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.

'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.

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.

Since the early 19th century and the invention of photography, artists have been experimenting with various methods for creating photographs without a camera. At once exhaustive and compelling, this book reveals the myriad approaches artists have used to create photographic images using just paper and a source of radiation. Simultaneously a chronological history and a thematic study, this book explores a range of practices, some of which have been in use for more than a century, while others are entirely contemporary. From placing objects on light-sensitive paper and drawing on blackened glass plates to radiography, photocopying, and digital scanning, this is an elemental kind of photography that repudiates the idea that technology advances in only one direction. By eliminating the camera, artists are able to focus on other ways of making photographic pictures. They allow the world to leave its own imprint, to speak for itself as itself. This volume includes 160 exquisitely reproduced works of this kind. In turns abstract and realist, haunting and intricate, they seem to capture the very essence of their subjects. Featuring artists from the 19th century to today, this book explores cameraless photography as an important and influential medium that deserves to be included at the forefront of today's conversations about contemporary art.

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

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.

Der international renommierte Künstler und Fotograf Hiroshi Sugimoto hat durch seine ausgiebigen Erkundungen der Möglichkeiten von Fotografie einige der verführerischsten und rätselhaftesten Bildwerke unserer Zeit geschaffen. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über die Arbeiten der letzten fünf Jahrzehnte. Die Publikation vereint seine wichtigsten fotografischen Serien wie Theaters und Seascapes, bis zu weniger bekannten Werken, die seinen innovativen, konzeptionellen Ansatz beleuchten. Beiträge von internationalen Schriftsteller*innen, Künstler*innen und Wissenschaftler*innen – darunter James Attlee, Allie Biswas, David Chipperfield, Edmund de Waal, Mami Kataoka, Ralph Rugoff, Lara Strongman und Margaret Wertheim – beleuchten seine philosophische und zugleich spielerische Auseinandersetzung mit unserem Verständnis von Zeit und Erinnerung sowie dem paradoxen Charakter der Fotografie zwischen Dokumentation und Erfindung.

Appendix Two: University of New Mexico Art Museum Directors and Curators -- Bibliography of Related Works -- Index -- Back Cover

"Published in conjunction with the exhibition The original copy: photography of sculpture, 1839 to today, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (August 1-November 1, 2010)"--T.p. verso.

Fontcuberta's photography is itself about photographys own workings, and with each series he challenges the audience's trust in the veracity of the medium and its function as a system of representation. Confronting our anxieties about that system, Fontcuberta's careful fabrications are laced with clues and inconsistencies - the photographer himself even appears, disguised as Hans von Kubert or Joan Fontana.