Barthes’s Religious Substance Photography and Acheiropoietos Keith Broadfoot Abstract How are we to understand Geoffrey Batchen’s observation that, according to many commentators,

the image that forms the frontispiece to Roland Barthes’s famous Camera Lucida, Daniel Boudinet’s Polaroid, is ‘a central, perhaps even the central, image in Barthes’s argument, despite never being mentioned by him’? I wish to argue that this image relates to what nearly also goes unsaid in Barthes’s text, but yet can likewise be taken to be the central determining factor in his argument; namely, his admission that his relationship to photography is inescapably shaped by the ‘religious substance out of which’ he is ‘moulded’. Barthes draws a connection between the mould (as a form of contact), the Christian tradition of acheiropoietos (an image made without the touch of the human hand) and photography that crucially determines our understanding of what Batchen also identifies as the central invisibility around which the book is written: a ‘sacred “nothing”’. Résumé Comment comprendre l’observation de Geoffrey Batchen que, selon beaucoup de commentateurs,

l’image Polaroid de Daniel Boudinet qui forme le frontispice du livre célèbre La chambre Claire de Roland Barthes, est ‘central, peut-être même le central, image dans l’argument de Barthes, malgré le fait qu’il n’en fait jamais mention dans le livre.’? Mon propos est que cette image se relie à un autre clef de son argument qui est presque passé sous silence; à savoir, son admission que son rapport avec la photographie est indéniablement formé par ‘la substance religieuse dont je suis pétri’. Barthes dessine par là un rapprochement entre le moule (comme forme de contact), la tradition chrétienne des acheiropoietos (une image faite sans contact de la main humaine) et la photographie qui détermine crucialement notre compréhension de ce que Batchen identifie également comme l’invisibilité centrale autour de laquelle le livre est écrit: un ‘sacré “rien”’. Keywords Roland Barthes, André Bazin, Georges Didi-Huberman, photography, religion.

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Where does photography come from? In La chambre claire/Camera Lucida (1980/81), Roland Barthes went against popular thought in suggesting chemistry rather than painting as an answer. It is not Albertian perspective that is decisive in photography but its capacity to register light. Photography’s ‘noeme’, its ‘that-has-been’, came about, Barthes explains: Only on the day when a scientific circumstance (the discovery that silver halogens were sensitive to light) made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object. 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 transmissions is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with [the one] who has been photographed. (Barthes, 1981: 80–81) The emphasis that Barthes places on the emanation of light is no more evident than in the photograph he selects for the frontispiece to the book, Daniel Boudinet’s Polaroid.

Of this

photograph, however, Barthes says nothing, which is in complete contrast to his treatment of the famous ‘Winter Garden’ photograph (an image of his mother as a child) of which he speaks exhaustively without ever revealing it. Yet, it is precisely because of this opposition that the two photographs should be understood as inextricably linked. In the introduction to his anthology of critical writings on Barthes, Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Geoffrey Batchen highlights this connection, and notes how some commentators ‘have argued that Boudinet’s Polaroid is a central, perhaps even the central, image in Barthes’s argument, despite never being mentioned by him’ (Batchen, 2009: 16). This single photograph is selected from a sequence of works, titled Fragments of a Labyrinth, that Boudinet made of his apartment over the period from dusk to dawn, using only the natural light entering via a window. The image Barthes selects is the moment of the coming of light, a dawn that could equally be that of photography itself. In the same way that Barthes writes that ‘all the world’s photographs formed a Labyrinth. I knew that at the center of this Labyrinth I would find nothing but this sole [Winter Garden] picture’ (1981: 73), so this selected photograph can be the one photograph that announces the coming into being of all photography. However, in this photograph – with the image hovering on the edge of emergence – there is not, as Batchen notes, ‘much to see’ (2009: 16). Yet, as Barthes is at pains to argue, what one can see is not of the essence of a photograph. As a frontispiece, this particular photograph already enacts the signficance of the book’s title. The set-up that Boudinet uses as an aperture – the only source of light through a window – may make one think of the camera obscura. However, it is the Vol. 13, No. 3 (2012)

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la chambre claire – literally, the room of light – that is presented. The curtain that falls in front of our eyes is there as the ‘skin’, as the light that is ‘a carnal medium’. Looking at this photograph, even without a body there, one feels the presence of the ‘missing being’. Viewers search in vain for the trace of an impression left by a body on the bed or pillow, and it is the curtain that stands in for this missing contact, doubling as it does the photographic surface. In the ever-so-subtle and slight parting of the curtains, the opening is one to a pure luminosity. Diana Knight argues this forms part of Barthes’s ‘symbolic narrative of refinding his mother in the literal chambre claire of the glass conservatory’ (Knight, 1997: 138). Knight notes that just before he discovers the Winter Garden photo, Barthes is struck by the brightness (clarté) of his mother’s eyes. ‘For the moment’, Barthes says, ‘it was simply a physical luminosity, the photographic trace of a colour, the blue-green of her pupils’ (1981: 66). Yet this will be, as Knight proposes, ‘the mediating light that will lead him at last to the essence of her face, a blue-green luminosity which is also that of the Boudinet polaroid’ (1997: 138). All this confirms Batchen’s idea that in seeking to see what is barely visible in Boudinet’s Polaroid, one sees the essential invisibility of the Winter Garden photograph. Polaroid, Batchen writes, is the other to the Winter Garden Photograph, that much discussed but never reproduced imaginaire in which Barthes finds the essence of both his mother and photography. These two photographs are presented by him as inseparable manifestations of the same labyrinth – one (barely) visible, the other not at all (except in our mind’s eye). Borrowing an analogy pursued by Barthes in Empire of the Signs, his 1970 book about his impressions of Japan, one might say that the Boudinet picture represents ‘the visible form of invisibility [hiding] the sacred “nothing”.’ Its presence is necessary to maintain the binary dynamic that animates every aspect of this book. Accordingly, any translated edition of La chambre claire that does not include the Boudinet image should be regarded as fatally flawed. (2009: 17)

Unfortunately, this brilliant insight is not developed in the rest of Batchen’s collected essays. What of the sacred? Of the ‘nothing’? Of the visible form of invisibility? Herein, I believe, lies something crucial to the understanding of Camera Lucida; something that should be explored by returning to Barthes’s declaration in the book, where he states that his relationship to photography is inescapably shaped by the ‘religious substance out of which I am moulded’ (1981: 82). If Barthes initially seeks the origin of photography in chemistry rather than painting (the history of which is tied to the Renaissance institution of Albertian perspective and the camera obscura), this is because its true vocation is not that of resemblance. Photography’s peculiar power

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of presence, its effect of the immediacy of contact, needs to be understood as a quality that defies the figurative. Barthes writes: Nothing can prevent the Photograph from being analogical; but at the same time, Photography’s noeme has nothing to do with analogy (a feature it shares with all kinds of representations)... To ask whether a photograph is analogical or coded is not a good means of analysis. The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation. (1981: 88) Barthes’s observation here needs to be carefully considered. This excess of authentication over representation means that the photograph is essentially abstract. A photograph’s power of authentication is an effect of its contact: the photograph is in touch with what is photographed. This contact destroys the distance from the object that a schema of representation or resemblance would require. It is the always-implicit element of touch – and photography is etymologically defined as writing with light – that brings about the excess that causes the photograph to disfigure and distort. Consider the image that Barthes captions as The First Photograph (Niepce’s The Dinner Table). Should the indeterminate and vague nature of the image simply be overlooked as belonging to photography in its infancy – a kind of technical immaturity that will soon be overcome? Barthes’s answer is no. Rather, what can be found in the blurs and blotches of the image is the very excess of authentication over representation. Ultimately, the image’s illegibility contains a truth that photography will never pass beyond. In the darkness of the gaping hole towards the centre of the picture, sight no longer sees. What exactly one is looking at here thus passes into strange and unfamiliar territory. But then, oddly, what this means is that the authenticity of the image is something of which sight is not the ultimate guarantor. A disquieting paradox emerges here, which Barthes meditates upon many times throughout the book: if contact brings about authenticity, it also creates anguish, because, after all, how can one ever be certain about something that remains no more than an abstract mark? Photography incites such wonder for Barthes that he at first believes the photograph should be categorised as an ‘anthropologically new object’ that ‘escapes the usual discussions of the image’ (1981: 88). It is not, however, a totally new object, for, going against his own claim, Barthes suggests a precedent. In arguing that the photograph’s purpose is not to restore what has been abolished, but rather to attest that what one sees has indeed existed, Barthes writes: Always the Photograph astonishes me, with an astonishment which endures and renews itself, inexhaustibly. Perhaps this astonishment, this persistence reaches down into the religious Vol. 13, No. 3 (2012)

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substance out of which I am moulded; nothing for it: Photography has something to do with resurrection: might we not say of it what the Byzantines said of the image of Christ which impregnated St Veronica’s napkin: that it was not made by the hand of man, acheiropoietos? (1981: 82) To properly appreciate this key passage, one needs to be aware of an unfortunate omission that occurs in its translation. In the original text, the passage reads as follows: Peut-être cet étonnement, cet entêtement, plonge-t-il dans la substance religieuse dont je suis pétri; rien à faire: la Photographie a quelque chose à voir avec la résurrection: ne peut-on dire d'elle ce que disaient les Byzantins de l'image du Christ dont le Suaire du Turin est imprégné, à savoir qu'elle n'était pas faite de main d'homme, acheïropoïètos? (Barthes, 1980: 129) Here, Barthes proposes that one can say of photography what the Byzantines said of the image of Christ – ‘dont le Suaire du Turin est imprégné’ (‘with which the Shroud of Turin is impregnated’). In the translation, however, the reference to the Shroud of Turin is replaced with St Veronica’s napkin. Both the Shroud of Turin and St Veronica’s napkin are instances of what is known as acheiropoietos, that is, an image made without the intervention of a human hand. In the case of St Veronica’s napkin, the story goes that Veronica, seeing the drops of agony on Jesus’ brow as he walked past her on the way to Calvary, wiped his face with a napkin. Later, she discovered that the features of Christ’s face were miraculously impressed upon the cloth. The Shroud of Turin is the supposed burial cloth that covered Christ’s body; again, miraculously, an image was formed through direct contact without the touch of human hand. Significantly, however, thanks to the workings of photography, this image of Christ came to reveal itself anew in the Shroud of Turin. Photography literally gave a new life to the Shroud on the day that a photographer saw Christ gazing out at him from the depths of the chemical bath in which his photograph of the Shroud was developing. For Barthes, it is this joining of the miracle of photography with the miracle of Christ makes the Shroud of Turin such a privileged object – unable as he is to decide on which side his ‘astonishment’ should lie. In the original French passage, the fusion between photography and the Shroud is even more evident. Barthes describes that the astonishment he always feels with a photograph ‘plonge-t-il dans la substance religieuse dont je suis pétri’ (‘immerses me in the religious substance from which I am moulded’). This immersion, with its Christian connotation of the formation of self through baptism, is, at the same time, in its association with the Shroud of Turin, at one with the photograph immersed in the chemical bath and the miraculous appearance of the image on the blank (virgin) piece of paper. In Barthes’s subsequent exclaimation over this religious substance – ‘rien à faire: la Photographie a quelque Vol. 13, No. 3 (2012)

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chose à voir avec la résurrection’ – ‘rien à faire’ suggests that it can’t be helped, or that there is nothing to do or to make, as if this understanding of photography, like that of the acheiropoietos, works all by itself. The eliding of the Shroud of Turin reference also inadvertently adds to (what for many commentators is) Barthes’s surprising absence of any signficant reference to André Bazin’s writings on photography. Considering that on the first page of Camera Lucida, Barthes writes of how he ‘was overcome by an “ontological” desire to know what Photography was “in itself”’, it is striking that there is no reference here or later to Bazin’s key article, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’. Perhaps it is because, as Barthes also emphasises here, he liked ‘Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it.’ His approach can be seen to oppose Bazin’s, a writer who had perhaps approached photography only to better understand the cinema. Barthes was thus trying to separate the links that Bazin had formed. However, I wish to highlight a more specific connection between Barthes and Bazin here. In his aforementioned article, Bazin includes an intriguing reference to the Shroud of Turin at a pivotal point in his argument. Like Barthes, Bazin first makes a claim for photography as a completely new form of image: ‘For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man’ (Bazin, 2004: 13). This sense in which the image is made – without the touch of the human hand – once again recalls the tradition of the acheiropoietos. Continuing, Bazin suggests that whatever one’s rational mind might think to the contrary, with photography ‘we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re- presented, set before us’, and here includes a footnote to the Shroud of Turin. If in photography there is a ‘transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction’, then one should, he suggests, also ‘examine the psychology of relics and souvenirs’ that do the same. In particular, ‘let us note in passing that the Holy Shroud of Turin combines the features alike of relic and photograph’ (2004: 14). As in Barthes’s text, Bazin reveals an uncertainty in where to place the Shroud of Turin; is the desire for photography, its origin, already present in the acheiropoietos? Are they, in Bazin’s terms, part of the same pyschology of the image? The crucial connection to be established here is not simply related to the removal of the human hand; it is in understanding the importance of contact – how the image arises from the cloth or material that has been in contact with the body. When Bazin comes to define photography, this element of the acheiropoietos remains.

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In his later essay, ‘Theater and Cinema Part Two’, Bazin argues that, before photography, the plastic arts (especially portraiture) were the only intermediaries between actual physcial presence and absence. Their justification was their resemblance which stirs the imagination and helps the memory. But photography is something else again. In no sense is it the image of an object or person, more correctly it is its tracing. Its automatic genesis distinguishes it radically from the other techniques of reproduction. The photograph proceeds by means of the lens to the taking of a veritable luminous impression in light – to a mold. (2004: 96) Given that the idea of the mould is such a pivotal concept for Bazin it is hard not to recall Barthes’s statement of his underlying ‘religious substance from which I am moulded.’ Ultimately, the key influence of not just religion but also Bazin comes back to Barthes. Barthes suggests a link between a mould, photography, acheiropoietos and the identity of the ‘I’ that is already present in Bazin. To understand these connections, the authors’ key shared reference to the Shroud of Turin needs to be developed. In his article ‘The Index of an Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)’, Georges DidiHuberman undertakes a remarkable analysis of the various ‘modalities of the desire to see’ (1984: 64) that underlie the attempt to see a figurative image in the stains on the Shroud of Turin. How does one go from seeing an abstract stain – which, as an accidental blemish seems outside of meaning and lacks any recognisable form – to seeing an image of Christ? Didi-Huberman initially positions this move within a concept of ‘figurative Aufhebung’, because he realises that the proof of Christ’s physical contact with the Shroud must be maintained even if a figure begins to emerge out of (or is ‘uplifted’ from) the abstract stain. Certainty, therefore, cannot be said to lie exclusively with either the figure or the stain. There cannot be a proof on the side of the figure and doubt on the side of the stain. That a figure could arise from the stain would only be on the condition that it is able to detach itself from the stain’s impregnation into the weave and texture of the cloth. The figure can only establish itself as a recognisable form by differentiating itself from the opacity of the surface so that, in a sense, it can no longer be said to be in contact with it. Yet, this is precisely what should not occur, for if it were to do so there would be merely an image lacking all physical evidence: all its powers of verification would be lost. This emphasises the fact that the authenticity of the ‘true’ portrait depends on the canvas, cloth or shroud being in contact with the body of Christ. Without the indexical effects of contact, there would be nothing. Separated from their support, the stain and the figure become questionable. As a result, a dilemma is posed: for there to be evidence, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2012)

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any authenticity can only be given in the non-figurative and non-mimetic nature of the stain. Contact necessitates a certain disfiguration, such that the power of authentication, as Barthes writes, would always exceed the power of representation. Didi-Huberman astutely realises all this in noting that the ‘absence of figuration therefore serves as proof of existence. Contact having occurred, figuration would appear false’ (1984: 68). He then extends his reasoning to include this crucial insight: ‘Every figure has its origin where it is effaced, if that place of origin is a place of contact’ (1984: 68). This insightful thought transforms one’s reading of Bazin. Consider the following passage by Bazin: The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model. (2004: 14)

Didi-Huberman’s proposal forces us to turn Bazin’s logic on its head: it is not in spite of, but because of, the abstraction, that the image is the object. To approach photography as DidiHuberman does in his analysis of the Shroud of Turin is to provide the means of thinking through the implictions of Bazin’s claims, repeated by Barthes: that the essence of photography lies beyond resemblance. In order for interpreters of the Shroud to see more than just a stain, Didi-Huberman argues, they need to begin with a ‘dramaturgical deduction’ (1984: 78). The stain is a trace of Christ’s Passion, an indexical record of the dramatic event of Christ’s crucifixion. By paying close attention to all of the stain’s details, one might be able to determine what actually occurred during the crucifixion. Pierre Barbet, a surgeon at the Hôpital Saint-Joseph in Paris, was one such interpreter. He embarked on a project to attempt to establish definitively where the nails with which Christ was crucified entered his body. After the seemingly endless number of diagrams and X-rays he amassed to support his claims, Barbet’s study concluded with one extraordinary experiment. To establish his theory of crucifixion beyond all doubt, Barbet offered a final piece of proof; as he said, ‘One more for good measure’. However, it was perhaps one piece too many. Even as he presented his crowning piece of evidence, he admitted that it was necessary to ‘apologise for including these last two photographs, which even I think are hideous and blasphemous’. These photographs show how he, in his own words, ‘found some human tatter in the Anatomy cloak-room, perfectly fresh and supple and proceeded to crucify it’ (1984: 77–78). Vol. 13, No. 3 (2012)

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The photographs that Barbet produced are horrific in their extreme realism. Indeed, the excessive nature of the procedure begs belief; the study has moved from a mark on a piece of fabric to a real thing, a real person, crucified. Yet, this hideous and blasphemous reality is nothing but a phantasm. Considering Barbet’s final element of proof, Didi-Huberman realises that what he initially described as the ‘dramaturgical deduction’ – the stain as the mark of a dramatic event – is not really a deduction. Rather, it is more like what Aristotle, in outlining the different forms of logic, labels an abduction; that is: A syllogism whose major premise is evident (it is evident that if there are stains on the Shroud of Turin they are the index of something), but whose minor premise is only likely (probable); the probability of the conclusion, therefore, is only as great as that of the minor premise. (1984: 78) And, as Didi-Huberman reasons, for the probability to be only as great as that of the minor premise, the reconstruction of the Passion needs to be one of ‘pure scenic verisimilitude: a pure resemblance’ (1984: 78). Thus, there must be an actual presentation, rather than representation, of the drama of the Passion. At this point, though, the extremely odd nature of this form of proof becomes evident, for is not a pure resemblance the very absence of any resemblance? A pure scenic verisimilitude and the move towards a perfect imitation would not be a move towards some proof equating the copy with the original, but towards an uncanny and horrific double. What this double constitutes – or rather, consecrates – therefore, is the loss of the original. This loss should be understood not so much as an original that is then, subsequently, lost, but a condition of pure loss. The double is not, therefore, copying any prior model; rather, it gives body to this pure loss. This move beyond the standard notion of imitation produces a significant insight; strange as it may seem, the absence of imitation returns the figure to the place where figuration produces itself. That is, because the figure in its process of doubling goes beyond resemblance, it, like the stain, is non-mimetic – both imitate nothing. Thus, each can return to the other and generate itself from the other. What there is, finally, is the mutual mimesis of nothing – a creation ex nihilo. There is another related, quite marvellous, aspect to this whole process that needs to be mentioned. Against the usual reading of Walter Benjamin – which would suggest that in the age of technological reproducibility, an artwork’s aura declines and its cult value is replaced by its exhibition value – with the Shroud of Turin, this cult value returns through the medium of photography. It returns through photography’s exposure, its exhibition. Through the photographic process, the Shroud of Turin’s status as a cult object is doubled, with the one becoming inseparable from the other. Indeed, the ultimate detail, the final tendering of proof, is for the Shroud to be a Vol. 13, No. 3 (2012)

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photograph – for the medium of photography to be the burial cloth. Where then, to repeat Barthes’s words, does the astonishment lie? Is it that photography, all by itself – again, in the manner of the acheiropoietos – completes the miracle? The final twist to the logical unfolding is that photography itself converts a crucifixion into a resurrection. Writing on the photographing of corpses, Barthes writes ‘if the photograph becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse, it is the living image of a dead thing’ (1981: 78). If Didi-Huberman speaks of how the final veracity of the photograph gives way to a ‘phantasm of referentiality’, then this phantasm is equally a spectre or ghost – just what, not coincidentally, Barthes wished to evoke when he called the person or thing photographed the ‘Spectrum’ of the photograph. In its root, this word retains ‘a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead’ (Barthes 1981: 9) I have detailed this photographic encounter with the Shroud of Turin to understand the special place it holds in Bazin’s and Barthes’s texts. In particular, this privileged object of astonishment – one that fuses the religious substance and the photographic medium – bears a similar relation between the abstract and the figurative revelation that occurs when Barthes views the Winter Garden photograph of his mother. I will briefly sketch out the rudiments of this connection. After the death of his mother, Barthes journeys back in time by means of viewing different photographs of her. Mournfully passing from one photo to the next, he searches for her, for the ‘truth of the face I loved’ (1981: 67). Against his expectations, Barthes finds this in a photograph of his mother as a child; he exclaims, ‘There she is!’ What, though, does he see? ‘Lost in the depths of the Winter Garden’, he writes, ‘my mother’s face is vague, faded’ (1981: 99). Without the image being clearly defined, it is more abstract than figurative. Even so, there his mother is. Barthes lingers over this photograph, and, like the faithful in front of the precious Shroud, he lovingly scrutinises it, wanting to ‘know more about the thing or the person it represents’ (1981: 99). Barthes writes that what pains and anguishes him in analysing a photograph is that sometimes, when moving through a number of them: ‘I get closer, I am burning: in a certain photograph I believe I perceive the lineaments of truth. This is what happens when I judge a certain photograph “a likeness”’ (1981: 100). But what is a likeness? Likeness only offers the endless playing out of what is already photographed. Of this, Barthes offers a proof a contrario: ‘Finding myself an uncertain, amythic subject, how could I find myself “like”? All I look like is other photographs of myself, and this to infinity: no one is ever anything but the copy of a copy, real or mental...’ (1981: 102). What, then, does Barthes see in that vague and faded face in the photograph, the one that Vol. 13, No. 3 (2012)

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offers him the splendour of the truth precisely because it is, as he specifies, a ‘lost, remote photograph, one which does not look “like” her, a photograph of a child I never knew?’ (1981: 103) Finding a ‘likeness’ offers no consolation for Barthes; all it provides is an identity ‘as itself’. Whereas what Barthes finds in the Winter Garden photograph is a subject, as he says, quoting Mallarmé, ‘as into itself eternity transforms it’ (1981: 102). One could liken Barthes’s distinction here to what Kant would designate the sublime. What is sublime possesses the inexpressible quality of an absolute singularity; it is beyond comparison, existing outside of any analogy. Kant writes: ‘We soon perceive that for this it is not permissible to seek an appropriate standard outside itself, but merely in itself. It is a greatness comparable to itself alone’ (1952: 97). The inevitable supplement to this, however, is that the absolutely singular is a resemblance that immediately doubles itself to consecrate the loss of the original and unique being. It is this ‘beyond resemblance’ – what Barthes is looking for in a photograph of his mother – that is found in the Winter Garden photograph: a sublime presence that is at one with its absence. At this point, we touch the photograph and the photograph touches us; we enter the mystery of photographic contact, closing our eyes to receive the longed-for embrace: I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die, as Nietzsche did when, as Podach tells us, on January 3 1889, he threw himself in tears on the neck of a beaten horse: gone mad for Pity’s sake. (1981: 117)

This final aspect of touch – this ‘taking into my arms what is dead’ – acts out the element of contact that Barthes believes to be the photograph’s founding condition. However, one should not think that this remaining trace on the photograph allows some direct return to the referent. Even if Barthes maintains that the referent ‘adheres’ to the photograph, there is no clear passage back to a distinct or even directly nameable referent. Rather, the condition of contact opens up in the trace a mark of difference. If the referent returns, it does not do so within the stability of the same; as in the spectre in the Shroud of Turin, it is as already doubled or divided, that is to say, different, from itself. It is then not simply either a case of the same or the different, but both at once, reminiscent of that impossible conjunction of terms that Freud located in the uncanny: the familiar and strange together, one inseparable from the other. How the Winter Garden photograph leads Barthes to reassess his thoughts on the punctum, which is the singular way in which a photograph touches you, confirms this thought. Contrary to how he initially locates the punctum – as something that can be delimited with some precision, something that can be clearly marked out through a kind of close inspection of the photograph – the Vol. 13, No. 3 (2012)

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new punctum is what undoes any clear form. After the Winter Garden photograph, Barthes knows ‘that there exists another punctum (another “stigmata”)... This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (“that-has-been”), its pure representation’ (1981: 96). At this crucial point, Barthes’s ‘religious substance’ is again brought to the fore. The ‘stigmata’, the piercing of the body of Christ, opens a wound and gives way to an outpouring that is not within the confines of a stable, figurative form. The first example Barthes gives of his new understanding of the punctum is Alexander Gardner’s portrait of a young man about to be hanged. The punctum is: ‘He is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been: I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake’ (1981: 96). If resemblance offers any familiarity it also immediately renders everything strange, with the uncanny confusion of the live and the dead giving way here to an unspeakable horror. Finally, it is worth returning to the curtain in Boudinet’s photograph. How is this photograph the photograph? In the opening pages of Camera Lucida, Barthes reflects on the causes for the writing of the book, speaking of how he was troubled by the thought that Photography did not even exist, that it had no ‘“genius” of its own’. In the quest to know Photography’s own origin and ‘ontology’ , to make it stand out from ‘the community of images’, Barthes consistently works throughout the book to separate photography not only from cinema but, more importantly, from painting. Barthes imagines that the people who saw the first photograph ‘must have thought it was a painting: same framing, same persepctive’ (1981: 30). Ever since this moment, photography has been unable to escape from this dependence; indeed, the degree of influence has been so allpervasive that, Barthes argues Photography…has made Painting, through its copies and contestations, into the absolute, paternal Reference, as if it were born from the Canvas (this is true, technically, but only in part; for the painters’ camera obscura is only one of the causes of Photography; the essential one, perhaps, was the chemical discovery). (1981: 31) A curtain figures prominently in Pliny’s famous tale of the contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius to determine who was the greater painter. When Zeuxis revealed his painting of grapes, birds flew down to peck at the painting’s surface. Feeling superior and confident that he could not be beaten, Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to draw back the curtain so that he could see what he had painted. Almost immediately Zeuxis realises his error – the curtain is the painting – and Parrhasius is the victor. Lacan astutely observes that, compared to Zeuxis who just deceives the birds, ‘the opposite example of Parrhasios makes it clear that if one wishes to deceive a man, what one presents to him is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that incites him to ask what is behind it’ (Lacan, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2012)

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1979: 112). If this desire defines something essential to painting, the curtain that begins Camera Lucida is different. Batchen writes of the curtain that it is ‘obscuring our vision of what lies beyond’ (2009 : 16). Yet, if there is obscurity – if it is marking an invisibility – it is not necessarily to indicate that what cannot be seen lies in a region beyond. It is not that the curtain prevents us from seeing behind or even through it. Rather, the desire is in the curtain itself; it is in the fall of the curtain, in the folds of light and darkness – of how light is in the darkness and the darkness in light – that absence and loss are embodied. Further, to again recall Batchen’s original proposal on the relation between Boudinet’s Polaroid and the invisible Winter Garden photo, it is not as if the image is ‘hiding the sacred “nothing”’. Rather, if one thinks not only of this curtain but equally the nature of the photograph as shroud, mask or mould, then the sacred nothing arises from the simple yet simultaneously strangely mysterious process of contact itself. It is not, and this is the final uncanny conjunction, that one has been barred access to the sacred domain – that it cannot be seen because it is closed off in some other transcendent beyond – it is that this sacred nothing can be found in the most mundane and material of things, in the indescribable beauty of the most ordinary of photographs.

References

Barthes, R. (1980), La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, Gallimard, Le Seuil. Barthes, R. (1981), Camera Lucida, New York: Hill and Wang. Batchen, G. (2009), (ed.), Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press. Baxandall, M. (1972), Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bazin, A. (2005) What is Cinema? Volume. 1, (2nd edition), Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Benjamin, W. (1979), ‘A Short History of Photography’, in One Way Street and Other Writings, London: Verso. Didi-Huberman, G. (1984), ‘The Index of an Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)’, October, 29, pp. 63–-81. Didi-Huberman, G. (1995), Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. Kant, I. (1952), The Critique of Judgement, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knight, D. (1997), ‘Roland Barthes, or The Woman Without a Shadow’, in Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, ed. Rabate, J., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Vol. 13, No. 3 (2012)

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Lacan, J. (1977), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin.

Keith Broadfoot is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History & Film Studies, University of Sydney, Australia [email protected]

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