Geoffrey Batchen

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Art historian Professor Geoffrey Batchen draws on archives held in the Bodleian Library to show how the English inventor of photography William henry Fox Talbot was continually inventing photography anew.

Batchen places Talbot’s work in the context of a modernising Britain and of his own social and intellectual environment. And he explains how competing daguerreotype processes spurred him on to improve his own techniques. Batchen will also talk about his earlier book, The Forms of Nameless Things, which looks at some of the most experimental photographs taken by Talbot. He presents them as artworks that speak of photography’s most fundamental attributes and potentials.

Batchen is professor of history of art at the University of Oxford.

Presented by the Bodleian Libraries.