In 1977 Barthes’ mother, Henriette, died. They had lived together for 60 years, and the loss of her was a serious blow for him. The book Camera Lucida is in no small part a eulogy to his mother. He discusses many photographs in the book, and the impact these photographs have on him. But when he discusses a picture of his mother, which he describes as ‘rediscovering’ her, he omits the photograph, saying “I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’…it would interest your studium…but in it, for you, no wound.” Studium is a term Barthes creates and explains in the first part. It means to recognise the photographer’s intentions, to find what is objectively interesting in the photo. It is what makes you like a photo and be interested in it, but not love it. He is in a dilemma here, as, on the one hand, he loves his mother very dearly, and wants to share this with us; but at the same time he does not want to share her, as she is for him and him alone. However, he misses his mother so much that he cannot help but pour his heart out. His mother is private, she is for him alone, but his feelings are open for us to read. It is these feelings that will be the subject of my essay.
It is not until Part Two of Camera Lucida that most of these more personal ideas come out. The first part is surely very personal too, since he discusses why he likes certain photos, what strikes him and why. But it is the second part where he becomes much more intimate, and exposes himself to the world. It is obvious from the very beginning of Part Two, which begins with the line “Now one November evening shortly after my mother’s death, I was going through some photographs.” Then within this same paragraph he brings up the subject of mourning. He begins speaking of how no photograph could cause him to remember his mother more than in his own mind, and he laments this greatly, describing it as “the most agonizing feature of mourning”. He wishes to write a little compilation of thoughts and feelings about her, just for himself. In short, he misses her very greatly, and wishes simply to enjoy her memory. Sadly he feels he cannot do this on his own; her death is too distant already, and he seeks out photos in which he will ‘find’ her. The first photo where he feels to have come close to finding her is one of her as a young woman on a beach. “I ‘recognized’ her gait, her health, her glow – but not her face, which is too far away”. However, he says that “none seemed to me really ‘right’…as a living resurrection of the beloved face”. He feels that these photographs do not capture her essence; no photograph can bring her back to him.
When he finds a photo of her as a child, there he ‘recognizes’ her. He sees the truth of the face he had loved. It is this omitted photo that pierces him so, the one that he decides he cannot reproduce for us as it would mean nothing to the readership of Camera Lucida. It is especially poignant that a photo of her as a child, a child he never knew of course, causes him to recognize the mother he has just lost, who died an old woman. Why does he link this child with his mother? It is in “The distinctness of her face, the naïve attitude of her hands…and finally her expression…In this little girl’s image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever”. The key to the recognition here is memory, as is a key facet of mourning. Mourning is essentially remembering, and knowing that you cannot experience that memory again. It is loss, and the bitter sadness experienced by the absence of a loved one. When Barthes speaks of finding his mother, he really means he remembers her, but in such an intimate way it is as if he is with her, if only temporarily, and this lessens his sense of loss. He seeks to be with her, and through photographs he achieves this by finding or discovering such a strong and powerful memory.
The next chapter begins with Barthes writing “I worked back through a life, not my own, but the life of someone I love. Starting from her latest image…I arrived, traversing three-quarters of a century, at the image of a child”. He pores over his mother’s life, wishing to connect to it, to her. He just wants more time with her, and yet all he can do is view her past. He finds these photos of his late mother, the woman he lived with almost his entire life, so very powerful, that he cannot distance himself from her, and he does not know how to be without her. His relationship with his mother is quite clearly a closer one than nearly anyone has with their mother. He writes that during her illness “it was impossible for me to…go out in the evenings; all social life appalled me”. By finding this photo of her as a child, he says that he resolved death. To me this would mean moving on, accepting she is gone and not dwelling or mourning too severely. He feels he has finished grieving, as if by seeing her as a child he has defeated death. She is always with him; and so he does not miss her. This is as far from the truth as can be, as all he does is mourn, and dwell on her memory. He thinks by remembering he is not mourning, but surely that is what mourning is. He ends the chapter by saying that “From now on I could do no more than await my total, dialectical death. That is what I read in the Winter Garden Photograph”. He has resigned himself to death, because without his mother he feels incapable of anything, incapable of carrying on with life. All he wishes to do is to join her in death, and after discovering her essence in this photograph, rather than alleviating his mourning as he seems to imply, the photograph has given his sense of loss shape and meaning. He understands the nature of his loss, and accepts it. Without her, his life is meaningless.
For Barthes, photography cannot defeat death. He wrote that “The Photograph does not call up the past… [It does] not restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but it attests that what I see has indeed existed”. By viewing a photo, you do not rewind time, for example, to a point before the person died. All you are doing is proving that what you once knew is true. To think of it in this way can perhaps aid in grieving. “The photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.” Rather than constantly trying to recapture the person alive, know they are gone, but know that they did exist. Not ‘what is’ but ‘what was’. Barthes then begins to muse on the dead in photographs.
An anonymous photograph represents a wedding…I read the date and I compute: 1910, so they must all be dead, except perhaps the little girls and the baby…it is possible that Ernest, a schoolboy photographed in 1931 by Kertész, is still alive today (but where? How? ...) why is it that I am alive here and now?
The photograph permanently fixes an image, a moment frozen in time. But time continues to march on long past when the photo was taken. Barthes is looking at these fresh living faces, and knowing for sure that nearly all of them are dead. They are in the past, and this photo is all that remains to certify their existence. The last sentence in the above quote is a particularly interesting one: the photograph is dead and everyone in it is dead, but the interpreter is alive. One day he too shall cease to be and shall die, his existence only proven through the photograph (or the book he is writing), but for the moment he is on the other side of this.
Camera Lucida, especially the second part, is more about the grief Barthes felt following his mother’s death than about photography. He seems to alternate between discussing the two, but when discussing photography it is always in relation to his grief. However, this does show how powerful a tool photography is, and how important it is to Barthes. It is certainly one of the only things he uses to understand his grief, and try to move past it. He openly discusses his grief several times in this book, “I cannot transform my grief,” he says; the photograph cannot change how he feels, merely allow him to understand it better.
At the beginning of chapter 38, death is mentioned more than ten times, beginning with the line “All those young photographers…do not know that they are agents of Death”. By capturing an image of something, it becomes dead, for death must be present in society. If it cannot be in religion, it must be “in the image which produces death while trying to preserve life”. This is one of Barthes’ musings which can be read doubly as being about photography and on death, rather than most of his discussions which keep them somewhat separate or more personal. By freezing the moment, Barthes infers, you do not preserve it, to be revisited whenever desired, but you kill that moment, to be remembered and looked back on only. Not that by not photographing it you would keep it alive, but to photograph it is to kill it. Barthes is then told by a student that he talks about death very flatly, to which Barthes remarks on the horror of death. This once again becomes very personal, as he says the horror of death is to him “nothing to say about the death of one whom I love most, nothing to say about her photograph, which I contemplate without ever being able to get to the heart of it…The only ‘thought’ I can have is that at the end of this first death, my own death is inscribed”. It is remarkable that Barthes did little else in the time between his mother’s death and his own other than to write this book. There was nothing between them, as he said “nothing to say”. Because of this, many have seen Camera Lucida as being not only a eulogy to Barthes’ mother, but also as one to himself.
Next Barthes speaks of the death of the image. All he can do to a photograph is to kill it, that is, to throw the image away. Even the negative can be destroyed, it is all mortal. “Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes; there is nothing left to do but throw it away.” He speaks of how, prior to photography, society functioned with memory alone. He describes memory as the substitute for life, and that then at least the Death was immortal, the Monument. The thing that encapsulated death was itself immortal, whereas photography he feels is not. The mortal photography has resulted in the Monument becoming disused. The mortal death creator has replaced the immortal monument. He seems slightly disparaging of photography here, but really I think it is death that he abhors. He loves photography or, at least, he loves photographs. Fear and hatred are intrinsically linked, and he most certainly fears and hates death. By associating death and photography as he has, he cannot help but to hate photography in spite of his feelings towards photographs.
In Camera Lucida Barthes described punctum, the prick, the wound that an image inflicts on a person. The first punctum is the personal, intimate detail that you see in an image, the one that forces you to fall in love. According to Barthes it cannot be inserted by the photographer intentionally, as that instantly will prevent it from being punctum. It needs to be present by chance, that wonderful small touch.
This first punctum was in part one of Camera Lucida, the part which focuses more heavily on critical theory. In part two he brings up a second punctum. The placing of these two punctums in the book is quite important. The second punctum is that of time, or the “that-has-been”. This idea is strongly linked to death, as his first photographic example is so clear to represent. It is a photo taken in 1865 of Lewis Payne, a man who attempted to assassinate a politician, and who was then sentenced to death. He is photographed in his cell, knowing what his future will be. For Barthes, the punctum of this image is the boy’s short future; that the boy will die soon after the photograph is taken. Now comes the crucial point, it is both “This will be and this has been”. For Barthes is so struck with the death of his mother, he can no longer view photographs without thinking in the case of old pictures that the person is both dead and will die, and in more recent photos that the person will die. Death is inseparable from photos for him, and while it is true that everyone photographed will die, having only this perspective at the centre of your views of every photograph offers a very narrow reaction. Barthes speaks of being moved when viewing a photo of a past event. It is surely not rational thinking, to associate death with everything that has been photographed. When we are fascinated by older photographs it is not because we know the person has died and will die; this is unlikely to even cross most people’s minds. Barthes’ grief has focused all his attention on understanding and explaining it. “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe”, he says; he is being far too pessimistic, and mourning has taken control of his every feeling. Even where it is not applicable, he brings everything back to death and his mother.
Throughout Camera Lucida, Barthes links his reflections back to the ideas of death and mourning. This focus becomes most prominent and consistent in part two, where he discusses his mother’s death. His relationship with his mother was a very close one, he lived with her for nearly his entire life, and her illness and death shaped the rest of Barthes’ life. When she was ill, he stopped having a social life; and when she died, he kept a mourning journal and wrote Camera Lucida, discussing in depth his love and loss. I do not know if he was like this in earlier life, or how different Camera Lucida might have been if he had written it before his mother had died, but he takes a very pessimistic approach. A lot of human behaviour is linked to death, as death is the great unifier, and something that affects everyone, but I do not believe that photography in itself can be linked to death. There can be photos which remind us of death, or photos with the intentional purpose of themes of death, but as Barthes implies the inherent link of death to photography and that to photograph something is to kill it, I do not agree. I believe that it is his grief for his mother that has overwhelmed him in such a way that he cannot help but think of her, and therefore will link as many things as he conceivably can towards death, as it is at the very front of his mind, dominating his every action. It is all about memory for him, and memory of the dead. The photos do not allow you to see the thing as it was, it is not like stepping through a window into the past, but it proves what was. It proves that you knew this person, and loved them. When Barthes brings up the second punctum of time, he transforms the “that-has-been” into that of death. Barthes implies that every photograph of a person ever would have this foreknowledge of death. This interpretation seems to contradict the first punctum which discusses how it is in the important small, rare details, and that it is personal, and far from being a feature of every photo. However, it seems that this second punctum of time can be applied to every photo, specifically those of people. By looking at old photos, Barthes infers, the viewer reads the passage of time, and the potential death of the subject as being part of the photograph. The subject is simultaneously both alive and dead.
While this can be a very interesting concept, and certainly warrants philosophical debate, I do not think it satisfies the criteria of punctum as with the original explanation. With recent photos, the punctum of time is in the sealed fate of the person’s guaranteed future death. This seems a bit obvious to me; of course they will die, we all will. But this does not interest me in a photo, or at least I would not be interested in a photo for this reason. Barthes has a narrow focus on the deep feeling aroused by the anticipated death of the subject because he is overcome with grief, and has associated everything with death. In many respects Camera Lucida functions primarily as a eulogy to his mother, and possibly to himself, to the extent that the book does not just refer to death but is wholly about death and how we deal with it.
Bibliography
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993)
Final Mark: 63%, 2-1
No comments:
Post a Comment