Page 141 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

COLLECTING LOSS 135

My father asleep, 18 months. ‘…I suspect that my father is wide awake and hiding.’
Our childhood photographs are an extraordinary touch with the real because
they are able to capture an essence of a unique being that we carry within
ourselves from birth to death indexically. Like footprints in the sand or
fingerprints in wax, photographs leave a trace of the referent. All photographs
are traces of a skin that once was. Balzac understood this; that is why he feared
losing thin ghosts of himself, like layers of skin, with each photograph ‘taken’. 31
Barthes is in touch with Balzac when he writes:

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body,
which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am
here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the
missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a
star. 32

Maybe this is why when I see an old childhood photograph of my father, my
grandmother, myself, I have an urge to touch it, to really feel it. And, even
though I (really) feel nothing but smoothness—in my body, in my heart I feel a
weighty ache, a pang of loss. I believe like Balzac, like Barthes, that the child
before me is touching me. He weighs me down, she weighs me down, with
grains of light that emanate from a small body that wears such childhood things
as short trousers, cotton dresses, white cotton shirts (without collars), striped
sweaters (with pointy collars), socks that bag and crinkle at the ankle.