Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History

e “Unruly, energetic, unmastered. Also erudite, engaged and rigorous. Batchen’s essays have arrived at exactly the e a c h w i l d i d e a right moment, when we need their skepticism and imagination to clarify the blurry visual thinking of our con- a writing photography history temporary cultures.” geoffrey batchen c —Ross Gibson, Creative Director, Australian Centre for the Moving Image h In Each Wild Idea, Geoffrey Batchen explores widely ranging “In this remarkable book, Geoffrey Batchen picks up some of the threads of modernity entangled and ruptured aspects of photography, from the timing of photography’s by the impact of digitization and weaves a compelling new tapestry. Blending conceptual originality, critical invention to the various implications of cyberculture. Along w insight and historical rigor, these essays demand the attention of all those concerned with photography in par- the way, he reflects on contemporary art photography, the role ticular and visual culture in general.” i of the vernacular in photography’s history, and the —Nicholas Mirzoeff, Art History and Comparative Studies, SUNY Stony Brook l Australianness of Australian photography. “Geoffrey Batchen is one of the few photography critics equally adept at historical investigation and philosophi- d The essays all focus on a consideration of specific pho- cal analysis. His wide-ranging essays are always insightful and rewarding.” tographs—from a humble combination of baby photos and —Mary Warner Marien, Department of Fine Arts, Syracuse University i bronzed booties to a masterwork by Alfred Stieglitz. Although d Batchen views each photograph within the context of broader “This book includes the most important essays by Geoffrey Batchen and therefore is a must-have for every schol- social and political forces, he also engages its own distinctive ar in the fields of photographic history and theory. Batchen takes each element of history as equal ground for e formal attributes. In short, he sees photography as something coding and decoding and approaches each part of a given subject as just as important as all the others. He works that is simultaneously material and cultural. In an effort to a from a wealth of material deriving not only from photographic, art, and literary history but also from industrial evoke the lived experience of history, he frequently relies on archeology, information science, biology, and other sciences.” sheer description as the mode of analysis, insisting that we —Rolf Sachsse, Professor of Photography and Electronic Imagery, Department of Design, Niederrhein University look right at—rather than beyond—the photograph being dis- of Applied Arts at Krefeld, Germany cussed. A constant theme throughout the book is the question of photography’s past, present, and future identity. also available by geoffrey batchen e a c h burning with desire Geoffrey Batchen is Associate Professor, Department of Art the conception of photography and Art History, the University of New Mexico. In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and sci- batchen entific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. In refiguring the traditional story of photog- w i l d raphy’s origins, Batchen examines the output of the various nominees for “first photographer,” then incorporates this information into a mode of historical criticism informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The result is a way of thinking about photography that persuasively accords with the medium’s undeni- able conceptual, political, and historical complexity. i d e a available in paperback the mit press writing photography history massachusetts institute of technology cambridge, massachusetts 02142 geoffrey batchen http://mitpress.mit.edu ,!7IA2G2-aceiga!:t;K;k;K;k book and jacket design by ori kometani bateh 0-262-02486-1 each wild idea + + + + + + + + + the mit press cambridge, massachusetts london, england each wild idea writing photography history geoffrey batchen ©2000 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM BY ANY ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL MEANS (INCLUDING PHOTOCOPYING, RECORDING, OR INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL) WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER. THIS BOOK WAS SET IN ADOBE GARAMOND, ENGRAVERS GOTHIC, AND OFFICINA SANS BY GRAPHIC COMPOSITION, INC. PRINTED AND BOUND IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA (TO COME) Not however expecting connection, you must just accept of each wild idea as it presents itself. —Thomas Watling, Letters from an Exile at Botany-Bay, 1794 contents prelude viii 1 2 3 desiring australian made vernacular production 26 photographies 2 56 4 5 6 taking and making post-photography ectoplasm 82 108 128 7 8 9 photogenics obedient numbers, da[r]ta 146 soft delight 176 164 notes 192 index 230 prelude There can be something quite disconcerting about anthologies like this one. Nine essays by a single author are garnered from a variety of sources and presented as a coherent narrative. Congealed each in the moment of its initial publication, such essays usually provide little more than an archaeology of these past moments, a history of the unfolding of history itself. Each Wild Idea certainly repeats this model; its chapters incorporate essays already published elsewhere (in academic journals, exhibition catalogues, and art magazines). But this book is not only a record of past publications, for these publications all appear here in revised and/or expanded form, having been brought up to date and often stitched together into broader ar- guments bearing on photography and the writing of its history. In other words, like the photography they discuss, these essays take up the kernel of an initial exposure and subject it to continual development, reproduction, and manipulation. Written through a process of ac- cretion, they are presented here as works in progress, coming from the past but still in mo- tion, (never) to be completed, and therefore also of and about the present. The subjects of these essays range widely, from a discussion of the timing of photography’s invention to analyses of the consequences of cyberculture. In between there are re- flections on the Australianness of Australian photography (another indication of my own historical trajectory), the state of contemporary art photography, and the place of the vernacular in photography’s history. In each case, readers are faced with having to determine the relationship of form and history, and therefore of being and identity, a crucial yet compli- cated spacing too quickly stilled by the formalist and postmodern approaches that continue to dominate photographic discourse. Thus, despite its variety of themes, Each Wild Idea is marked by a constant refrain throughout: the vexed (and vexing) question of photography’s past, present, and future identity. A brief note on method would seem to be appropriate. Informed by the aspirations prelude and rhetorics of postmodernism, this book engages the semiotics of photographic meaning. It assumes, in other words, that the meaning of every photograph is imbricated within broader social and political forces. However, my writing does not want to regard this production as simply a cultural matter, as if meaning and politics infiltrate the passively waiting photograph only from the outside. What is the photograph on the inside, before it enters a specific historical and political context? The question is an impossible but necessary one— impossible because there can never be an unadulterated “before,” necessary because the positing of an originary moment is the very condition of identity itself. This Prelude, for example, comes before the chapters that make up the rest of this book and yet was written after them. To read it now is to experience a peculiar convolution of spa- tial and temporal orders, a kind of convolution that constantly reappears throughout these essays. For my interest here is in the way photography is inevitably an “impossible” implo- sion of before and after, inside and outside. I want to articulate photography as something that is simultaneously material and cultural, manifested as much in the attributes of the photographic object as in its contextualization. Philosophy has a word for all this: deconstruction. In the words of Gayatri Spivak, “The sign must be studied ‘under erasure’, always already in- habited by the trace of another sign which never appears as such. ‘Semiology’ must give way to ‘grammatology’.” The language is difficult to grasp, but so is the agency it seeks to describe. And even when this agency is conceded, one might well still want to ask, So how does this tracing embody itself in and as the flesh of a photograph? This could be taken as the moti- vating challenge of Each Wild Idea. The essays that follow ponder this question in any number of ways, but they all take their cues from a consideration of the particularities of specific photographs. If nothing else, my discussions should remind us of photography’s wonderful strangeness (inference: you do not have to read theory to encounter the dynamics of a photogrammatology—just look at the evidence of history itself). Each Wild Idea is a compendium of such evidence, finding it in everything from a master work by Alfred Stieglitz to a humble combination of baby photo and bronzed booties. I show that both examples incorporate their own singular histories (they are not just in history; they are history). The difficulty is conveying this process through a piece of writing. To my surprise, I have often found myself gravitating toward sheer description as a mode of analysis, thus insisting that we look right at, rather than only beyond, the formal qualities of the photograph being discussed. This attention to form has little to ix do with a desire to reveal photography’s essential characteristics as a medium (the purported ambition of the kind of formalism to which postmodernism has traditionally opposed itself).

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