Repetition and Difference: The Dissemination of Photography

As part of the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation's current exhibition, Image at Work, Phaidon author Geoffrey Batchen will be hosting a lecture at Index, Stockholm, on Tuesday 30 November.

Repetition and Difference: The Dissemination of Photography takes photography’s capacity for reproduction as a point of departure in order to suggest different ways of imagining photography’s history.

'Although seldom engaged in published histories of photography, reproducibility is a key element of this medium's identity,' explains Batchen. 'Among other effects, it allows photographic images to be widely circulated, but it also gives the same image the capacity to come in many different looks, sizes and formats. It also makes it possible for an image to appear in many places at once and to exist simultaneously at many different points of time. Equally complicated is the way its capacity for reproducibility ties photography to the processes and social implications of capitalist mass production, making any study of its effects an unavoidably political issue.'

The author of William Henry Fox Talbot, Geoffrey Batchen is currently Professor of Art History at Victoria University, New Zealand.

Follow the link to the Index Foundation's website for more information.