28th July – This is my first attempt at a literature review. It is incomplete but I wanted to try and put a framework together. I didn’t feel a need to bring my review to a conclusion at this initial stage. I started my work by trying to review an argument from Barthes in Camera Lucida where he tells us that after his mother died he didn’t think a photograph could adequately define her being yet he does find a photograph which for him does exactly that. I wonder if, in my attempt to explore Barthes’s idea, have I spread this too wide and gone off at tangents and brought in too many other sources? As I am new to this am not certain if for reasons of word count and for the purpose of reviewing literature upon which my own research builds. Will be interesting to receive some feedback on this attempt.

26/07 – version i

Abstract

It would seem to be a natural human reaction to impending loss and to the grief caused by this sense of loss to look at photographic images or to reach for the camera to try and create photographic images of our own. These actions would appear to be attempts to try and find an image that conveys a sense of what has been lost and to freeze the memories of the person suffering from grief. Whether to try and find a previous, presumably happier moment in time or, in case of taking photographs at the point of loss, to try and preserve that moment in time. Is use of the photograph as a way of freezing or fixing a moment in time and with the photographic image, setting the emotions and the moment forever and so capturing it. These actions appear to be something we do regardless of whether a death is considered a good death or a bad death and irrespective of how that person lived their life.

Literature Review

Roland Barthes wrote his book Camera Lucida following the death of his mother, Henriette, in 1977. Barthes seems to have lived his life surrounded by loss. His father, Louis, had been a naval officer in the Great War and died before Barthes’s first birthday. Barthes writes of his father’s name being written on the blackboard by a teacher and that when that blackboard was wiped clean, “nothing was left of his proclaimed mourning.” (Barthes, 2018, p. xi) After the death of his father, Barthes was raised by his mother, his Aunt Alice and his paternal grandmother (Barthes, 2018, p. xxi) There was also an uncle that he mentions when describing a photograph of his mother. (Barthes, 1981, p. 67)  I don’t know when his uncle, aunt or grandmother died but it is easy to imagine Barthes’s life having been framed through loss. These facts seem important to give some sense of context around Barthes and his attitude to death.  I can imagine a similarity here with my own experiences of a life defined, in part, through death. Barthes must have been very close to his mother as he expresses his grief and his sense of his own inevitable death, “Once she was dead I no longer had any reason to attune myself to the progress of the superior Life Force….From now on I could do no more than await my total, undialectical death.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 72)

After the death of his mother, Barthes was looking through photographs. He was looking for a sense of his mother that he could write about so that her memory would last. He had no hope of finding a photograph that might speak “as a living resurrection of the beloved face.” He states that “I had no hope of ‘finding’ her, I expected nothing from these photographs”. Barthes goes further acknowledging the fatality in mourning that no matter how often images of the dead are studied, the dead cannot be found in photographs. “I could never recall her features (summon them as a totality).” None of the photographs seems to adequately represent his dead mother. “none seemed to me really ‘right’: neither as a photographic performance nor as a living resurrection of the beloved face.” (Barthes, 1981, pp. 63–64) He writes of “the terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 9). Barthes is saying that the photograph does not bring back the dead and gone but the photograph provides proof that this person who has been captured in the photograph was once alive and was once in that place in front of the lens. Susan Sontag echoes this point saying that, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” (Sontag, In Plato’s Cave,1979, p. 15) Ernst van Alphen expands on this idea when he writes about the art of Francis Bacon and that the act of the representation of death is normally conducted second hand, “Being dead, or even in the process of dying, cancels out the possibility of participating in the act of representation.” (Alphen, 1992, p. 95) This feels important as the photograph that Barthes seeks is from his perspective. His sense of his mother might be a sense his own mother might reject. My own sense of my daughter is my perception of her. It is difficult to get close to the core essence of herself. There is no absolute truth. Equally, every time someone new looks, they will get a new and differently personal sense. There is a dichotomy here as although a photographic work is fixed at a single moment in time and space, the reaction to that photograph is not fixed and can change according to the audience or through the passage of time. The memory of the dead is not fixed.

What is it we look for in photography to try and summon a person who is dead, or perhaps more accurately to summon our memory of that person? Barthes writes of the imperfection of the photograph and of the feeling of loaning yourself to a photograph which might capture different attitudes which might seem incomplete or even completely false to the viewer. He describes finding a ‘perfect’ photograph that for him was unexpected and spoke to him of his mother, “looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 67) Barthes describes his find, an old faded sepia print from 1898, showing two children on a little wooden bridge in a conservatory, one his mother aged five and the other her brother aged seven. He described the image in detail naming it the Winter Garden Photograph. He tells us that for him, the photograph represented justice and accuracy. It was his way of resolving her death and finding a vision of her in strength before her age and her illness. Yet Barthes doesn’t show the photograph to us. “I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of a thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’; it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 73) This is an interesting thing to consider, describing a photograph yet, by keeping the photograph hidden, not allowing that photograph to perform the function of a photograph.  Bathes does this as he feels the photograph has a meaning that is private to him and so only makes sense with him as the viewer. Barthes looks at a photograph which to him contains the sense of his mother when she was a child. He traces his memory of her in life through the photograph, the look of her face, the attitude of her hands, her docility and her expression. Barthes’ grief demanded an image to be accurate to his sense of her and to provide a sense of justice. (Barthes, 1981, pp. 69–70) All of this is personal to Barthes. Diana Knight proposes that the Winter Garden photograph is not real and is an invention by Barthes, “a psychological displacement complicated not only by mourning but also by Barthes’ homosexuality.” (ref) Whether or not the photograph of his mother is real or not, I have a sense, from my own experience, of the mind playing strange tricks at moments of great stress and grief is clearly such a time that the fact of the photograph matters less than the fact that Barthes describes it in detail down to the age of the photograph with blunted corners from being in an album. To him at that moment that image was real whether it came from a photograph or a memory. As well as the question of reality, there is added complexity to trying to summon what has been through looking at the photographic image. Memory and imagination can get in the way.

Future points to consider …

• How the photograph is used and shaped by memory and how the memory shapes memory
• Post mortem photography as an attempt to freeze the moment of death and to preserve the memory of life
• Geoffrey Batchen’s work looking at photographers in the 1840s and 50s who advertised for customers urging them to, “secure the shadow ere the substance fade, let nature copy that which nature made” (Batchen, 2004, p. 33).
• Memorials to the dead but for the living.
• The metonymy of using things such as hair to represent the dead.
• Good death and bad death. Kellehear speaks of the idea of dying at the ‘proper time’ and of children or young people dying and creating a “social tragedy and emotional disjunction of a young death where only ‘old people’ are expected to die.” (Kellehear, 2007, p. 214)

References

Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Vintage Books.

Barthes, R. (2018) Album: Unoublished Correspondence and Texts. New York: Columbia University Press.

Batchen, G. (2004) Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=2YAXe5_y3IIC&pgis=1.

Kellehear, A. (2007) A Social History of Dying. Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press.

Sontag, S. (1979) On Photography. London: Penguin Books.