Burning with desire : the conception of photography / Geoffrey Batchen.

Main entry:

Batchen, Geoffrey, author.

Title & Author:

Burning with desire : the conception of photography / Geoffrey Batchen.

Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : The MIT Press, [1997]
©1997

Description:

xii, 273 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identity -- Conception -- Desire -- Pictures -- Method.
Current Copyright Fee: GBP15.00 0.
Dust jacket.

Summary:

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.
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.

ISBN:

0262024276 (hardcover ; alk. paper)
9780262024273 (hardcover ; alk. paper)

Subject:

Photography History.
Photographic criticism.
Photographie Histoire.
Critique photographique.
Fotografía Historia
Photography
Fotografie.
Ontstaansgeschiedenis.

Form/genre:

History

Added entries:

Kometani, Ori, book designer.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 192288
Call No.: ID TR15.B37; ID:97-B3382
Status: Available

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