Burning With Desire the Conception of Photography
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BURNING WITH DESIRE: THE CONCEPTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY / Geoffrey Batchen--Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, September 1997.--273 p.: ill.--ISBN 0-26202427-6 (cl., alk. paper); LC 97-4022: $35.00. The conception of photography in its most philosophical sense is extraordinarily abstruse, as anyone who ever ventured into Susan Sontag’s On Photography (New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977) will remember. And for those readers who never "quite got through" that important text or who have since agonized over not knowing quite what thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and, more recently, John Tagg, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Allan Sekula are talking about, relief is at hand. Geoffrey Batchen, Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico, has actually read and absorbed all of the work of these thinkers, post-modernists and their predecessors, and presents us with an accessible text on the origins of photography and its ineluctably evolving future. (The title, incidentally, is derived from a letter written by Louis Daguerre in 1828 to his partner Nicéphore Niépce, in which he says, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature," i.e., photographs). Beautifully designed and printed, the book is really both the presentation of Batchen’s rereading of the history of the medium and an analysis of current thinking about photography’s relationship--past, present and down the road-- to human behavior. There are few illustrations, but those included serve the author’s discussion on "first photographs" very well. In his initial chapter, Batchen clearly and concisely articulates the two, broad opposing philosophical points of view concerning photography’s identity: Postmodernists (Tagg, Sekula, Victor Burgin, et. al.) argue that photography essentially has no identity of its own because any meaning derived from whatever is photographed is entirely dependent upon the spatial and temporal context within which it is seen, i.e., culture. Photography, in other words, is a means to an end, a vehicle, but in itself is meaningless. This view, of course, clashes with that of the formalist thinkers and critics, John Szarkowski being the preeminent spokesperson for that school, that sees and values photography’s inherent aesthetic veracity, i.e., nature. But Batchen, closely examining the writing of twenty "proto-photographers" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, discovers a wide array of differing opinions and "desires" among these early hopefuls and practioneers. In the preface, he states, "Where photography’s contemporary commentators want to identify it with either nature or culture, the medium’s earliest proponents offer a far more equivocal articulation that incorporates but declines to rest at either pole." Finally, Batchen tackles the issues facing photography in the "digital age." Is photography, as we have known it, on the verge of dropping dead? He speculates with wonderfully provocative comments such as the following:
The main difference is that, whereas photography still claims some sort of objectivity, digital imaging remains an overtly fictional process. As a practice known to be nothing but fabrication, digitization abandons even the rhetoric of truth that has been such an important part of photography’s cultural success. As the name suggests, digital processes actually return the production of photographic images to the whim of the creative hand (to the digits). For that reason, digital images are actually closer in spirit to art and fiction than they are to documentation and fact. Batchen provides an accurate index and sizeable set of readable end notes. In fact, to understand some of his arguments, one has to flip from the text to the notes and back to the text, but that becomes easy with practice. Relative to the notes, incidentally, the names Derrida and Foucault come up more often than not. If I have one criticism of the book, it might be that Batchen is still a little too reliant on the thinking of others. Perhaps he needed to take some more time, following his encyclopedic reading of all of these thinkers, to allow more of his own fine thinking to emerge. It is almost as if the author never comes up for air, and we, as readers pulled under by him, have to struggle to the surface for an occasional gasp. Overall, however, this is an extraordinary text that will quickly become the heavily sought-after photographic theory book of the year. Timothy Troy University of Arizona
The main difference is that, whereas photography still claims some sort of objectivity, digital imaging remains an overtly fictional process. As a practice known to be nothing but fabrication, digitization abandons even the rhetoric of truth that has been such an important part of photography’s cultural success. As the name suggests, digital processes actually return the production of photographic images to the whim of the creative hand (to the digits). For that reason, digital images are actually closer in spirit to art and fiction than they are to documentation and fact. Batchen provides an accurate index and sizeable set of readable end notes. In fact, to understand some of his arguments, one has to flip from the text to the notes and back to the text, but that becomes easy with practice. Relative to the notes, incidentally, the names Derrida and Foucault come up more often than not. If I have one criticism of the book, it might be that Batchen is still a little too reliant on the thinking of others. Perhaps he needed to take some more time, following his encyclopedic reading of all of these thinkers, to allow more of his own fine thinking to emerge. It is almost as if the author never comes up for air, and we, as readers pulled under by him, have to struggle to the surface for an occasional gasp. Overall, however, this is an extraordinary text that will quickly become the heavily sought-after photographic theory book of the year. Timothy Troy University of Arizona
