Page 133 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

COLLECTING LOSS 127

‘Their damaged edges invite me past seeing towards touch…I am torn by what lies
between these young women.’
Source Lady Hawarden, Clementina and Isabella Grace Maude c. 1864. London, Victoria
and Albert Museum.

pictures contained thin ghosts of the actual person photographed (of our aunt,
our cousin, our mother, our childhood friend, our self). We are haunted by our
family photographs. If thrown away— ‘What is it that will be done away with,
along with this photograph which yellows, fades, and will someday be thrown out,
if not by me—too superstitious for that—at least when I die? Not only “life”
(this was alive, this posed live in front of the lens), but also, sometimes—how to
put it?—love.’ 17 As Barthes has told us, photographs have an umbilical
connection to their referent, to life itself.
Likewise, because clothing is ‘perishable’ and because it takes on the body (it
takes form, smells, dirt), ‘it makes second graves for the loved being,’ even
before death, but especially after death—when we found ourselves confronted,
not only by dresser drawers, and shoe boxes and vinyl albums of photographs
that have traced the loved one’s body, but also their clothes. For me, wearing the