ABSTRACT
Even the most cursory survey of the texts that constitute the history of photography reminds people that the selection of an origin point has always been both arbitrary and interested. In Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, the author equated the origin stories propagated by formalist and postmodern scholars with their respective ideological agendas, finding that both presumed to know the essential identity of the photography they are discussing even while avoiding the complexity of that same claim. The "desire to photograph" became a cultural imperative not exclusively invested in efforts to produce actual photographs. The aim was to show how this significant historical moment was indeed a moment, a turning point accompanied by revolutionary changes in the experience of time, space and subjectivity. Camera Lucida is a book about photography built on the absence of precisely what Michel Frizot takes to be the medium's most fundamental and essential element.
