The latest photographic offering in the Guardian from the estimable Sean O’Hagan is about a new project, and related book, responding to Roland Barthes’s iconic book Camera Lucida.
At the heart of Camera Lucida, although it only makes an “appearance” about half way through the book, is a photograph of the author’s mother at the age of five. The irony is of course that the photograph itself does not actually appear at all; we only have Barthes’s description of it. (The book might, given that absence, perhaps have had an alternative title of Camera Vacua, the Empty Room, which opens up the pun – for which I can only apologise but nevertheless cannot resist – based on the modern, English, meaning of “camera” of the Empty Camera.)
What this recent project and its resulting book do is try to fill that gap, with various artists, writers, and others, presenting found or created images that in a way refer back to the photograph of Barthes’s mother and stand in for it. I have not seen a copy of the book, which is called Keeper of the Hearth after the French meaning of his mother’s name, Henriette, but will almost inevitably do so in due course, not least because it perhaps goes some way towards answering, or at least considering, one of the abiding questions about Camera Lucida: did the photograph actually exist?
I am aware that some critics, in particular have argued that it did not. I have not looked into any of those arguments, and have no firm view of my own one way or another, but it is certainly an interesting one, that I have thought about, and that does seem to me to have important implications for for issues about the “truth” and reliability of photographs. This is of course something that interested me throughout my time studying with OCA.
A number of possibilities occur to me. One is of course that the photograph did indeed exist. Why then does it not appear if it was such a pivotal image? Perhaps simply because it represented such a personal memory for Barthes that he did not want to share (all) of it? Was he making a point about the unreliability as a memory device? Was it a jeu d’esprit in the style of Lawrence Sterne in Tristram Shandy with his refusal to picture Widow Wadman, leading to the infamous blank page [147] and the exhortation to “Paint her to your own mind”? I cannot quite see Barthes being this frivolous but it is an idea that appeals to me.
Along this line of thought, and with parallels to this new project, in 2018 The Lawrence Sterne Trust (run from the actual Shandy Hall by the resourceful, entertaining, and hospitable, Patrick Wildgust) ran a project with 147 artists, writers, actors, assorted celebrities, to produce their own images or texts representing their own personal imaginings of the Widow. Great fun but also seriously thought provoking, as this new book will no doubt be.
Or, getting back to the point, did it not exist? Was it just a McGuffin, a useful mechanism for making his broader point?
In any event, even if it had appeared in the book would we have been able to trust it? In the absence of any corroborating context would we have been able to know whether it was genuine or not? But is that not largely the point, whether the photograph existed or not, and whether or not it was included in the book? This very much makes me think of various of the books by WG Sebald (whom O’Hagan mentions) that include photographs. There reliability, their veracity, is always open to question, which in turn adds to the lingering doubts about the precise status of some of his works: are they fact or fiction?
And that is of course a point that I keep coming back to, that photographs in and of themselves are not necessarily “the truth”.
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