Page 132 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

126 CULTURAL STUDIES

depress the beholder; they speak in melancholic tones. ‘With the Photograph, we
enter into flat Death.’ 12
And like childhood and new woollen winter coats and linen blouses and
mothers and silk dresses and felt hats and distant cousins and grandmothers,
photographs deteriorate, spoil, die, benumb, weaken. ‘Not only does it [the
photograph] commonly have the fate of paper (perishable), but even if it is
attached to more lasting supports, it is still mortal: like a living organism, it is
born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment then
ages…. Attacked by light, by humidity, it fades, weakens, vanishes.’ 13 The
photograph dies like a body. And like a body, we simply cannot throw it out.
(We bury the dullest, even the ugliest, photographs in drawers and boxes.) To
tear or to cut the photograph is a violent, frighteningly passionate, hysterical
action, which leaves behind indexical wounds, irreparable scars. (My friend
Patricia snatched some albums away from her father. I was shocked to see that
he had cut her mother out of each and every one of the pictures—even the
wedding photographs. What absolute violence!)
I experience my friend’s missing mother, or the ripped picture found at the
bottom of a box, or those blank spaces in my father’s album where paper photo-
14
corners mark a picture’s escape, as ‘convulsive beauty’. Such undue alterations
captivate me for the ways in which they suggest untold, unimaged, lost and often
purposely forgotten stories. My attraction to ravaged photographs lies behind my
love for the endless photographs taken by Lady Hawarden of her ravishing
daughters in fancy dress (1860s). I fetishize and desire these some 800 pictures,
not only because the girls (Isabella Grace, Clementina, Florence Elizabeth) wear
old clothes that their mother collected—magnificent party dresses, boys’ velvet
breeches, laced underwear, black riding habits, and silk flowers in their hair—
but because their edges have been torn and cut, ripped and scissored. ‘Originally
they were pasted into albums, but before presentation to the Victoria and Albert
Museum [by Hawarden’s granddaughter] the pictures were cut or torn from the
album pages.’ 15 Hawarden’s ‘family albums’ were preserved by her relatives,
only to be destroyed by them. Almost all the photographs bear the mark of this
final gesture that completed their short flight from home (5 Princes Gardens, South
Kensington) to institution (the Victoria and Albert right around the corner). Their
damaged edges invite me past seeing towards touch. Looking at Clementina and
Isabella Grace Maude (c. 1864), my fingers move along the picture’s chewed
edges only to feel the crispness of Isabella’s net petticoats, the pull of Isabella’s
back sash, the tightness of Isabella’s bound hair, the warmth of Isabella’s forearm
where it is graced by Clementina’s hand, the burning of Clementina’s gaze as it
shoots like a star into the eyes of Isabella. I am torn by what lies between these
two young women.
Yet most of us are anxious to preserve our images of ourselves and our loved
ones (as whole and as undamaged), like ‘flies in amber’ (as Peter Wollen has
written). 16 So, we often ask ourselves, what are we to do with these traces of
bodies that fill drawers, boxes, shelves, attics, basements, closets? It is as if our