Apparitions
Curated by Geoffrey Batchen and his ARTH405 Honour’s students, Apparations: the photograph and its image showed at the Adam Art Gallery in 2017.
By bringing together a range of media, Apparitions: the photograph and its image examined the dissemination of photographic images during photography’s earliest decades. This dissemination, usually in the form of engravings or lithographs derived from photographs, allowed photographic images to be reproduced in large numbers and circulated around the globe. Among other things, an examination of this process draws attention to the oscillation between material and immaterial states of being that complicates the identity of the photographic medium to this day.
Although usually associated with the advent of digital technologies, this exhibition demonstrated that efforts to exploit a distinction between a photograph and its image have preoccupied practitioners since the 1830s. By placing this invention of the photographic image into an extended history, Apparitions traced its association with the political economies of industrialisation, capitalism and colonialism, as well as with the advent of an illustrated press.
Among the items on display were photographs taken by the English inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot; early English and French daguerreotypes (photographs made on silvered sheets of copper); the earliest photographic images to be made in Africa and Italy and of Māori and Australia’s Aboriginal people; engravings from the first book to be illustrated by photographic images; and a series of prints made after the only photograph ever taken of the Duke of Wellington.
Although confining itself to the mid-nineteenth century, Apparitions presented photography as something always in flux; a continual transmutation of materials, forms, meanings and uses that has irrevocably transformed our relations to time and space.
This exhibition was the end result of an Honours seminar taught by Professor Geoffrey Batchen in the Art History programme at Victoria University of Wellington, with eight students involved in its curating and in the production of an accompanying scholarly catalogue. Batchen, who specializes in the history of photography, previously co-curated Dark Sky for the Adam Art Gallery. His recent books include Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (Prestel, 2016) and More Wild Ideas: History, Photography, Writing (China Nationality Art Photograph Publishing House, 2017).
The exhibition was accompanied by an illustrated catalogue: Apparitions: the photograph and its image, edited by Geoffrey Batchen, Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, 2017 (ISBN 978-1-877309-40-3
For more information and to purchase the publication visit: www.adamartgallery.org.nz