Page 123 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

CAROL MAVOR
COLLECTING LOSS

ABSTRACT
‘Collecting Loss’ develops themes from Pleasures Taken (Mavor, Duke
University Press, 1995) with an emphasis on the fetishization of
photographs and old clothes (exemplified, on the one hand, in Elin O’Hara
Slavick’s own girlhood dresses that she has stitched with haunting
memories of her childhood, and on the other hand in the lush photographs
taken by Sally Mann and the Victorian photographer Clementina
Hawarden). As Christian Boltanski has written: ‘What they [clothing and
photographs] have in common is that they are simultaneously presence and
absence. They are both an object and a souvenir of a subject, exactly as a
cadaver is both an object and a souvenir of a subject.’ Reading an old
photographic album made by her own grandmother against other maternal
collections of plenitude (whether they be old clothes or photographs or
domestic bric-a-brac), Mavor reveals how such accumulated goods are
made to fill in for the pangs of loss: lost childhoods, lost family histories,
lost memories, lost friends. Mixing corporeality and critical theory, Mavor
engages with Emily Apter’s notion of ‘maternal collectomania’ as a site of
provocative meanings worthy of placement alongside more conventional
discourses on visual representation and collecting.
KEYWORDS

photography, clothing, childhood, maternality, family album, collecting
All women…are clothing fetishists.
Sigmund Freud 1

What they [clothing and photographs] have in common is that they are
simultaneously presence and absence. They are both an object and a
souvenir of a subject, exactly as cadaver is both an object and souvenir of a
subject.
Christian Boltanski 2