Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History
Citation
Batchen, Geoffrey. Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. xi + 236 pp. ISBN 0-262-02486-1 (hardcover).
Tier justification
Tier 2: university-press monograph (MIT Press) by a recognized scholarly authority in photography theory. Batchen is also the author of Burning with Desire (MIT Press, 1997; src-batchen-1997-burning-with-desire), already in the repo as a Tier-2 source.
Relevance
Each Wild Idea is a collection of Batchen’s essays on photography theory, history, and writing, published between the late 1980s and 2001. The essays engage with topics including the desire to photograph, the ontology of the photographic image, photography and memory, and the contested histories of photographic criticism — all of which bear on the scholarly re-reading of The Family of Man that characterizes 2000s reception scholarship.
The book is part of the theoretical context in which Stimson (2006) and Turner (2013) situate their arguments about mid-century humanist photographic exhibitions. Batchen’s earlier Burning with Desire (1997) critiques the Sontag/Sekula/Solomon-Godeau lineage of postmodern photographic criticism; Each Wild Idea extends that project into questions of photography’s relationship to writing and historical memory. Secondary literature (not consulted in this round) credits Batchen with treating the controversial reception history of Steichen’s Family of Man as illustrative of photography theory’s core disputes; that connection is not verified from body-text access this round.
Key excerpts / pages
- Access status (2026-04-30): Internet Archive item page
https://archive.org/details/eachwildideawrit00batc_0fetched successfully. Bibliographic metadata confirmed from that page:- Full title: Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History
- Author: Geoffrey Batchen
- Publisher: MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
- Year: 2001
- ISBN: 0262024861
- Page count: 236 pages (xi + 236 p.)
- Subjects: Photography; Photography — Philosophy
- Access: print-disabled collection (restricted; no CDL borrow completed this round)
- Body text NOT read this session. No page-specific quotations are recorded.
Notes
verified: false: IA metadata confirmed (fetched 2026-04-30); body text is in the print-disabled collection, CDL borrow not completed. Page-level claims about FoM engagement deferred to a future CDL session.- ISBN confirmed from the IA item page: 0262024861 (= 978-0-262-02486-1 in 13-digit form). The paperback ISBN (0-262-52259-4 for Burning with Desire) is different; the paperback for Each Wild Idea was not listed on the IA record fetched.
- Cross-reference to
src-batchen-1997-burning-with-desire: the predecessor monograph. - Cross-reference to
src-stimson-2006: the two books occupy adjacent intellectual territory in post-2000 photography theory. - Cross-reference to
src-sandeen-1995-picturing: both engage with the post-1970s critical reassessment of humanist photography. - A future pass should complete a CDL borrow to retrieve specific essays and page citations, particularly any essay that addresses Steichen or humanist exhibition traditions directly.