Clocks for Seeing: Daguerreotypes and the materiality of time

When we speak about photography’s material conditions, we usually mean to encompass the changing array of physical properties and capacities that have made the medium possible. However, it is important to also consider a crucial non-physical condition that has mediated the appearance of every photograph ever made. Professor Geoffrey Batchen is talking about time. 

In his paper, he will, for the sake of focus, be examining just one form of photography—the daguerreotype—in an effort to identify the degree to which, for makers of daguerreotypes, time was both a challenge to overcome and their primary medium of representation. As Roland Barthes once put it, ‘cameras…were clocks for seeing’. An historical assessment of this proposition requires a granular reflection on the surprising variety of ways in which daguerreotypes have engaged with time and made it both conceivable and perceivable. Such a reflection is a reminder that a photograph’s material presence is achieved only through a negotiation with a range of non-material conditions of possibility, both then and now.

Geoffrey Batchen is the Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. A specialist photo-historian, Batchen’s books include Negative/Positive: A History of Photography (2021); The Forms of Nameless Things (2022); and Inventing Photography: William Henry Fox Talbot in the Bodleian Library (2023). He has also curated exhibitions seen in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Iceland, and Japan. His next book will be an anthology of essays about the daguerreotype.