GEOFFREY BATCHEN

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) is widely considered to be the father of modern photography, having developed the process by which photographic images could be reproduced. However, he has yet to be sufficiently appreciated as a photographer in his own right. Over the course of his photographic career, he has made more than 5,000 images that include fascinating pictures of his home, Lacock Abbey, portraits of family and friends, and still lifes of botanical specimens, cloth, and household objects. A key intellectual figure of the nineteenth century in science, mathematics, astronomy, politics, and archaeology, Talbot is arguably the most important figure in the invention of photography. His practice established many of the medium's most familiar genres. Talbot was devoted to the advancement of photography, publishing the first photographically illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature (1844-46), which revealed the potential of the medium to a wider audience. This new monograph features many of Talbot's best-known landscapes made around Lacock Abbey and some of the first negatives ever made. It also includes lesser-known and previously unpublished work that reveals the extraordinarily diverse scope of his work. His photographs reflect and embody the social and cultural issues of the time, but they are also fascinating, often beautiful images that are still as engaging today as they were nearly 200 years ago.

En una carta de 1828 a su socio, Nicephore Niepce, Louis Daguerre escribió: "Ardo en deseos de ver tus experimentos tomados de la naturaleza". Arder en deseos. La concepción de la fotografía analiza la aparicion del deseo de fotografiar en los circulos filosoficos y cientificos que precedieron a la verdadera invencion de la fotografia. Las interpretaciones recientes de la identidad de la fotografia establecen una diferenciacion entre el punto de vista posmoderno, segun el cual toda identidad esta determinada por el contexto y, por otra parte, un esfuerzo formalista por definir las caracteristicas fundamentales del medio fotografico. Geoffrey Batchen critica ambos enfoques mediante un exhaustivo analisis de la concepcion de la fotografia a finales del siglo XVIII y principios del siglo XIX. En primer lugar examina la produccion de los diversos candidatos a "primer fotografo" y luego incorpora esta informacion a una modalidad de critica historica influida por la obra de los filosofos Michael Foucault y Jacques Derrida. El resultado es una forma de reflexion sobre la fotografia que concuerda convincentemente con su innegable complejidad conceptual, politica e historica como medio.