Geoffrey Batchen

Geoffrey Batchen)

Geoffrey Batchen (born 1956) work as a teacher, writer and curator that focuses on the history of photography. He is particularly interested in the way that photography mediates every other aspect of modern life, whether we're talking about sex or war, atoms or planets, commerce or art. This makes photography a particularly challenging phenomenon to study and a lot of Geoff's work addresses the methodological challenge that this study poses for art history. Besides being an expert in the general theory and historiography of photography, Geoff has helped to pioneer the study of vernacular photography (photographs not intended as art, such as snapshots, commercial photos, and objects like photographic jewellery). Along with Martin Parr and Victor Burgin, Batchen keep his annual series of public lectures about photography at CCP (The Centre for Contemporary Photography) in Melbourne (Australia).

Literature

Books

• Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, The MIT Press, 1997.
• Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, The MIT Press, 2001, 2002.
• Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, Van Gogh Museum & Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.
• William Henry Fox Talbot, Phaidon, 2008.
• What of Shoes?: Van Gogh and Art History, Cologne: Seemann Henschel, 2009.
• (Editor), Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009.
• Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death, Japan: Izu PhotoMuseum, 2010.
• (Co-editor), Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, London: Reaktion Books, 2012.

Articles

• "Carnal Knowledge", Art Journal 60:1 (Spring, 2001), pp 21-23.
• "Snapshots: Art History and the Ethnographic Turn", Photographies 1:2 (September 2008), London, pp 121-142.
• "Les Snapshots: L'histoire de l'arte et le tournant ethnographie", Etudes Photographique, No. 22, Paris, 2008, pp 4-37. [1] (French)
• "The Labor of Photography",Victorian Literature and Culture 37:1, 2009, pp 292-296.
• "Seeing and Saying: A Response to 'Incongruous Images'", History and Theory 48:4, 2009, pp 26-33.
• "Lost in Space", Art History 34:3, 2011, pp 610-612.

Books and Articles on Batchen

• Guy Lane, "William Henry Fox Talbot by Geoffrey Batchen", The Art Book 16:3, 2009, pp 61-62.
• Mark Durden (ed.), Fifty Key Writers on Photography, Routledge, 2013.

Links

• Batchen's profile at the School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies of University of Wellington
• The Centre for Contemporary Photography