Geoffrey Batchen: A Little History of the Negative

One of the distinctive characteristics of photography is that most analogue photographs are positive prints that have been made from a negative. Nevertheless, the negative is almost always regarded as a secondary entity in discussions of photography, if it is discussed at all. This talk by writer, curator and teacher Geoffrey Batchen will offer a little history of the negative, tracing some of the ways that history complicates our understanding of the photograph.

Geoffrey Batchen is the author of Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography and Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph. He teaches art history at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.