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| Geoffrey
Batchen Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography MIT Press 1997 Jorge Lopez |
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 Hippolyte Bayward, Le Noyé
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Studies based on
the notion of a clear historical period always rest on
dubious grounds. Attempts at locating beginnings usually
result in foundational stories that have more to do with
our own time's ruminations than with the ideas of those
who contributed to mark a fresh turn in history. It seems
plausible, however, to locate the beginnings of what
could well be the single most influential force to have
shaped contemporary everyday life aesthetics. I am
referring to photography, an artifice whose beginnings
coincide with those of modernity. Such has been the
expansion of photographic technology over the past two
hundred years that today we could be excused for failing
to see it: it's all around us. Geoffrey Batchen¹s Burning With Desire: The Conception of Photography surveys the four decades prior to the medium's official birth in 1839. Batchen identifies a "desire to photograph", which begins to take hold of some curious minds around the 1790s. The ensuing three decades were a period of extensive experimentation, which culminated with photography's official unveiling before the Parisian elites. Batchen documents this period carefully, down to the anecdotal detail, making Burning with Desire an interesting as well as enjoyable read. Batchen's research shows that the writing of light on chemically sensitive surfaces did not begin as a mere French curiosity. Due credit is given to at least twenty 'proto-photographers' in seven countries for setting up the discursive framework that today allows us to conceive of photography. Both the timing and the ubiquity of these experiments suggest that photography was part of a larger historical unfolding. Batchen presents the early desire to photograph in the light of Foucault¹s historical understanding of the epistemological rupture that marked the transition from the Classical age to modernity. Although Foucauldian studies of the photographic image have already been rehearsed by the likes of John Tag and more recently Jonathan Crary, Batchen remains concerned about the methodological impasse that such critiques have inadvertently posed: the project of emptying photography, as a medium, from any formal quality of its own, has ended up invalidating the very notion of photography. Indeed, the prevailing view in Anglo-american postmodern criticism defines photography as nothing but an instrument of power. Such an instrumental view rests on the idealist premise that operations of power somehow precede photography. Batchen combines Foucault and Derrida to argue that photography, like writing, is more than an inconsequential medium. Photography is, by definition, the writing of light. It is a paradox, a "message without a code" in which both nature and culture are directly implicated in a mutual play of power dynamics. Batchen advances the notion of "photopower" to reinvest photography with the value it lost to positivist aesthetics. As photography now begins to recede, clearing the way for the digitisation of communication technologies, Batchen revisits those early days when the new medium was still accepted as an unresolved phenomenon. Burning With Desire shows that the initial questions posed by the discovery of photography are yet to be resolved. Or are they? The writing of light keeps playing hide and seek with reason. This is where one may begin to appreciate the real breadth of Batchen's project: In showing that photography is more than an inert instrument of power, his study may be put to work as a model for a metacritique of postmodern strategies; as a warning against the consequences of assuming necessary and sufficient answers. Jorge Lopez © |
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William
Henry Fox Talbot, Botanical |
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Louis
Daguerre, Still Life, |
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 Jurraien Andriessen, Artist
with |
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