This is my second draft of this review. The written work here feels more concise than my first draft. The essay is unfinished but is longer than previously but at 2,600 words is still only half of the total length of the literature review when completed. I have taken on board feedback about removing superfluous detail such as the family history of Barthes. I have also tried to be more precise about using other sources to amplify or to explain the points Barthes makes. Later in my essay I have begun to work in Batchen bringing his views to the overall argument. In my next version I will bring in more of the other works which will form part of this review, Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Martha Langfords’ Suspended Conversations. I hope that along with Barthes and Batchen that these four works will not be too much for a 5,000 word literature review. If so I might need to rationalise my writing in my next draft.

As part of my revision of this document, I have reread some texts which I read previously earlier on in this unit. At this stage in my study, I have found that I am finding more meaning and depth to these written works so my rereading these works has been rewarding for me. This reminds me of watching some favourite film which acts on different levels and reveals itself in stages as we watch and watch it again. I have not specifically called out which literature I am reviewing in an introductory paragraph as didn’t feel this required but maybe I should signpost what am doing more.

28/09 – version ii

It would seem to be a natural human reaction to impending loss and to the grief caused by this loss to seek to capture that visual moment in time. Whether by looking at existing photographic images or to reach for the camera to create contemporaneous photographic images, these actions would appear to be attempt to try and find an image that conveys a sense of what has been lost and to freeze that memory or to try and find a previous moment in time that shows the person in happier times and in better health in an attempt to preserve that time or even to try and store the last precious moment of life before death. An attempt to capture the very essence of that moment containing the physical and the emotional aspects and, mirroring the capture of the photographic image, to fix it forever.

Roland Barthes wrote his book Camera Lucida following the death of his mother. Barthes seems to have lived his life surrounded by loss. His father died when Barthes was an infant. I can imagine a similarity 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)  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) This idea of chalk on a blackboard appears to have several levels of meaning. There is a sense that the chalk on the blackboard is like a memory which, through time, fades and is partially or wholly rubbed out until we are unable to exactly recall what was written and who was being remembered. With the fading of the exactitude of that memory, the sense of connection to that person fades. There is also a sense of the feelings of mourning fading through time. Barthes goes further when speaking of his mother and 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).” 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 but the photograph provides proof that this person who has been captured in the photograph was once alive and in that place in front of the lens but at the same time, the photograph reminds him of that person who will die. Susan Sontag echoes Barthes 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, 1979, p. 15)

I have to pause here and consider the word mourning used by Barthes. I don’t want this essay to be specifically about mourning and grief which is a very large subject but I believe it needs to be understood what Barthes means. The dictionary definition of mourning is a period of sadness or sorrow often related to the death or impending death of a loved one. It seems to me that this barely scratches the surface of the idea. The word mourning is related to terms such as loss and grief. Grief itself is an ancient emotion which can impact physical and mental health related to strong emotions such as anger, guilt and denial. It is not uncommon to read of people having an experience of grief and that this experience has changed them. My assumption when I read the word mourning in relation to Barthes and the loss of his parents that this involves grief and not just sadness.

Returning to Camera Lucida, is the fading of memory and of mourning the same for memories related to the written word and also to photographs which are more definite and fixed than are chalk marks on a blackboard? If I was to look at the blank blackboard and try to recall the exact words and what they meant and how they looked, I would have to rely on my memory. How exact might my recall of that memory be? Yet the photograph is an attempt at an exact copy or visual representation of the original scene. Does referring or even deferring to a photograph fill in the gaps in memory? Barthes states that, “The photograph does not call up the past” (Barthes, 1981, p. 82) Marianne Hirsch repeats the point, stating of Barthes’ words, “photography, he implies, does not facilitate the work of mourning.” (Hirsch, 2012, p. 20) This connection between words and photographs needs to be considered. As Barthes was an infant when his father died in the Great War, I might safely assume he had no visual memory of his father other than perhaps photographs or second-hand stories from his mother or, in his given example, the words on the blackboard at school which served as a proxy for his memory of his father. In an echo of what Barthes says about his father, after his mother died, 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 states that “I had no hope of ‘finding’ her, I expected nothing from these photographs”. 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) This is interesting because it would appear that whether using the written word or a photograph to try and conjure a sense of a person, neither can exactly mirror the lived human memory not the real moment the memory records. Another important meaning to Barthes’s words about nothing being left of his mourning, which is highly relevant aspect to the photograph and to visual human memory, is that the apparently simple act of looking at a photograph can replace that original memory with a memory of the photograph or we can even invent new memories. If we imagine an event we see in real life as the original, first-hand record and if we read about this event or look at a photograph, this is a second-hand record. If, however, we keep looking at the photograph, human memory can reduce, compact and shape our memory of the original event so that we can no longer be certain which is our real original memory and which is our memory shaped by looking at the photograph. In this case does the reviewed photograph impacted memory become a third-hand record? Hirsch speaks of this when quoting Marguerite Duras’s words, “photographs promote forgetting…It’s a confirmation of death.” (Hirsch, 2012, p. 20) This echoes the thoughts of Barthes who tells us that the photograph, blocks memory, “Not only is the photograph never, in essence, a memory… but it actually blocks memory, becoming a counter memory.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 91) Barthes’s point is that the photograph is not an inert object but that it interacts with the human mechanism of codifying and of recalling each memory. The photograph can become my memory and can replace my visual memory. Importantly, by extension, what the photograph does not show must not have happened so these details are gradually deleted from memory. Barthes phrases this as, “The photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused and transformed.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 91) When we look at a straight photograph the event shown must have happened at some point in time so how can we deny this basic truth? How can memory be greater than the empirical, mechanical truth of a photograph? Susan Sontag phrases this as, “Photographs furnish evidence… The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture.” (Sontag, 1979, p. 5) Barthes tries to resist this violence of the photograph wiping clean the chalk marks of his memory by trying to avoid the photograph, “I cannot place it [the photograph] in a ritual (on my desk, in an album) unless, somehow, I avoid looking at it (or avoid its looking at me), deliberately disappointing its unendurable plenitude and, by my very inattention, attaching to it an entirely different class of fetishes”. (Barthes, 1981, pp. 90–91) I wonder if whether in trying to avoid a photograph, Barthes is attempting to keep a grip on his sense of mourning for the loss of his mother or father.  Geoffrey Batchen writes about the photograph and memory in his book Forget Me Not asking whether photography is a good way to try and remember things or whether it is solely concerned with nostalgia. He tells us that, “the photograph does not really prompt you to remember people the way you might otherwise remember them—the way they moved, the manner of their speech, the sound of their voice, that lift of the eyebrow when they made a joke, their smell, the rasp of their skin on yours, the emotions they stirred. (Can you ever really know someone from a photograph?)” (Batchen, 2004, p. 15) What Batchen is talking about is the complexity of human memory. The memory isn’t only about the single sense of sight. A memory will contain all sorts of inter-related threads. Interesting then that when we view a photograph which is all about one sense, we recreate the fabric and depth around this photograph as of a real memory. Batchen quotes Siegfried Kracauer who said that photography, “captures too much information to function as memory. It is too coherent and too linear in its articulation of time and space.” (Batchen, 2004, p. 16)  Barthes speaks of this idea of nostalgia and of being unable to separate the logic of a photograph from its pathos. “As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for ‘sentimental’ reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observer, and I think.” (Barthes, 1981, p. 21) The emotional response which Batchen calls nostalgia often relates to a perfect, airbrushed, rose-tinted and perfect view of the past. A memory which, perhaps for reasons related to trauma and the preservation of the human psyche, has been trimmed of rough edges, negative thoughts and reality. This returns to my original question asking why it appears to be a natural human reaction to impending loss and to the grief to seek to capture that visual moment in time through photography. The photograph will record the pale pallor of the skin at the point of death, the pain on the face of a loved one as they suffer and each time this is viewed will remind us of their pain and of our own pain. Is it any wonder that as an act of self-preservation, the human mind might shape our memories? As Barthes searched for a ‘perfect’ image of his mother, was this really a search for a comfort blanket and not a search for a true, perfect, warts and all image?

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 seemed to demand an image to be accurate to his sense of her and to provide a sense of justice. (Barthes, 1981, pp. 69–70) The key phrase here is “sense of her”. I imagine that Barthes wanted an image which matched the image of his mother inside his head.

Photography when used for reasons of nostalgia seems to me to be more about an emotional response rather than seeking to store a factual memory.

Batchen goes on to describe memorials and keepsakes for the purposes of declarations of love or marriage troths and connected with death, grief and memory, but adds that often such memorials are made into something more than a photograph, increasing the sense of time in their creation by adding text, painting on the photograph, framing the photograph and by adding the photograph to a mirror or locket. In a way what Batchen says has an element which applies to me on working on this project.  There is another very important point Batchen raises, “Photography…unlike other systems of representation, the camera does more than just see the world; it is also touched by the world.”(Batchen, 2004, p. 31) This echoes a point Barthes makes, “to know that the thing of the past, by its immediate radiations (its luminances), has really touched the surface which in its turn my gaze will touch” (Barthes, 1981, p. 81) This is important when thinking of photography for the purpose of memorial as there is a sense that those who have died have left a “visual imprint, as faithful to the contour of the original object as a death mask is to the deceased.” (Batchen, 2004, p. 31) This mixing of other forms with the photograph brings with it new ways to experience the photograph for example the memory of the noises of the tools, the feel of the materials as they worked or the smells released by sanded wood or of the application of paint or if text. It also gives a different sense of time in the creation of the memorial, no longer a fraction of a second to expose a photograph.

 

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.

Hirsch, M. (2012) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

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