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Burning with desire : the conception of photography /

By:

Batchen, Geoffrey [author.]

0262522594
9780262522595

Subject(s):

Contents:

Identity. Photographies -- Photography itself -- Origin stories -- Conception. The greatest mystery -- Quite a list -- The proto-photographers -- Desire. Images of nature -- Views of landscape -- Images formed by means of a camera obscura -- Spontaneous reproduction -- Transmutations -- Pictures. Draftsman drawing a nude -- The Corinthian maid -- Paysage (view from a window) -- Still life -- Electromagnets -- Le noyé -- Method. Photography and differance -- Continuity/discontinuity -- Postmodernism and photography -- Real unreality -- Representation/ real -- Rethinking photography.

Review: "In an 1828 letter to his partner Nicéphore Niépce, 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. In this refiguring of the traditional story of photography's origins, Batchen 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."--Jacket.

Holdings ( 1 )
Title notes ( 3 )

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Book	Whitecliffe Library General Shelves	General	TR 15 BAT (Browse shelf(Opens below))	1	Available		0007241

Includes bibliographical references (pages 218-266) and index.

"In an 1828 letter to his partner Nicéphore Niépce, 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. In this refiguring of the traditional story of photography's origins, Batchen 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."--Jacket.