Geoffrey Batchen’s “Burning with Desire”: The Conception of Photography
This is not a heroic history of inventors, but a conceptual history and a genealogy of discourse: tracking how the *desire* “to turn the world automatically into an image” was accumulated, and finally named “photography.”
New Zealand scholar Geoffrey Batchen published Burning with Desire in 1997 (MIT Press). Combining Foucauldian discourse archaeology with material culture studies, he returns to the turn of the 18th-19th centuries to rewrite “the birth of photography.” The book’s key argument is that photography first existed as a social and intellectual “desire” long before its technical naming in 1839. This is not a “who-invented-it-first” timeline, but a history of an idea.
Core Concepts: Desire Precedes Naming and Device
Batchen’s argument unfolds along four primary paths:
1. “Photography” as Concept and Desire Before Naming
Long before 1839, European communities were already imagining “nature writing its own image” without the hand of an artist. From chemical discolorations, photogenic drawing, the camera obscura, and automatic drawing machines, a field of desire, imagination, and experimentation accumulated. The conclusion: photography was not the flash of insight from a single inventor, but the condensation of a cross-disciplinary desire.
2. Deconstructing the Single-Inventor Narrative: Synchronicity and National Myths
Niépce, Daguerre, and Talbot are often placed in a single lineage. Batchen highlights that multiple technical lines ran in parallel, often borrowing from each other. Later national-institutional forces (patents, museums, histories) “recruited” this complex synchronicity into a single origin story. He uses documents, letters, and journals to dismantle the “single origin” myth.
3. Conceptual History x Material Turn: From Ideas to Objects and Practices
This book does not just read texts; it emphasizes material traces and vernacular objects: miniature portraits, silhouettes, camera obscura toys, manuals, sample books, and domestic chemistry kits, showing how “automatic imaging” infiltrated daily life. This prefigured the “vernacular photography” and “material turn” of the late 1990s.
4. Rewriting Ontology: From “Index” to a Composite Model of “Concept-Institution-Desire”
Countering the theoretical line that reduces photography’s essence to “indexicality” (e.g., Krauss), Batchen argues that the index is just one condition. Photography is, more importantly, a cultural assemblage that is named, institutionalized, and driven by desire. To understand photography, one must read the resonance between technology, language, law, objects, and social imagination simultaneously.
Value and Impact: As Method and Lineage
The enduring value of To Burning with Desire can be understood on two levels:
- Value as Method and Tool: Batchen provides three operational keys: (a) Concept-first: treating the “desire for automatic imaging” as the object of study, avoiding technological determinism; (b) Multi-point origins: using a multi-source, synchronous model to reconstruct “invention,” neutralizing the single-hero bias; (c) Material and vernacular: including manuals, apparatuses, and folk-made objects as evidence.
- Long-Term Impact: This book propelled the “discursive archaeology” and “material culture” turns in photo history. It created a theoretical resource for the study of vernacular photography and archival exhibitions. It entered into a productive dialogue with Krauss’s “indexicality,” complemented the institutional critiques of Tagg and Sekula, and laid groundwork for scholars like Edwards & Hart. In short, it pushed “photography” from being just a machine back to being a historical event that was, first and foremost, desired and named.
Burning with Desire teaches us that to understand photography, we must look not only at who invented it, but at who desired it, when, and how they named it and brought it into their lives.
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