Joseph Beuys

Peter Fischli

David Weiss

Dan Graham

Geoffrey Batchen

Barbara Kruger

Giovanni Anselmo

John Baldessari

Bas Jan Ader

Douglas Fogle

Richard Flood

Vito Acconci

Kathy Halbreich

Mel Bochner

Jan Dibbets

Pamela Lee

Christian Boltanski

Sol Lewitt

Sarah Charlesworth

Valie Export

Stefan Gronnert

Broodthaers, Marcel.

Artists Using Photography 1960-1982

The Last Picture Show

'Forget Me Not' explores the relationship between photography and memory and shows how ordinary people have sought to strengthen the emotional appeal of photographs, primarily by embellishing them to create strange and often beautiful hybrid objects.

Photography and Remembrance

Forget Me Not

Maggie Finch

The Great Exhibition

Patrick Pound

Hubertus Gassner

Everybody collects something, sometime. Many artists have discovered collecting and saving as a means of artistic expression and have made the storage of objects and information the subject of their work. This ranges from digital memory to rows and stacks of materials to shelves, packaging crates, installations, and entire areas filled with diverse objects stored systematically or in states of utter chaos.

Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art

Deep Storage

David Campany

M. Darsie Alexander

Spanning 170 years, from William Henry Fox Talbot's first negative to the latest constructed tableau by Jeff Wall, Singular Images is a collection of thought-provoking essays on individual photographs. Each essay focuses on the uniqueness of one particular image, exploring the artist's intention, the work's technical complexities, its historical context, and the individual writer's response to it. The essays all capture a sense of how challenging it is to create a perfect single image.

Essays on Remarkable Photographs

Singular Images

Martin Parr

Nigel Warburton

Val Williams

Roger Hargreaves

Sheena Wagstaff

Mary Warner Marien

Dominic Willsdon

Darsie Alexander

Liz Jobey

Larry J. Schaaf

Russel Roberts

Traces of Life

William Henry Fox Talbot

In an 1828 letter to his partner Nicephore Niepce, Louis Daguerre wrote, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature." In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed discussion of photography's conception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this refiguring of the traditional story of photography'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 undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity.

The Conception of Photography

Burning with Desire

Hito Steyerl

George Baker

Carol Squiers

George Thomas Baker

Organized by ICP Curator Carol Squiers, 'What Is a Photograph?' will explore the intense creative experimentation in photography that has occurred since the 1970s. Conceptual art introduced photography into contemporary art making, using the medium in ways that challenged it artistically, intellectually, and technically and broadened the notion of what a photograph could be in art. A new generation of artists began an equally rigorous but more aesthetically adventurous analysis, which probed photography itself - from the role of light, color, composition, to materiality and the subject. 'What Is a Photograph?' brings together these artists, who reinvented photography.

What is a Photograph?

Roxana Marcoci

Since its birth in the first half of the 19th century, photography has offered extraordinary possibilities of isolating works of art for study and pleasure. Through cropping, focus, angle of view, distance and lighting as well as the ex post facto techniques of dark room manipulation, collage, montage and assemblage, photographers not only interpret the artworks they record but create stunning reinventions. The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1939 to Today presents a critical examination of the intersections between photography and sculpture. Through a selection of nearly 300 outstanding pictures by more than 100 artists from the 19th century to the present, The Original Copy explores how one medium has become implicated in the understanding of the other. Photographs reproduced in this richly illustrated volume range in subject from inanimate objects to performing bodies, and include major works by mediums most influential artists, from early modernism to the present.

Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today

The Original Copy

Nancy K. Miller

Jay Prosser

Mick Gidley

A volume of essays by leading photography writers and critics, published to benefit Amnesty International, cites such examples as the work of Susan Sontag to question whether photography of disturbing images stirs empathy or voyeurism in its viewers, outlining how to look at photographs to become contextually informed. Original.

Photography in Crisis

Picturing Atrocity

Essays on photography and the medium's history and evolving identity. In Each Wild Idea, Geoffrey Batchen explores a wide range of photographic subjects, from the timing of the medium's invention to the various implications of cyberculture. Along the way, he reflects on contemporary art photography, the role of the vernacular in photography's history, and the Australianness of Australian photography. The essays all focus on a consideration of specific photographs--from a humble combination of baby photos and bronzed booties to a masterwork by Alfred Stieglitz. Although Batchen views each photograph within the context of broader social and political forces, he also engages its own distinctive formal attributes. In short, he sees photography as something that is simultaneously material and cultural. In an effort to evoke the lived experience of history, he frequently relies on sheer description as the mode of analysis, insisting that we look right at--rather than beyond--the photograph being discussed. A constant theme throughout the book is the question of photography's past, present, and future identity.

Writing, Photography, History

Each Wild Idea

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.

Photography and Dissemination

Apparitions

As its title suggests, Negative/Positive begins with the negative, a foundational element of analog photography that is nonetheless usually ignored, and uses this to tell a representative, rather than comprehensive, history of the medium. The fact that a photograph is split between negative and positive manifestations means that its identity is always simultaneously divided and multiplied. The interaction of these two components was often spread out over time and space and could involve more than one person, giving photography the capacity to produce multiple copies of a given image and for that image to have many different looks, sizes and makers. This book traces these complications for canonical images by such figures as William Henry Fox Talbot, Kusakabe Kimbei, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, Seydou Keïta, Richard Avedon, and Andreas Gursky. But it also considers a number of related issues crucial to any understanding of photography, from the business practices of professional photographers to the repetition of pose and setting that is so central to certain familiar photographic genres. Ranging from the daguerreotype to the digital image, the end result is a kind of little history of photography, partial and episodic, but no less significant a rendition of the photographic experience for being so. This book represents a summation of Batchen’s work to date, making it be essential reading for students and scholars of photography and for all those interested in the history of the medium

A History of Photography

Negative/Positive

In an 1828 letter to his partner, Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre wrote, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature." In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed discussion of photography's conception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He 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 undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity.

Geoffrey Batchen

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