Geoffrey Batchen
Professor of the History of Photography and
Contemporary Art

PhD University of Sydney, 1991

gbatchen@gc.cuny.edu

Professor Geoffrey Batchen teaches at the Graduate Center, having previously taught at the University of New Mexico and the University of California, San Diego. His first book, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, presents a critique of postmodern and formalist accounts of photography by way of a detailed analysis of the medium's emergence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was the first study of photography to make extensive use of the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. His second book, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, comprises a collection of his essays on photography and electronic culture, further demonstrating the critical possibilities offered to art history by deconstruction. In 2004 he curated an exhibition of vernacular photographs for the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, with a subsequent tour to the National Museum of Iceland, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in the UK and the International Center of Photography in New York. The book that accompanied the exhibition is titled Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. He is currently working on an anthology of essays for The MIT Press about Roland Barthes' famous book, Camera Lucida.

Books:

Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance . Exh. Cat. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum & Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.

Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.

Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997.

Back to Faculty listing>>