One thing that was mentioned during my last discussion with my tutor was Roland Barthes idea about the photograph being a harbinger of death. I have to admit, I don’t always find the writings of some of the philosophers and great thinkers the most accessible and easy to understand so I hope my work building upon his writing, does him justice.
While I was looking into Barthes and what it might mean and how it might relate to my research and so be relevant to my own work, I wondered about other works after Barthes and what other’s thought about death and visual imagery so this essay will extend beyond Barthes.
Barthes was looking for a photograph of his deceased mother which, to him. would conjure her essence. He found a photograph of her as a child and in his own words,
“In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient , over a catastrophe which has already occurred, Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 96)
Dr Winnicott was a psychoanalyst who worked alongside Jung. (Sedgwick, 2008)
His view that the photograph is a static symbol for an impending death is echoed by Sontag who says,
“Photography is the inventory of mortality. A touch of the finger now suffices to invest a moment with a posthumous irony. Photographs show people being so irrefutably there and at a specific age in their lives; group together people and things which a moment later have already disbanded, changed, continued along the course of their independent destinies.” (Sontag, 1979, p. 70)
Do I agree with Barthes and Sontag? Well, yes, the photograph captures a moment in time. The photograph of Barthes’s mother who will die at a point after that image captured. Barthes tells us that the photograph is of the past. It has been. However, could the photograph of Barthes’s mother equally speak of life and of birth depending on the audience? If the mother of Barthes’s mother had looked at the photograph, might she have thought of birth? It seems to me that photography doesn’t have to act as a method for the viewer to travel only forwards in time, it can just as easily be an aid to travel backwards in time. I suggest that this looking backwards is a more usual way that the photographic image is used. Do photographs of cities or ancient monuments speak of the future destruction of the place depicted, or isn’t a more normal way to imagine a photograph as a window to a place and a period in time before now? Although, in reality, time only moves forwards, so, maybe Barthes and Sontag are correct, but in the human experience, I can look at a visual image and shift time and space at my whim only limited by my imagination. When I look at pictures of my own daughter, I might see her death and even the moment of death, but equally I can use the photograph to remember other points in her life.
Barthes went further when he speaks of the catastrophe which has already taken place even as he looked at the photograph. Is he referring to fate or is his comment about grief and loss? Barthes was dealing with grief after the loss of his mother when he wrote these words. From my own grief, I understand how focus can be on death and on loss.
Sontag speaks of
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” (Sontag, 1979, p. 15)
Memento mori is Latin for remember death. It is interesting that Sontag too writes with this sense of mixing the past and the present.
This idea is shared by Gerhard Richter who says,
“There can be no photograph that is not about mourning and about the simultaneous desire to guard against mourning, precisely in the moments of releasing the shutter and of viewing and circulating the image. What the photograph mourns is both death and survival, disappearance and living-on, erasure from and inscription in the archive of its technically mediated memory”. (Richter, 2021, p. xxxii)
Richter references the work of artist Thomas Demand who constructs models which he photographs and then destroys the model.
Demand says of his work, “They [the models] have one peak of perfectness, of immaculate beauty, sometimes just for a day or two. If you don’t catch the shot on that day, it’s gone.” (Demand, 2012)
“The photograph captures the moment of the here and now that, once taken, no longer corresponds to any existing reality. Photographs of the self can be circulated in one’s absence, even when the self pictured in them is still alive, just as they will be when the photographed self has died. In this way, the photographic portrait prepares the self for its own death; it is a form of mnemonic mortification that commemorates a passing that already has occurred or that is yet to come”.(Richter, 2021, pp. xxxii–xxxii)
The work by Demand and the writing by Richter help me visualise this concept of death and the photograph. It is interesting from the point of view of my studies that a physical work aligned to a written work come together in this way. It makes me think of my research and of the creative physical pieces which are created and how these two things intertwine. It is also interesting to consider Richter’s idea on photographs outliving their reality. This made me think of photographs having a new purpose when their original purpose has been forgotten.
References
Barthes, R. and Howard, R. (1981) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Vintage Books.
Demand, T. (2012) Thomas Demand: Model Studies – Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham Contemporary. Available at: https://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/whats-on/thomas-demand-model-studies/ (Accessed: 22 April 2022).
Richter, G. (2021) ‘Between Translation and Invention: The Photograph in Deconstruction’, Copy, Archive, Signature, pp. ix–xxxviii. doi: 10.1515/9780804775014-002/HTML.
Sedgwick, D. (2008) ‘Winnicott’s Dream: Some Reflections on D.W. Winnicott and C.G. Jung’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 53, pp. 543–560. Available at: http://jungpage.org/learn/articles/analytical-psychology/915-winnicotts-dream-some-reflections-on-dw-winnicott-and-cg-jung (Accessed: 22 April 2022).
Sontag, S. (1979) On Photography. London: Penguin Books.