Page 140 - Cultural Studies Volume 11
P. 140
134 CULTURAL STUDIES
Simon Watney as a little boy. ‘The photograph is familial…’
Source Photograph from Out There. Courtesy of Simon Watney.
in a series (‘Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art’) edited by Marcia
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Tucker. It has been said that the book is one of the most important texts on the
topic of cultural marginalization, but rarely do I get past the old family
photographs. I guiltily admit that these childhood snapshots are my favourite
part of this book. I take perverse pleasure in matching up what I know (or what I
imagine must be so) of the adult as it exists in the childhood photograph. I am
especially delighted to find a picture of Simon Watney (the cultural critic who is
one of the most important AIDS activists of our time) framed by grass and
backyard shadows, head down, bottom up, pants short, shoes sweet, face buried.
The photograph is familial; it is reminiscent of a photograph of my own father-
as-boy, in which my father’s face (like Watney’s) is also buried in a grassy
heaven of seclusion and childhood privacy. (My grandmother, with her familiar
and comforting cursive, has inscribed the picture of my father with the words
‘Asleep. 18 months’; yet I suspect that my father is wide awake and hiding.) But
in Out There, it is the little picture of Nancy Spero (the painter whose biting,
figurative works have been central to feminist art since the 1970s) that gives me
what Barthes has so famously referred to as punctum: a sometimes
unexplainable, but always personalized, sense of being wounded or pierced by a
photographic image. Looking at the charming snapshot of her sitting on an
oriental rug that has only temporarily landed, that appears ready for take-off, I
see a flash of her. I recognize her startlingly wide-eyed smile, the tightness of
her skin, the clarity of her ears, the fall of her hands, a certain love of the world,
an excitement that I swear I have seen before in photographs of her as an adult.
In the childhood picture, I see an essential image of her that has achieved
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‘utopically, the impossible science of the unique being’.
