A critical art-historical essay on the echo between sculpture and photography, developed over five years of preparation and writing from the author's text Photography and Sculpture, or Reciprocity, itself prompted by William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature. From Auguste Rodin to Giuseppe Penone, from Fox Talbot to Robert Mapplethorpe, it shows sculpture and photography joined by an unbroken attention to surface, both supported by modern techniques and each taking on the face of art according to time and place. Tadashi Kanai also argues that it was not the appearance of photography in the nineteenth century but the rise of the eighteenth-century sculpture reproduction industry that fostered modern reproduction culture and, as its mirror image, the belief in the original. Chapter by chapter the book shows that the dichotomy between three-dimensional and two-dimensional, material and image, which still shapes classification by medium today, hides commonalities, affinities and interdependence.