François Willème

François Willème (27 May 1830 – 31 January 1905) was a French painter, sculptor and photographer who in 1859 invented the 'photosculpture', also known as 'sculpture by light', a means of generating 3D forms in a variety of media, clay, marble or electroplated bronze, from photographs taken by a battery of cameras.

Willème was born in Sedan where he undertook his primary and secondary education. His parents were Marie-Joséphone (née Foy) and Denis Willème who moved their family to Paris, where François studied sculpture and painting at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, with history painter Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux and married Celine Lacaille. He was using photography as an aid in his practice of sculpture and was making clay moulds for bronzes.

In 1859 Willème conceived the idea of photographing the subject 'in the round' with multiple cameras in order to accurately record the form of his human subjects, in effect, "a cybernetic production of likeness" (Auger). As Antoine Claudet, introducing the invention in England, expressed it in The Photographic Journal of 15 October 1864:

however extraordinary such a prognostication might appear, however difficult at first thought it may be to understand the possible connection between flat representation of objects and their solid form, it has been proved that from flat photographs a bust, a statue, or other object of three dimensions can be made by a mechanical process without the necessity of the sculptor's copying the original, or even seeing it at all. Yet the result is a perfect facsimile of the original! Moreover the work is executed in one-tenth of the time required for modelling by hand. This beautiful application of photography is called Photosculpture, and is the invention of Mr. Willème, an eminent French sculptor.

Willème developed and patented (in France on 14 August 1860 and in the United States on 9 August 1864) this process for producing portrait photosculptures. One of the first tests he made was François Willème standing, and is probably the one which he exhibited at the announcement of the invention in 1863, a plaster copy of which is in the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, from the collection of Cromer who had worked with Willème. He in turn had Lanson make a copy for the French Photographic Society, a work preserved since 1926 in the Musée des Arts et Métiers de Paris.

With the support of investors, most prominently Edgar Aimé, the bankers Émile and Isaac Pereire, Soubeyran and Paul Dalloz, he formed the Société Générale de Photosculpture and opened a commercial premises in 1862 in a studio at the address of the Society, 42 Avenue de Wagram (then called Boulevard or Avenue de l'Étoile) near the Arc de Triomphe. The system employed a circular photographic "salon" approximately 10 metres in diameter, with a glass dome and platform beneath for the sitter who posed with their head under a silver orb suspended to mark the exact centre of the rotunda.

Around the perimeter, twenty-four cameras—concealed behind carved busts, themselves produced by the process—exposed photographic plates simultaneously, with a brief 5-10 second exposure, from all angles via cord-linked shutters. The subject could then step down, as their role was complete.

In the workshop, the negatives were enlarged using projections onto a translucent screen. From this an operator traced the contour of each silhouette with one arm of a pantograph, while the arm at the other end was equipped with a knife which carved the corresponding profile into a rotating block of porcelain clay. The pantograph could produce versions of reduced scale. Repeating the operation for each view produced a solid form composed of the "sum of profiles", which a sculptor then refined before the work was bisque-fired or cast in plaster, bronze, or other material.