Burning with Desire

The Conception of Photography

Geoffrey Batchen (Victoria University)

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English

MIT Press
15 March 1999

History of Art & Design Styles; Photography & photographs

Series: Burning with Desire

In an 1828 letter to his partner, Nicephore Niepce, Louis Daguerre wrote, ""I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature."" In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed discussion of photography's conception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He examines the output of the various nominees for ""first photographer,"" then incorporates this information into a mode of historical criticism informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The result is a way of thinking about photography that persuasively accords with the medium's undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity.

By: Geoffrey Batchen (Victoria University)
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 191mm, Spine: 16mm
Weight: 590g
ISBN: 9780262522595
ISBN 10: 0262522594
Series: Burning with Desire
Pages: 286
Publication Date: 15 March 1999
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational , A / AS level , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of the History of Photography and Contemporary Art at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of Burning with Desire- The Conceptions of Photography (1999) and Each Wild Idea- Writing, Photography, History (2002), both published by the MIT Press.

Reviews for Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography

Given its ambitious and groundbreaking scope, Burning with Desire is bound to become the touchstone for any further consideration of the topic of photography's invention. --Douglas R. Nickel, Assistant Curator of Photography, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art