The virgin of flames

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Geoffrey Batchen

In an 1828 letter to his partner Nicephore Niepce, Louis Daguerre wrote, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature." In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed discussion of photography's conception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this refiguring of the traditional story of photography's origins, Batchen examines the output of the various nominees for "first photographer," then incorporates this information into a mode of historical criticism informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The result is a way of thinking about photography that persuasively accords with the medium's undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity.

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Mark Richard Leach and Barbara J. Bloemink

This volume presents two decades of Michael Lucero's glazed ceramic, bronze, and mixed media sculptures, including such series as the Dreamers, Pre-Columbus, New World, and Reclamations. While at first glance his work appears to be a vigorous example of contemporary ceramic sculpture with a background in 1960s California art and a foreground in New York eclecticism, in fact his figurative forms borrow liberally and wittily from the history of art of various cultures, including pre-Columbian, Native American, European, Afro-Carolinian, and the vernacular and popular media. The imagery that slides in and out of the complex glazes of this master of the ceramic medium is art about art and about self. The consistent strength of the work comes from a fusion of ceramic tradition with sculptural innovation, and from a combination of extraordinarily fine technique, keen wide-ranging intelligence, and the resonance brought to bear by past associations, cultures, and use.

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Thierry Magnier

Isabelle, a pretty pig with artistic aspirations, visits the museum and is shown all the paintings and statues by the little Angel, an experience that changes her life.

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Katharine Weber

The diary of a New York art historian as she keeps company a Vermeer painting, being held by the IRA for ransom. Alone in her lover's cottage in Ireland, Patricia Dolan admires the woman on canvas. "She's beautiful," she writes. By the author of Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.