Geoffrey Batchen: Eyes Wide Shut: A History of Photography

A trend on Instagram involves celebrities posting photographs with their eyes closed. Such photographs are nothing new. Amateur photographers, for example, have regularly captured people blinking ever since the introduction of hand-held cameras. However, the frequency of this particular pose on social media would suggest that, despite its casual appearance, the look is prescribed. These celebrities have shut their eyes deliberately, to facilitate such pictures. What does this phenomenon mean? How would one place this desire, this urge to be seen as unseeing, in a history of photography?

Australian photography historian Geoffrey Batchen will explore these questions while reflecting on the generative relationship between sight and blindness in photography from 1839 to now.

Presented in partnership with University of Queensland School of Communication and Arts.

Geoffrey Batchen is a Professor Emeritus of History of Art at the University of Oxford. A photo-historian, his recent books include Inventing Photography: William Henry Fox Talbot in the Bodleian Library, The Forms of Nameless Things, and Negative/Positive: A History of Photography. He has curated exhibitions in Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Iceland, and Japan. His next book will be a collection of essays about the daguerreotype.

Image: Claude Brevet (France), François, a teacher in Neuville-les-Dames [with eyes closed], 26 July 18471/4 plate solarised daguerreotype in vintage matt with green seals