On the History of Photography:

A Talk with Geoffrey Batchen

Professor Geoffrey Batchen, who joined the art history faculty in the fall of 2002, is an expert in the theory and historiography of photography. He has helped to pioneer the study of vernacular photography (photographs not intended as art, such as snapshots, commercial photos, and objects like photographic jewelry) and is the author of Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (MIT Press, 2001) and Burning With Desire: The Conception of Photography (MIT Press, 1997). Over the past twenty years, he has also been involved in the international art world as a curator and editor, working on exhibitions in Australia, Brazil, and in New York. Folio spoke with Batchen about his unique areas of research as an art historian.

Photography was conceived in about 1800; in other words, its history coincides with that of modernity itself. The appeal of photography as an object of study is precisely that there is no aspect of modern life--from birth to death, from sex to war, from atoms to planets, from commerce to art--that is not entirely infiltrated and mediated by practices of photography of one kind or another. This is also the problem of photographic history as a discipline: how do you develop a coherent and effective method of analysis for an entity that is so ubiquitous and various? How can you speak with equal intelligence about the photograph as a thing, and about what any particular photograph is of? How can you identify the meaning of such a photograph when that meaning is largely determined by its context, a context that is always shifting and is therefore itself hard to define? Photography's refusal to stay put makes it a problematic medium to study in an art history program; it is by its very nature an interdisciplinary beast and never simply an 'art.' But this of course is also its fascination.

The argument you refer to reiterates the theme of an earlier book, Burning with Desire, in which I suggest that photography's multiple invention (over twenty people from seven different countries claimed to have invented it over a thirty year period) is best explained by locating it in the specific cultural and social context of that moment in European history. Photography is thereby identified not with a set of technologies but with a desire to articulate a quite particular relationship between what were then new conceptions of time, subjectivity, and representation. In this sense, the work of Coleridge and Constable can also be regarded as 'photographic.' This argument was mounted as a critique of the obsession of contemporary historians with questions of origin and invention. But it also offers a way to critically reflect on the identity of photography, an issue that continues to inform theoretical debates about the medium, whether we're talking about its conception or its imminent dissolution.

Although my work in the last fifteen years has revolved around humanitarian intervention, before that I worked on economic and social development in poor countries. I remain convinced that this part of the UN will ultimately be the its strongest legacy: the story of its effort to develop new ideas, to massage them, and try to turn them into principles and norms that can guide the behavior of states, institutions, and individuals. So my side-kicks Sir Richard Jolly and Dr. Louis Emmerij [senior research fellows at the RBIIS], who themselves were major players in the UN and are now retired, and I have embarked on this truly ambitions effort to document these important ideas. The UN Intellectual History project will result in fourteen books, and five have now been published. The volume that we're working on at present is an oral history of many people involved--very powerful individuals with good ideas, who are very committed to social justice and economic development. The 75 interviews will make up a kind of "Studs Terkel" documentary on the United Nations. It's been fun speaking with people who were there in 1945 when the UN was founded, or who were in their home countries when decolonization took place, or who were behind the Iron Curtain trying to teach UN affairs. It's nice to go back 50 or 60 years instead of 50 or 60 minutes.

I am organizing an exhibition for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam on the theme of photography and memory. We tend to think of photographs and memories as synonymous, but most of the better commentators on photography have in fact argued the opposite--that photographs displace, replace, or even destroy memory (that they replace the emotional thrills of involuntary memory with the dull certainties of history). My exhibition will present a variety of vernacular photographic practices where ordinary people have sought to overcome this dilemma by doing things like adding writing, paint, framing, embroidery, fabric, string, hair, flowers, butterfly wings, or other images to the photographs involved. The photograph becomes something that is touched, whether really or in the imagination of the viewer, and this helps drag its perception into the immediacy of the present. These practices also slow memory down, insisting on a drawn-out, interactive and multi-sensory process of remembrance. The exhibition, which comprises about 140 objects, is due to open in March 2004; I'm also hoping it will be shown in New York later that year.

The term 'vernacular' literally means the ordinary and ubiquitous but it also refers to qualities specific to particular regions or cultures. Its attachment to the word 'photography' allows historians like myself to argue for the need to devise a way of representing photography's history that can incorporate all its many manifestations and functions. A vernacular history of photography will have to be able to deal with the kind of hybrid objects I describe above, but also with, for example, photographies from outside Europe and the U.S. It may mean having to adopt non-traditional voices and narrative structures. It will certainly mean abandoning art history's evaluation system (based on masterpieces and masters, originality and innovation, and so on). In short, the term 'vernacular photography' is intended as a provocation and a challenge.