Professor Geoffrey Batchen
Professor Geoffrey Batchen:
Professor Geoffrey Batchen teaches history at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, specializing 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) and More Wild Ideas (forthcoming in Chinese, 2016).
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 has been published by Prestel.
abstract of lecture:-
Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph
How can a photograph of nothing - of nothing discernable or apparently significant - be said to offer a useful, even a critical, purchase on the world it inhabits? How can a photograph that represents, but does not depict, a given situation be freighted with historical knowledge and import? Confining itself to examples of cameraless photography, from the 1830's to now - this address will ask these questions with a view to determining the role that such might play in commenting on our present situation. My subject will have a global perspective but will also highlight a number of New Zealand made examples (Including one made within the auspices of the Auckland Camera Club). I will argue that photographs of this kind redefine both the nature of photography's realism and its potential as a critical agent.
