instead of preserving it as a closed historical record.^*24

Since the mid-2000s, VanDerBeek has consistently examined the relation between photography and sculpture. The Whitney traces this concern from early structures in which printed images and small objects were suspended by strings to later work involving classical sculpture and architectural elements, emphasizing the way objects and their surroundings activate memory.^*2

MoMA's 2009 New Photography exhibition presented VanDerBeek alongside Walead Beshty, Daniel Gordon, Leslie Hewitt, and others whose photographs began with collecting, assembling, and manipulating materials. MoMA framed the exhibition around studio- and darkroom-based practices that expanded conventional definitions of photography.^*4

VanDerBeek's significance in that moment lies less in digitization itself than in her integration of the process of “making something before taking the photograph” with the time after exposure, when that object no longer exists.^*3

Why Photography?

VanDerBeek has said that photography and sculpture both fix things and time in different ways, while she wants to loosen that fixity.^*22 Photography allows her to transform three-dimensional relations into a single plane through camera position, light, and framing. The point is not to preserve the sculpture's physical size or weight, but to create scales and overlaps that did not exist in the object itself.

The photograph is therefore not a substitute for a sculpture that has been lost. When the structure is photographed, reproduced images, actual wood, shadows, and thread are compressed onto the same plane, making it difficult to distinguish at a glance between an object and a photograph of an object. In Aperture, VanDerBeek identifies “scale, time, and place” as central concerns because photography can reorganize the scale and temporality of an experience instead of merely preserving it.^*5

Temporary Sculptures Made for the Camera

In her early work, images gathered from art-history books, archives, magazines, and newspapers were combined with wood, thread, Plexiglas, and small objects in temporary constructions. The Whitney explicitly notes that the structures were dismantled soon after exposure and that the photograph became the “only remaining evidence.”^*1

This procedure prevents the photograph from functioning as a reproduction of a completed sculpture. The sculpture is an intermediate state made for the camera; the work reaches its final form only when light, shadow, perspective, and overlap are translated onto a flat image.^*10

Flattening Through the Camera

MoMA curator Eva Respini explains that photographing the three-dimensional construction flattens its spatial relations. Images incorporated into the structure begin to read like collage, while shadows become some of the few remaining clues to depth.^*3

Within this visual matching game, historical images by figures such as Tina Modotti, Giacometti, or Walker Evans no longer operate simply as illustrations of their original sources. They become elements on the same plane as other objects and shadows. The work refers to photographic history while asking how that history is repositioned within a contemporary image environment.^*7

Detroit, New Orleans, and Baltimore

A Composition for Detroit overlays images of America from different periods, including Walker Evans, Charles Moore, and photographs of factories, within one constructed arrangement. Frieze discussed the work as a composition in which economic recession, the civil-rights era, and the present of an industrial city interfere with one another inside a single image.^*7

In To Think of Time, VanDerBeek left the studio to photograph building foundations in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans and family photographs and architectural fragments in her hometown of Baltimore. The Whitney framed the exhibition as a meditation on time as both a personal and collective condition.^*1

As The New Yorker noted, photographs of the 1969 lunar eclipse and post-disaster foundations double past and present, memory and material, within a single image.^*9

The Feedback Loop Between Photography and Sculpture

VanDerBeek has described a “feedback loop” in which photographs produce sculptures and sculptures generate subsequent photographs. In an interview with Musée Magazine, she explains that a print itself moves between image and object and that two-dimensional and three-dimensional presentation continually alter one another.^*11

For that reason, the shift from early works in which structures were always dismantled after exposure to later exhibitions at the Hammer Museum where sculptures appeared alongside photographs does not constitute a break in method. The photograph becomes an input for the next object and exhibition space instead of serving as a final endpoint.^*6

The 2016 Metro Pictures exhibition Pieced Quilts, Wrapped Forms made the integration of photographs and sculpture within one exhibition space even more explicit. Metro Pictures' exhibition record and the artist's own archive trace a development from temporary constructions that disappeared after exposure toward installations in which prints, sculptures, and architectural placement form one environment.^{*17 *23}

A Composition for Detroit

A Composition for Detroit was a four-part work shown in MoMA's New Photography 2009. It constructed an image of industrial Detroit from press photographs, Walker Evans, and VanDerBeek's own photographs of abandoned factories. MoMA presented it as a work that relocates the cultural memory carried by existing images into a studio construction.^*3

Detroit and New Orleans do not appear as direct documentary views of cities. Photographs and printed matter made at different moments are physically layered and then photographed again, compressing past images into a single present photograph. History is organized through placement—what comes forward and what is obscured—without relying on a continuous chronology.^*20

To Think of Time

VanDerBeek's first solo museum exhibition at the Whitney included Blue Caryatid at Dusk, Foundation, Reynes Street, Treme, Baltimore Departure, and other works. The exhibition page places temporary sculpture and fragments photographed in cities within the same inquiry into time.^*1

Baltimore Departure shows light and shadow entering through a window and falling across an interior wall. The MFAH collection entry places it within a body of work that blurs boundaries among time, space, and light.^*16

In the Foundation works, building foundations can resemble sculpture, bringing traces of urban destruction and abstract form into the same frame. Memory emerges through the structures that remain, with no continuous narrative supplied for them.^*13

Ancient Sculpture and Exhibition Structures

During the 2010s VanDerBeek extended her attention to ancient sculpture and archaeological objects in museums, combining photographed fragments with custom frames and concrete sculpture. In an Aperture interview, she identifies the way photography alters readings of scale, time, and place as a central concern.^*5

A Studio International review of Electric Prisms, Concrete Forms records the stage at which fragments of ancient sculpture, architectural forms, and planes of color moved between photography and three-dimensional work. Even as the early procedure of “photograph and dismantle” developed into the return of photographed images to the exhibition space as objects, the movement between scale and flatness/volume remained consistent.^*12

Art Practical reviewed Ancient Objects, Still Lives as an exhibition in which ancient and modern forms echo across photography and sculpture, stretching and compressing the temporality of still life.^*8

In the Whitney's Montauk, the work foregrounds fragments of light and objects losing stable scale within the photographic plane; the seaside location itself remains secondary.^*14 The museum's Labyrinth similarly overlaps sculptural form and photographic flatness, continuing VanDerBeek's attention to the intermediate state in which objects become images.^*15 In Lace Interlace (2023–24), images of textiles and clothing found through research into nineteenth-century photographic albums are layered with lace-like perforated steel frames.^*21 Early works dismantled temporary sculptures and left photographs behind; recent works design the frame and exhibition structure supporting the image as parts of the final object.

MoMA’s New Photography 2009

MoMA's New Photography series, begun in 1985, had long introduced emerging photographers. In 2009, for the first time, six artists were brought together under a shared theme, and the exhibition was explicitly framed as an examination and expansion of conventional definitions of photography. It was installed in galleries dedicated to the museum's Department of Photography. At a moment when digitization was changing the boundaries between capture and print, the department itself treated collecting, assembling, manipulating, and connecting photography with sculpture as forms of photographic production.^*4

The change cannot be reduced to the phrase “photography entered contemporary art.” Photography was already collected by museums. What changed in the 2000s was that the spread of digital images made the definition of photography as a single print made by a camera increasingly inadequate to actual artistic production. MoMA placed VanDerBeek, Beshty, Gordon, Hewitt, and others within one photography exhibition because each used the studio, darkroom, preexisting images, and three-dimensional objects differently, making the processes before and after exposure part of the work.^*4

Comparing Beshty, Gordon, and Hewitt

Walead Beshty folded photosensitive paper and exposed it to light without a camera to produce color photograms, while treating shipping crates and the physical movement of the work as sources of material traces. MoMA presents this as a method in which photography becomes an event occurring to photosensitive material, with no external subject required.^*25 VanDerBeek likewise addresses photographic materiality, but her emphasis falls on three-dimensional constructions made to become photographs and then disappear, along with the memories attached to their constituent images; the photosensitive paper itself is not the primary subject.

Daniel Gordon prints images gathered from the internet, cuts them into paper figures and still lifes, photographs those constructions, then dismantles and reuses them.^*26 His work is close to VanDerBeek's in building objects for the camera, but Gordon foregrounds the visibly artificial, cut-and-pasted bodies and still lifes. VanDerBeek integrates art-historical reproductions, shadows, and architectural fragments into quieter structures in which the temporal distance carried by the source images becomes a central issue.

Leslie Hewitt temporarily arranges family snapshots, magazines from the 1960s and 1970s, records, and books into still lifes that place personal memory beside cultural histories such as the civil-rights movement.^*27 VanDerBeek also works with family material, but crosses it with industrial Detroit, building foundations in New Orleans, ancient sculpture, and art-historical reproductions. By dismantling the structure after exposure, she makes the question of what remains a condition of the photograph itself.

These comparisons show that constructed photography around 2009 did not correspond to one look. Beshty centered the reaction of photosensitive material; Gordon, paper sculpture made from internet images; Hewitt, still lifes joining family and political histories; VanDerBeek, the disappearance of temporary sculpture. MoMA's decision to place these works within one photography exhibition is itself evidence of an institutional change: the medium could no longer be adequately defined only by the moment of releasing the shutter.^*4

Guggenheim’s Photo-Poetics

The accumulation of works and exhibition records on MoMA's artist page also shows that New Photography 2009 was not an isolated introduction; the subsequent relation between photography and sculpture became an ongoing subject of museum collection and research.^*19

Guggenheim's 2015 exhibition Photo-Poetics: An Anthology placed VanDerBeek alongside Moyra Davey, Anne Collier, Leslie Hewitt, Erin Shirreff, and others, approaching a younger generation of studio-centered still-life photography through the legacy of Conceptual art. Books, magazines, records, and preexisting images recur throughout the exhibition, and the museum describes them as forms of “displaced self-portraiture” in which personal significance overlaps broader cultural history.^*18

Within that context, VanDerBeek's work differs from an archive intended simply to preserve memory. She cuts, supports, and rephotographs family photographs, art-historical images, urban remains, and ancient sculpture, disrupting their original scale and sequence to create new relations in the present exhibition. Photography becomes a device for temporarily placing images from different historical moments into the same present, not a storage vault that fixes the past.^*18

Since the 1970s, Barbara Kasten has built mirror, light, and architectural structures for the camera, moving continually between sculpture and photography. ICA Philadelphia traces her incorporation of sculpture, painting, theater, and installation into photographic work.^*28 In 2015, the museum brought Kasten together with VanDerBeek, David Hartt, and Takeshi Murata in Kasten in Context: New Peers to discuss shared processes and precedents.^*29 Kasten converts light and geometric structures into abstract photographs; VanDerBeek incorporates art-historical reproductions, family photographs, newspapers, and urban remains—images already carrying specific histories—into temporary constructions. She inherits the earlier method of building a three-dimensional set for photography while placing the selection of which images survive and how different periods occupy one photograph at the center of the work.