Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This extensively researched study on the development of photography discusses the medium's nature from two perspectives: the context of its conception in the 18th and 19th centuries from primary sources of the time, and the postmodern conception of the photographic image as a philosophical and cultural entity. Beginning from the point of the desire or intention to make lens-chemically generated pictures of the world based on the camera obscura, Batchen (Univ. of New Mexico) walks us through the politics of photography's "invention," then explores its cultural uses in the realms of art and industry. Along the way, we come to understand the metaphysics of the medium as expressed in the development of its language and terminology. Batchen concludes his argument with an exploration of digital imaging, which he claims is truer to the fictive nature of images than the true transcription from nature claimed by the medium's inventors. The minimally illustrated text reads sometimes like a postmodern lexicon and sometimes with the pace of a detective novel. The book is appropriate for undergraduates and graduates familiar with the history of photography, and is of general interest to students of the critique of cultural phenomena. J. Bloom formerly, San Francisco State University