Page 130 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

124 CULTURAL STUDIES

My grandfather ‘…he turns his face away from the camera—the old Ford grimaces and
returns the camera’s gaze for him.’
attention is distracted from her by accessories which have perished: for
clothing is perishable, it makes a second grave for the loved being. In order
to ‘find’ my mother, fugitively alas, and without ever being able to hold on
to this resurrection for long, I must, much later, discover in several
photographs the objects she kept on her dressing table, an ivory powder
box (I loved the sound of its lid), a cutcrystal flagon, or else a low chair,
which is now near my own bed, or again the raffia panels she arranged
above the divan, the large bag she loved (whose comfortable shapes belied
the bourgeois notion of the ‘handbag’). 9

The photographs, objects themselves, record objects within them (dress, dressing
table, ivory powder box): things that stand in for her, not wholly, but partially. It
is no wonder that he never ‘recognized her except in fragments’. These mother-
10
objects are tied to her and to Barthes, who (despite his claims) could never really
cut the cord.
Because photographs so poignantly speak of death and loss, they (as Barthes has
written) wound us, prick us, reach us like ‘the delayed rays of a star’. 11 Every
photograph is a record of a moment forever lost—snapped up by the camera and
mythically presented as evermore. The family album is always torn by the
sorrows of loss: lost childhoods, lost friends, lost relatives, lost memories, lost
objects, lost newness. Pressed into the album, not without joy, the images