Geoffrey Batchen

Geoffrey Batchen’s work as a teacher, writer and curator focuses on the history of photography. He is particularly interested in the way that photography mediates every other aspect of modern life, whether we’re talking about sex or war, atoms or planets, commerce or art. Besides being an expert in the general theory and historiography of photography, Geoff has helped to pioneer the study of vernacular photography. Batchen has published extensively, in eighteen languages to date. He is the author of Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997, with subsequent translations into Spanish, Korean and Japanese, and a forthcoming one in Slovenian), Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001), Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance(2004), William Henry Fox Talbot (2008), What of Shoes: Van Gogh and Art History(2009, in German and English), and Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (2010, in Japanese and English). He has also edited an anthology of essays titled Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (2009) and co-edited another titled Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (2012).