Burning with Desire

In an 1828 letter to his partner, 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 preceeded 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...
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In an 1828 letter to his partner, 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 preceeded 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-18th and early-19th centuries.