This volume includes a preface from Mark Robbins and Peter Benson Miller’s “Cy Twombly, Photographer.” In his foreword, Robbins focuses on the relationship between painting and photography, drawing on Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents as an antecedent to Twombly’s practice. Arriving at Twombly, Robbins asserts that “[p]ainting, photography, and sculpture were the collective source material Twombly used as needed in the service of making images and things. One could say his paintings are framed like photographs, non-centered and cropped.” He offers historical background on Twombly’s photographic practice and contextualizes his relationship to the American Academy in Rome. 

Benson Miller opens with framing Twombly as “a photographer, rather than simply a painter who also took photographs.” He discusses areas of intersection between the artist’s painterly and photographic processes, but nevertheless maintains the necessity of considering each as distinct. Pursuing this distinction, Benson Miller asserts that “[t]he seductive allure of Twombly's photographs, however, has a lot to do with how he upends photography's traditional relationship to concrete objects and visual information.” He draws on Sally Mann’s photographs of Twombly and her memoir as a means of assessing this “rift” in his practices across media. He offers extended consideration of photographs Twombly took of a Pan sculpture he owned, suggesting that the photographs engage in “a concerted effort to undermine any sort of easy resolution.” Emphasizing the conceptual centrality of the fragment for Twombly, Benson Miller seeks to “underline how Twombly plays with certain conventions of photography and reinterprets them to suit his purpose,” drawing connections to William Henry Fox Talbot. 

For more on Twombly’s photographs, see also From State of Mind to the Tangible: The Photographic Cosmos of Cy Twombly by Carlos Peris (2022); Cy Twombly: Photographs, Volume II, published by Gagosian (2015); Cy Twombly: Photographs 1951–2007, ed. Laszlo Glozer (2008); Twombly: Photographs, published by Brazos Projects (2000); Cy Twombly Photographs: Lyrical Variations, published by the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art (2016); Cy Twombly: Photographs, published by Matthew Marks Gallery (1993); Cy Twombly: A Survey of Photographs 1954–2011, published by Gagosian Gallery (2012); and Cy Twombly: Photographs, 1951–1999, ed. Nicola Del Roscio (2002). 

(Publication description by Jamie Danis)

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Cy Twombly, Photographer at the American Academy in Rome (October 7 – November 22, 2015).

Cy Twombly, Photographer. With essays by Mark Robbins, Peter Benson Miller. Published by NERO, 2015. 96 pages, fully illustrated. English edition.