Page 149 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

COLLECTING LOSS 143

most profound absence in the book is the lack of any photographic images of
Nadja, an absence which only emphasizes her haunting presence in the text.
Nadja’s striking non-materiality is later and similarly mirrored in Camera Lucida.
For Barthes’ treasured Winter Garden Photograph (which propels the narrative, yet
never appears among the twenty-five photographs which illustrate the book), is all
the more present by its absence.
15 Virginia Dodier, ‘Lady Hawarden’, from the pamphlet that accompanied The J.
Paul Getty Museum’s show ‘Domestic Idylls: Photographs by Lady Hawarden
From the Victoria and Albert Museum’ (Malibu: The J.Paul Getty Museum, 1990).
16 Peter Wollen, ‘Fire and Ice’, Photographies 4 (1984). As quoted by Christian
Metz, ‘Photography and fetish’, October 34 (Fall 1985):84.
17 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 94.
18 Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1981, p. 61.
19 Milan Kundera in ‘After word: a talk with the author by Philip Roth’, in The Book
of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim, New York: Viking
Penguin, Inc, 1981, pp. 234–5. Quoted in Lynn Gumpert, The life and death of
Christian Boltanski’, from the exhibition catalogue Christian Boltanski: Lessons of
Darkness, curated by Lynn Gumpert and Mary Jane Jacob and co-organized by the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, p. 64.
20 Melanie Pipes, unpublished essay, 1994.
21 Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973, p. 149.
22 Elin O’Hara Slavick, artist’s statement, in Embodiment, a catalogue prepared in
conjunction with the Embodiment exhibition, organized by Angela Kelly, Randolph
Street Gallery, Chicago, 22 November-28 December 1991, p. 13.
23 Angela Kelly, Introduction to Embodiment, p. 6.
24 Reynolds Price, ‘For the family’, Afterword to Sally Mann’s Immediate Family,
New York: Aperture, 1992 (no page numbers).
25 Price, ‘For the family’.
26 Hirsch, ‘Masking the subject: practising theory’, in The Point of Theory, Mieke Bal
and Inge E.Boerr, editors, New York: Continuum, 1994, p. 122.
27 Ibid., p. 109
28 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 34.
29 Russell Ferguson et al., editors, Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary
Cultures, New York and Cambridge: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and
The MIT Press, 1990.
30 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 71.
31 Nadar addresses this in his discussion of Balzac and the daguerreotype: ‘According
to Balzac’s theory, all physical bodies are made up entirely of ghostlike images, an
infinite number of leaflike skins laid one on top of the other. Since Balzac believed
man was incapable of making something material from an apparition, from
something impalpable—that is, creating something from nothing—he concluded
that every time someone had his photograph taken, one of the spectral layers was
removed from the body and transferred to the photograph. Repeated exposures
entailed the unavoidable loss of subsequent ghostly layers, that is, the very essence
of life.’ (Nadar, ‘My life as photographer’, trans. Thomas Repensek, October, 5
(Summer 1978):9.