Burning with Desire
Wood s lot pointed at a review of Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography by Geoffrey Batchen a week or so ago. Of course, I had to get it. It’s very good, and at the same time, very bad.
I like where its coming from, but I have big difficulties with parts of the approach. It’s distinctly similar to what has been running through my head. Batchen attempts to position photography, or as he would prefer “photographies,” in a larger cultural context. It’s neatly digested, well organized, but far too shallow in many respects. I’d really like to read the thesis that it originates from, because Batchen picks up on some parts of the eighteenth century context that are crucial, but he doesn’t follow through as well as I think he could— and he relies on secondhand information in places where it would have been relatively easy to go to the primary source, perpetuating errors that are quite embarrassing. I suspect it’s the condensed nature of the book that makes them stand out. When you’re painting with broad strokes, you have to make them count. Invoking Derrida and Foucault isn’t good enough to guarantee credibility in approaching a historical subject, at least for me.
Above all, Burning with Desire sets out to show that history inhabits the present in very real ways; that the practice of history is always an exercise of power; that history matters (in all senses of this word). (xiii)
Chapter one opposes the high formalist criticism of John Szarkowski with that of the postmodernists like Alan Sekula and John Tagg. Batchen casts it in terms similar to that of gender theory— Szarkowski’s position is characterized as “essentialist” and the postmodern position is marked by its refusal to accept any core identity for photography as practice. There is no “static identity or singular cultural status” for photography (5). Photography is a “vehicle of larger outside forces” and “photographic identity” is fundamentally contingent on these cultural forces (9). The formalist aesthetic of Szarkowski and Bazin is traced to the influence of Clement Greenberg, and the histories of photography offered to this point are taken to rely on an originary hypothesis that positions photography within the broader context of art history. The essential nature of photography is derived from the drive for representation.
I think Batchen is perfectly right to mark that both these approaches share more similarities than either side would admit— both sides present creative histories to support the notion that photography is motivated by something— the logic of capitol, or the logic of formalist art. Recast this way, it is an argument of culture vs. nature. Batchen asserts that both approaches avoid the “historical and ontological complexity of the very thing they claim to analyze” (21). Batchen’s approach is to analyze the analysis of photography’s history— sounds good.
Chapter two takes a turn that I’m not so sure about. Batchen wishes to take the inquiry into the origins of photography back to the dream. I was constantly haunted by Milton’s assertion that thinking of a sin does not constitute a sin— it only becomes a sin once it is performed. Though I’m a big fan of desire, I’m not so sure that it has as much relevance to the questions at hand. Batchen’s work is clearly a rhetoric of motives, and those motives are neatly slanted to suit his thesis.
Chapter two discusses twenty-four or more possible inventors or dreamers about photography, traces the discourse as if it were a sort of paternity suit. It goes into great detail regarding Davy’s experiments, the relationship of Tom Wedgwood, Humphrey Davy, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It also discusses the possibility of early experiments by Samuel Morse. The originary schemes and debates are contextualized, very narrowly, in the chapter that follows. I’ll write at greater length about that later.
