Lacunae Š 2013, Dan R. Talley Text excerpted from Camera Lucida: Relections on Photography by Roland Barthes Deep sky images from various public domain sources Family images from artist’s collection (complete resource list at end of text) Edition of three with one artist proof dbabad / www.danrtalley.com
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
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It is said that mourning, by its gradual labour, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believe this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do not weep), that is all. For the rest, everything has remained motionless. For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.
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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.
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The Photograph is an extended, loaded evidence — as if it caricatured not the figure of what it represents (quite the converse) but its very existence ... The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest shared hallucination (on the one hand “it is not there,” on the other “but it has indeed been”): A mad image, chafed by reality.
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Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object (how could Kertész have “separated” the dirt road from the violinist walking on it?).
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One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: “I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.� Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.
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When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: They are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.
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For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.
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Mom as a Cowgirl, circa 1939 NGC 5189, Hubble Space Telescope (National Auronatics and Space Administration) Dad as a Cowboy, circa 1939 (I was told these were taken at a fair) M101, The Pinwhell Galaxy Mom’s Studio Portrait, circa 1941
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ESO 499-G37, Hubble Space Telescope (National Auronatics and Space Administration) Incriptions on back of Dad’s Military Portrait, circa 1941 Dad’s Military Portrait, circa 1941 Abell 399 and Abell 401, Planck Space Observatory (European Space Agency) Embrace, circa 1942
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After the War, circa 1946 Helix Nebula, NGC 7293 (the Eye of God), Spitzer Space Telescope (NASA and Cal Tech) NGC 896, The Cracked Egg Nebula, JMSM Observatory, Mayhill, NM
All text excerpted from Camera Lucida: Relections on Photography by Roland Barthes
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