Lecture - A New Power: The Dissemination of Photography 1800-1850

Histories of early photography tend to be a chronological parade of the best surviving photographs, but photography encompasses far more than just photographs.

Join Dr Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford, for a lecture investigating the ways in which the demands of commercial publishing shaped early photographic practice in Britain. Drawing on a recent exhibition presented in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, he’ll speak about photography’s power as a social and political phenomenon within nineteenth-century British life.

Chaired by Dr Elisa deCourcy.

This is event is jointly hosted by National Portrait Gallery and the ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory; and funded through the Australian Research Council DE200101322.

Dr Geoffrey Batchen is the Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. He recently curated two exhibitions for the Bodleian Library: A New Power: Photography in Britain 1800-1850 and Bright Sparks: Photography and the Talbot Archive. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997), Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (2018), Negative/Positive: A history of photography (2021), The Forms of Nameless Things: Experimental photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot (2022), and Inventing Photography: William Henry Fox Talbot in the Bodleian Library (2023).

Dr Elisa deCourcy is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory. She is author of Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle: the global career of showman daguerreotypist J.W. Newland (Routledge, 2021, with Martyn Jolly), and is currently working on a book about early photography in colonial Australia – contracted with Melbourne University Press.

Access Information

This program is wheelchair accessible.

For access support or other ways to book please email bookings@npg.gov.au or phone 02 6102 7070 prior to your visit.