In reading through Camera Lucida I was left with an uneasy feeling about the Winter Garden story in which Barthes ‘sees’ all that is his mother. Leaving aside the question as to whether the photograph existed the question that remained for me was - How did he know that it was his mother? Obviously he could not know through his own experience so it is safe to assume that either someone told him or that he saw in the image someone he wanted to be his mother. Barthes is suspected of imagining the Winter Garden photograph because of his desire to find a photograph that captured the essence of his mother so it can be argued that this overwhelming obsession could have led him to identify a photograph of two children one of whom he decided was his mother.
In considering this possibility I considered how I knew that photographs of myself as a young child were actually of me. The earliest photograph of me that I have in my possession is me as an 8 year old child at a wedding reception. As far as I know this is the only image there is of me until I am 20 years old. I look at the photograph and despite having been told that the young child is me I have no recollection whatsoever of the actual event. I do not deny that the event took place, indeed I recognise the bride and groom as being my Aunt and Uncle (my Mother’s brother) and also recognise about 50% of the others who are/were relatives of mine. What I do not do is recognise myself. I cannot see the essence of myself in this image.
The photograph of me at 20 years of age is of me holding my baby daughter and I can remember such a time and identify where it was taken. Although the photograph was taken over 50 years ago I know with certainty that the adult with the baby is me. I have many photographs that cover the time that photograph was taken to the present day sufficiently close together in time for it to be possible to see the gradual changes as I grew older. I have a sense of continuity across the 50+ years that allows me to say with some certainty that that set of photographs is of me. Yet I cannot, with any certainty, place the first photograph into the sequence. Why should this be so? For me it raises the question of the difference between how we see ourselves and how we are recorded in a photograph.
There has been a discussion recently in ‘We Are OCA’ [http://www.weareoca.com/photography/damn-it-man-im-a-photographer-not-a-model] about the reluctance of photographers to be photographed. Although the comments now seem to be concentrating on the relationship between the photographer and the sitter the key comment for me was the one posted by Peter Haveland (14 Oct ’13 4.19p.m.) in which he suggests that ‘’.....they don’t approve of the way they look in photographs”. Being very much a reluctant sitter I can identify with this suggestion. What I see in a photograph, no matter how well it is composed and lit, is not how I imagine myself to be. The mental image I have of myself, and which I nurture, is at odds with the ‘reality’ portrayed. Is this an explanation of why I can consider the possibility of the child in the photograph not being me? Do I see in that child elements that I do not wish to acknowledge?
In Barthes case he had a mental image of his mother that all, bar one, of the photographs he found were not a true representation of the person he remembered. In my case I seem to have a mental image of myself as a child, which I cannot put into words, that allows me to challenge the validity of a photograph. I doubt it for reasons I cannot express. I trust that I am not alone in this respect that others have a similar experience when looking at images of themselves. My contention is that without a memory of the event we cannot know with certainty that what we are told is a photograph of us is a fact. We can only rely upon our trust in those providing us with the information.
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