Burning with Desire: Conception of Photography (The MIT Press): The Conception of Photography - Softcover

Geoffrey Batchen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0262522594 ISBN 13: 9780262522595

Publisher: MIT Press, 1999

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262522594
• ISBN 13: 9780262522595
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 286