VUW Art History Lecture
Thursday, 18 June, 6.00-7.30pm
Geoffrey Batchen
Professor, Art History
The Graduate Centre, CUNY, New York
Perplexity and Embarrassment: Photography as Work
This paper considers the degree to which a history of photography should be based on a business, rather than a fine art, model. It proposes that we need to think of photography as a form of work, and the photographer as a worker or business owner, if we are ever to grasp the full complexity of the photographic experience.
Particular attention will be paid to Henry Talbot's effort to establish a photography business in Reading in the 1840s and to the competition he faced from daguerreotype studios operated by Richard Beard and Antoine Claudet.
Stressing the economic and social contexts of industrialization and consumer capitalism, an alternative mode of photographic history will be offered, a mode with implications for our understanding of photography's past, but also its present and its possible futures.
@Victoria University
Murphy Lecture Theatre MY LT101
Level 1 Murphy Building,
Kelburn Parade
Wellington
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