Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination

Publication Details

Hardback
RRP $35.00 AUD
ISBN 978-0-909952-80-8
74 colour illustrations
212 pp
250 x 176 mm
610 gms

Author and/or Editor name/s

Geoffrey Batchen

Author and/or Editor bio/s

Geoffrey Batchen teaches art history at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, specialising in the history of photography. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997), Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (2004), William Henry Fox Talbot (2008), What of Shoes? Van Gogh and Art History (2009), Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (2010), Obraz a diseminace: Za novou historii pro fotografii (Czech, 2016), and More Wild Ideas (Chinese, 2017). He also edited Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (2009) and co-edited Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (2012). In April 2016 his exhibition Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph opened at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand. A book of the same name was published by Prestel.

Year of publication

2019

Publisher

Power Publications and NAMU

Abstract

An engaging and provocative account of photography’s first commercial applications in England and their global implications. This book addresses a persistent gap in the study of photography’s history, moving beyond an appreciation of single breakthrough works to consider the photographic image’s newfound reproducibility and capacity for circulation through newsprint and other media in the nineteenth century. Batchen asks:

“Can we now devise a history for photography built around the logic of movement and transformation, migration and dissemination, rather than that of origin and singularity? Can we at last abandon the familiar safety of a history restricted to the photograph alone, and allow the structure of our narratives to emulate the sometimes illicit flow back and forth across boundaries and identities that has always characterised both the photographic image and modern life and culture? Writing a story worthy of this dynamic – a history for photography rather than a history of photographs – is, I believe, the challenge that historians like me now face. This book is a fledgling attempt to take up that challenge.”