Geoffrey Batchen / Investir une image latente

“When is a photograph made?” asks photo historian Geoffrey Batchen. Is it when the photographer presses the shutter, or when a frame is selected for printing, “investing a latent image with the personal significance of selection, labor, and, most crucial of all, visibility?” Or perhaps a photograph only comes into existence when the image is exposed to public gaze, “adding itself to a culture’s collective visual archive . . . to enact some sort of residual effect.”

Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History / Cambridge, Mass. / MIT Press, 2001/, p83
Cité par Jeffrey Mifflin in "“The Story They Tell”: On Archives and the Latent Voices in Documentary Photograph Collections"