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The Great Buddha statue of Bamyan in Afghanistan was 53 meters high and therefore was considered to be the largest ancient depiction of a standing person. On the basis of the sculpture’s structure, stylistics and historical information, the date of the Great Buddha was estimated to be between the 3rd and 7th century AD. Unfortunately, in spite of its enormous historical value, it was totally destroyed at the beginning of 2001. However, because of its great artistic value, in the past some approaches to its reconstruction have been made, but they were repeatedly interrupted by military actions. Fortunately, now it seems that preparations for reconstruction of this sculpture will begin soon. Thelack of sufficient data on the shape of the statue was another problem. From literature review it appears that no accurate documentation survived. Because of that any information on the appearance and structure of the statue dating from before the destruction is very valuable and could play an important role in the statue’s physical reconstruction. The topic of this article is a presentation of the Great Buddha statue’s 3D model reconstruction based on archival copies of metric photographs, which were taken by the stereometric camera Wild C120 during the Student Asiatic Expedition organized by the Faculty of Geodesy and Cartography of the Warsaw University of Technology in 1974. The 3D model of the sculpture was made with the use of the PhotoModeler Pro 4.0 software, which was designed for making 3D models of close-range objects based on monocular observations. On the basis of this project an opinion on possibilities of the use of the mentioned software in this type of tasks has been formulated. Radiometric and geometric quality of the photographic documentation, as well as its usefulness for reconstruction of the Great Buddha statue, have also been verified.
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