Notes on Love and Photography

Abstract

Is Roland Barthes dreaming when he writes Camera Lucida? Does he think of his mother every day, or of the mother of whom he dreams every day (he tells us at one point that he only dreams of his mother), or of the mother that he both knew and did not know, saw and did not see, or of the mother that was never herself? Is he haunted by the ruin of all the memories of her that he wished to capture, in the writing of this book, for every day and always? Or by what happens, one day, between photographic technology and the light that helps bring to life a photograph of his mother when she was five years old-a photograph in which he claims to find the truth of the face he loved, and from which he seeks to "derive" all photography? Or * We would like to thank Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh for their encouragement and support, and Roger Bellin for his diligent research assistance. A longer version of this essay will appear in Palinodes, a collection of essays on Camera Lucida, edited by Geoffrey Batchen and Doug Nickel, and forthcoming from MIT Press and the Center for Creative Photography. When my gaze meets yours, I see both your gaze and your eyes, love in fascina-tion-and your eyes are not only seeing but also visible. And since they are visible (things or objects in the world) as much as seeing (at the origin of the world), I could precisely touch them, with my finger, lips, or even eyes, lashes and lids, by approaching you-if I dared come near to you in this way, if I one day dared. -Jacques Derrida, On Touching I desire you. I desire only you. . . . Where are you? I am playing hide and seek with ghosts. But I know I will end up finding you, and the whole world will be newly lit because we love each other, because a chain of illuminations passes through us. -André Breton, Mad LoveTo be on an island inhabited by artificial phantasms was the most insupportable of nightmares; to be in love with one of these images was worse than being in love with a phantasm (perhaps we always have wanted the person we love to have a phantasmatic existence).-Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel

Diasporic Erotic: Love, Loss, and the Copy

“…Photography, like love or death, is the experience of the singularity that is repeated or the repetition that appears as something singular. 31 These lyrical ruminations about the formal structures of love and photography as both singular and repetitive phenomena also lend themselves to our understanding of a diasporic erotic (in this instance). In this sense, these photographs of the ao trang, and of the women who wear them, are indexes, like ruins, of a beautiful dream that has gone beyond recovery, the (copy of a) fragment that allows us to touch the totality to which it once belonged -love, the referent, the desired object, the beloved body -and whose memory belongs to us.…”

“…Consider this with the photograph, which is also the return of the dead to us: "This is why the photograph always appears as a form of haunting which, evoking a material trace of the past, condenses, among so many other things, the relation between the past and the present, the dead and the living, and destruction and survival." 35 Such provocations (the ghost in the photograph, the photograph as the ghost) vividly evoke for us the past's profound resonance in our experience of the present. In this way the spectral calendar girl is the breach of both time and space: she waits for us in the past, in the future, forever.…”

“…To borrow from Cadava and Cortés-Rocca, "The body that poses for the camera is a photographic body, a subjectivity that does not exist before its representation but that instead constitutes itself in the act of sitting in front of the camera," that is constituted by the shutter's click and the digital processing of the photograph. 48 Contemplating the act of posing before the mechanical eye, Barthes writes: "In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art." 49 Or as Hoai assays, "I want the focus to be on the ao dai, the curves and the emotions of the photo, not the model."…”

Changing the Memory of Suffering: An Organizational Aesthetics of the Dark Side

“…As Sontag (2003, p. 85) emphasizes, collective instruction creates of an open situation a singular, dominant interpretation: photographs that ‘everyone recognizes’ become ‘a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about’ (Sontag, 2003, p. 85). At the institutional level, as Crane (2008, p. 309) argues, ‘certain recirculated images’ have created ‘a sense of familiarity with the Holocaust’, a process which Cadava and Cortés-Rocca (2009, p. 119) refer to as ‘dehistoricization’:To naturalize a political use of photographic technology and to convert this reading of the photograph into ‘the’ reading of it is, like any ideological operation, the result of a dehistoricization of the multiple modes in which the photographic image is circulated and read.…”

“…This instructional force of a photograph, its significance, its theatricality but also mythic potential, is particularly explored in Roland Barthes’ (1981) Camera Lucida , in which any assumed referentiality is progressively eschewed in favour of ‘a theory of photographic becoming in which the photograph is a force of transformation’ (Cadava and Cortés-Rocca, 2009, p. 109). In Camera Lucida , Barthes (1981) develops a systematic analysis of photographs, uncovering two heterogeneous elements whose co-presence establishes the significance of an image: the analytical doublet studium and punctum .…”