Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography

Abstract

Reviewed by: Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography* Patricia Johnston (bio) Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. By Geoffrey Batchen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Pp. xii+273; illustrations, notes/references, index. $35. In 1828, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre wrote to his partner Nicéphore Niépce: “I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature.” Though textbooks today generally credit Daguerre and Niépce with the invention of photography, announced to the public in 1839, they were part of much larger social, cultural, and technological movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that advanced the development of photography. Burning with Desire is Geoffrey Batchen’s historiographic [End Page 702] analysis of the telling of photography’s origin stories. The author announces one of his ambitious goals in the preface: “to rewrite the traditional history of photography’s origins” (p. xiii). Batchen does not attempt this rewrite through new discoveries in the archives, but rather through a reinterpretation of known information. Early on Batchen outlines the stakes. How these origin stories are told is crucial to supporting particular methodological approaches to photography: “recent approaches to photography all hinge on photography’s historical and ontological identity” (p. 17). The first chapter sketches the two dominant approaches to photography in the theoretical literature on photography of the last three decades: a “formalist” approach exemplified by John Szarkowski and Clement Greenberg and a “postmodern” approach Batchen identifies with John Tagg, Allan Sekula, Victor Burgin, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Batchen asserts that the key difference between the older formalist and newer postmodern positions centers around the location of photography’s identity. The argument “reduces down to a single, deceptively simple question: Is photography to be identified with (its own) nature or with the culture that surrounds it” (p. 17). In other words, the formalists tend to see inherent and essential qualities in the photographic medium, while postmodernists tend to believe photography has no singular identity or unified history and that context shapes the meaning of a given photograph. Thus the stage is set for a critical reexamination in which Batchen will “look for the identity of photography in the history of its origins,” which the author implies will result in a new, post-postmodern view of the medium (p. 21). The three central chapters tackle the meaning of invention itself. Is the invention of photography a technological struggle that should be traced to the chemists and physicists who studied light prior to the nineteenth century? Or is the invention a concept, an idea, a desire for photography? Rather than engage in futile questions of who got there first, Batchen prefers to explore the writings of the numerous proto-photographers, the people who experimented or recorded a desire to photograph prior to 1839. Using Foucault’s archaeological method, he locates the origins of photography in concept and metaphor as much as technology, “to uncover,” as Foucault said, “the regularity of a discursive practice” (p. 36). Batchen reviews the ideas of about twenty protophotographers, including both the well known, such as Thomas Wedgwood, Humphry Davy, Samuel F. B. Morse, Hippolyte Bayard, and William Henry Fox Talbot, and the lesser known, such as the Brazilian Hercules Florence, the German Philipp Hoffmeister, and the Spaniard Jose Ramos Zapetti. Batchen argues that this cluster of activity, which intensified in the early decades after the turn of the nineteenth century, reveals a deep cultural need for what was to become photography. But its meaning was not immediately clear, emerging as it did along with the new philosophical and aesthetic views of the modern [End Page 703] era. The shifting definitions of nature and culture, original and copy, are reflected in the difficulties protophotographers had in deciding whether their inventions recorded nature or whether nature recorded herself. Niépce used two terms: physante (nature herself) and autophuse (copy by nature). And Daguerre, Batchen notes, “claimed, quite paradoxically, that the daguerreotype drew nature while allowing her to draw herself” (p. 177). Talbot hedged on the name he chose for his process: “Photogenic Drawing, or, The Process by Which Natural Objects May Be Made to Delineate Themselves.” Thus, Batchen argues, the earliest photographers avoided the binary thinking...