The Mother
How the analysis is entangled, no, not entangled, pursued, through the contemplation and experience of personal loss. And its the loss of a mother, not a father, or a child. It strikes me as bold to talk about his love for his mother in this way. And that this loss, and his wound, is the basis for the analysis of photography, through the analysis of the photograph of his mother in the Winter Garden - that something so personal is both method and material for this analysis is simply wonderful. Such an analysis has a truthfulness and poetic beauty that numbers and references can't achieve.
Was there a time in which there could be analysis made based on feelings, the musings over a state of mind and heart, through experience only, and with oneself as the only expert? Has this time passed? It seems like a privilege.
Death
- And death, of course. The mothers death, the mother who he attempts to find in the photographs, but fails, and then perhaps succeeds, and then fails and succeeds again. As Susan Sontag talks of memento mori (photographs are always memento mori) in On Photography so does Barthes in his own way. He writes: "But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been. I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is at the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. /...)Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe." (pg 96). It makes me think that perhaps this is the force of any photography, this is the force of photography as such; it holds the nostalgic love of life and fear of death, not only of those who are in the picture but it reflects in me; I feel my own future death stab at me as my eyes meet those in the photograph. Barthes writes on a previous page:
"All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death. This is the way in wich our time assumes Death: with the denying alibi of the distractedly "alive", of which the Photographer is in a sense the proffessional. For Photography must have some historical relation with what Edgar Morin calls the "crisis of death" beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century; for my part I should prefer that instead of constantly relocating the advent of Photography in its social an economical context; we should also inquire as to the anthropological place of Death and of the new image. For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. "(92)
This reminds me of Zygmunt Bauman, who has also written about Death and, if I remember correctly, the extents to which the contemporary society is concerned with expelling Death. From life, with drugs and preventive treatments, from view, with elderly homes and other institutions. And we are concerned, whilst living, with eternalizing life, perhaps, quite possibly, by photographing ourselves. "This is who I was", "This was my life" to the afterworld.
Tallinn
9/8 2012
