Affiliation:
1. Department of History of Art, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA 19072, USA
Abstract
This essay, which reframes elements of my 2015 book, Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects, returns to the lacuna at the heart of Roland Barthes’s reflections on photo-graphy: the so-called “Winter Garden” photograph of his mother as a little girl. An image that is lovingly conjured but forever withheld, this photograph is the fulcrum of a theory of photography that emerged from the conjunction of mourning and desire. For Barthes, and all those working in his wake, the absent photograph is something of photography’s primal scene. With attention to the work of Eve Sussman and Simon Lee, their 2011 three-channel HD video Wintergarden and her 2018 NFT 89 Seconds Atomized in particular, this essay takes readers “back to the garden” to think about the time of early photography. To do so, this essay considers a range of contemporary videos that mine and mime the conventions of photography to produce static, durational encounters with stillness in a medium that is anything but, ultimately, revealing the truths and fictions of photography’s founding moment and fundamental logic.
Subject
General Materials Science
Reference19 articles.
1. Margulies, Ivone (2003). Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, Duke University Press.
2. Baker, George (2003). October Files: James Coleman, MIT Press.
3. Howard, Richard (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. First published 1980.
4. Kelsey, Robin, and Stimson, Blake (2008). The Meaning of Photography, Clark Art Institute.
5. Beckman, Karen, and Ma, Jean (2008). StillMoving: Between Photography and Cinema, Duke University Press.