François Willème, Portrait of Matilde de Aguilera y Gamboa c. 1865. White bisque porcelain, 16-7/8 x 11-1/4 x 14-3/4 in. Robert and Pauline Sears Fund, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, 2021.94. Courtesy Cantor Arts Center

It’s hard to keep track of everything that was embarrassing about the Obama years, even if you never dated a girl who was really into Tumblr. There was so much breathless optimism about everything, even around relatively mundane technology like 3D printing. Some people thought that it could forever change sculpture, or perhaps even disrupt standard means of manufacturing. So far its most innovative user has been Luigi Mangione.

“Solid Pictures: Photosculpture and the Making of Modern Likeness,” a new exhibition at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center, shows that the technology may never have been that revolutionary in concept. The show marks the first major exhibition devoted to the process of François Willème (1830-1905), who unveiled it to Paris in 1861. For his photosculptures, the subject stood on a platform beneath a glass-domed rotunda 10 meters across while 24 cameras hidden in the walls fired at once, cued by a whistle. Assistants projected the negatives onto frosted glass, traced the silhouettes and ran each profile through a pantograph that cut into a block of clay on a turntable. Ten seconds of posing yielded a bust in 48 hours—in plaster, bisque porcelain, terracotta or bronze. The firm that produced this invention went through two corporate reorganizations, and Willème was pushed out by his own shareholders in May 1867. Curator Patrick R. Crowley has gathered 26 surviving photosculptures (12 belong to the Cantor) alongside patents, prints, glass negatives and a handful of works by Oliver Laric, Aria Dean, Charles Ray and others to argue that this failure is the grandfather of the CT scan, the 3D printer and those contemporary artists. For Silicon Valley, it’s a cautionary tale about an overleveraged startup.

As if he can see this future, Self-Portrait (c. 1863) has Willème leaning back with his arms folded tight. The object on view is a copy of a copy, cast in 1924 by a former Willème employee trying to rescue the inventor’s name after Willème had retreated to his hometown of Sedan to run an ordinary photography studio. His work coat hangs wide and hollow like his own influence. Laric offers Self-Portrait (2026): a 3D-printed Willème three times in aluminum, in diminishing sizes, which was also something the pantograph could do.

Mechanically produced bust (c. 1860) is a somewhat horrifying proof of concept that reminds me of the work of Medardo Rosso (1858-1928). This representation of a woman’s head is assembled from 100 wedge-shaped sections of wood bound together with twine. Léon Foucault, of the pendulum, said it demonstrated the problems with the technology that would later cause the company to collapse, but removed from context, it’s a fascinating artifact, demonstrating how easy it is for the mind to conjure a face almost out of everything, and then give it emotions—in this case sad ones.

Photosculpture of Matilde de Aguilera y Gamboa (c. 1865) in bisque porcelain shows what the technology could do for someone with a bit more elegance. The sitter was a Spanish aristocrat, sister of the Marqués de Cerralbo. Isabella II summoned Willème to Madrid to make dozens of photosculptures of the royal family, which drew the notice of local aristocrats and earned him a knighthood in the Order of Charles III. Silicon Valley could learn much from this, too, because despite all the technical claims the most memorable parts of the work—the folded taffeta, the crumpled gloves, the complicated hair—were all carved by hand.

More in Exhibitions

• What Can the ’90s Tell Us About Today? Tate Britain Isn’t Sure

• In “Casserole Culture,” Melissa Joseph Redraws the Geography of Home

• At David Zwirner New York, Scott Kahn’s Landscapes Open Windows Onto Other Worlds

• At the Getty, the Beauty of Medieval Manuscripts Is in the Materials

• One Fine Show: “Mary Cassatt, After Impressionism” at the Art Institute of Chicago