Not Barthes’ Winter Garden Photograph
Have you ever happened upon a photograph that seems to depict somebody you know, or a place where you think you have been? An image that reminds you of a person, a feeling, or a situation you think you yourself have been in, while knowing perfectly well that the photograph you see can't possibly be connected to that situation or person you have in mind as an actual event in time? –
Those are those photographically stimulated recollections I am trying to think about in this essay. I refer to these photographic triggers as non-like photographs: images that left their worldly referents behind, now reflecting what we bring to them with a longing sense of false recognition. They might prompt something we want to see, something that constitutes a missing link or a lack, something that finds us even when we are not looking, something that catches us unaware. Enhanced by fading identifications or purposeful misrecognitions.
Can you think of a photograph that has those faculties for you? – Keep this image in mind; we will need it as the essay develops in its speculative ways. If you have it with you – great; if you only see it with your inner eye – equally good (as we are speaking in the context of memory and autobiography here, in the context of this book).
Our initial description of happening upon a photograph by looking at it as a non-like image doesn't apply to Roland Barthes’ famous Winter Garden Photograph though: a portrait of his mother-as-child taken long before he was born, in which he finds something that reminds him of her, the mother he knew during his lifetime. A photographic portrait that he never shows to the readers of his book Camera Lucida, knowing that it wouldn't have the same wounding effect on us, because we never knew her, and therefore cannot experience the quasi-physical connection the image allowed him to keep alive after her death.
This quality of having-been-there – this little death of a moment, which becomes a thing of the past once it is being photographed – that Barthes isolates as the ‘noeme’ of photography, is in fact multi-facetted. The term was developed by him in relation to memorising his mother after her death, through a long-gone moment in time that ‘died’ (according to Barthes) in the instant it was pictured, which he then used (shortly before his own death) to define what to him was ‘essentially photographic’.2