Olena Chervonik
Olena Chervonik (PhD fellow, the University of Oxford) is writing her dissertation on the history of photography and technologies of vision. Prior to embarking upon her dissertation, Chervonik held a number of curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Izolyatsia – Platform for Cultural Initiatives in Donetsk, Ukraine; and Videonale – Festival for Contemporary Video Art in Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany.
Scholars and museums tend to avoid the evidence of photography’s reproducibility. It is an unwelcome reminder of commerce and labour, of promiscuity and dissemination, of transformation and transgression.
Abstract
Bio
References
PDF
Close
Olena Chervonik talks with Geoffrey Batchen about his two most recent publications: Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination, that reached bookshelves in 2018, and Negative/Positive: A History of Photography, slated for release later in 2020. The conversation revolves around the photographic condition of reproducibility, repetition and difference, embedded in the medium from the time of its inception. While Apparitions explores photography’s relation to various newsprint outlets of the nineteenth century, Negative/Positive traces a comprehensive history of the medium’s propensity for multiplication, predicated on the dependence of photographs on the function of a negative, which, according to Batchen, seems to be a repressed Other in photographic history. A vehicle that enables reproducibility, a photographic negative is rarely discussed in critical literature and even more rarely reproduced or featured in the exhibition space. Batchen ponders this occlusion of a medium’s critical component, suggesting that a negative is linked to photography’s operation as capitalist mode of production. By omitting to profile a negative, we naturalize capitalism’s operational logic – a condition that clearly needs to be upset by directing a critical, revelatory, and thus politically engaged spotlight on photography’s predilection for image massification.
- Keywords: capitalism, commodification, massification, negative, photography, politics of resistance, reproducibility
Olena Chervonik (PhD fellow, the University of Oxford) is writing her dissertation on the history of photography and technologies of vision. Prior to embarking upon her dissertation, Chervonik held a number of curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Izolyatsia – Platform for Cultural Initiatives in Donetsk, Ukraine; and Videonale – Festival for Contemporary Video Art in Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany.
Geoffrey Batchen (BA, PhD Sydney) holds the Professorship of the History of Art in the Department of the History of Art and the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. Professor Batchen’s work as a teacher, writer and curator focuses on the history of photography. His publications include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997); 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); Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (2010); Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (2016); and Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (2018). He has also edited Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (2009) and co-edited Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis (2012).
- Batchen, Geoffrey. 2019. Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination. Sydney: Power Publications.
- _________. 2020. Negative / Positive: A History of Photography. London: Routledge.
- Batchen, Geoffrey, and Joan Fontcuberta. 2016. “Well, What Is Photography?” Correspondence (October / December). Available online here.
- Shaviro, Steven. 2014. “Speculative Realism – a Primer.” Texte Zur Kunst 93, Spekulation/Speculation: 40–51.
PDF format files of individual interviews are priced at 6.00EUR. If you are subscribed to Membrana Online, you may purchase PDF access to all content on our site: Membrana PDF
(Online subscription is required!)