This is an original and provocative rethinking of photography's origins and the scholars who inhabit the 'battlefield' of opinion that seeks to define its essence. In highly readable prose, Geoffrey Batchen deploys Foucauldian and Derridean insights to issue a challenge to the medium's postmodernist as well as its formalist critics, shaping an argument about photography and power that flies in the face of received wisdom.
Carol Squiers, Senior Editor, America Photo
Burning with Desire in its lucid and innovative blend of historical and theoretical reflections, will quickly become an enduring and indispensable text within contemporary studies of photography and visual culture. Especially amid current debates over whether or not we have entered a 'post-photographic' era, Geoffrey Batchen's work will be essential reading for its deeply intelligent archaeology of the material and philosophical status of the photograph.
Jonathan Crary, Columbia University
I wholeheartedly recommend Geoffrey Batchen's book Burning with Desire. It is a cultural studies or cultural history text, with ramifications for art history, the history of philosophy, studies in visuality, contemporary theory, and, of course, photographic history. Batchen writes with great clarity and pedagogic patience about ideas that are often judged difficult. I have no doubt that the book's lucidity and range will make it popular with scholars in all of these fields, as well as in graduate seminars.
Mary Warner Marien, Associate Professor and Director of GRaduate Studies, Department of Fine Arts, Syracuse University
Given its ambitious and groundbreaking scope, Burning with Desire is bound to become a touchstone for any further consideration of the topic of photography's invention.
Douglas R. Nickel, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Given its ambitious and groundbreaking scope, Burning with Desire is bound to become the touchstone for any further consideration of the topic of photography's invention.
Douglas R. Nickel, Assistant Curator of Photography, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
