Toward a Photography of Love: The Tain of the Photograph in Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red

Abstract

Toward a Photography of Love: The Tain of the Photograph in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red E.L. McCallum Abstract This essay examines the idea of the verbal photograph, particularly those in Anne Carson’s novel Autobiography of Red and Barthes’s winter garden photograph in Camera Lucida. The essay argues for a reconsideration of classic photography theory in light of the tensions around these seemingly absent photographs, suggesting that a counterpoint to the dominant equation of photography and death in photography theory is the alliance, abetted through narrative, of photography and love. “Today everything exists to end in a photograph.” —Susan Sontag, On Photography To speak of ending in a photograph, as Susan Sontag does, would seem to aver photography’s orientation towards death, an association it has held since its inception and one that has become practically axiomatic in photography theory. While Sontag means that our photophilia will turn everything eventually into an image (24), I’d like to ask what it means to end in a photograph, and what kind of end the photograph presents. For that matter, I’d like to interrogate the different ways of being a photograph. Will literature, too, end in a photograph or come to a photo finish? Does this end perhaps open up the form a photograph can take, complicating the truism that photography is thanatography? Might photography’s end be a proliferation rather than a singular event? Because film photography is, as Derek Attridge has pointed out, “analogically bound to the referent,” it faces a challenge in the digital age when the photograph “can always not be the direct effect of the referent on sensitized paper” (86). The change from emulsion to pixels impels us to rethink fundamentally what photography might be. Can we compare image pixels to those that comprise words? The change in medium raises the question of whether there is a change in the photographic relation as well: would photography no longer work through analogy, or for that matter through the contiguity of the negative and the printing paper? These questions push us headlong into the theory of digital images. But before we reach that end, before we consider what end has photography, or literature, come to in the age of the digital, I’d like to turn back and offer a palinode on the theory of the photographic image. Examining what’s behind the photographic image leverages a space to consider how the verbal medium for photography might come between film and digital. One can read Sontag’s claim as tracing out the conventional analogy between life and death, living and photography. To be sure, some of the most widely read photography theory focuses on death as the way of figuring ending in a photograph. Sontag herself sweepingly claims that “all photographs are memento mori” (15). Similarly, remarking on a photograph of himself in Camera Lucida (the book he wrote after the death of his mother), Roland Barthes tells us that “death is the eidos of that photograph” (15). Even critics who do not explicitly link photography with death tie it to implicitly deathly things: André Bazin, for instance, after suggesting that “the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor” in all of the plastic arts (9), goes on to claim later that photography in particular “embalms time” (14). Eduardo Cadava’s more recent reading of photography in the oeuvre of Walter Benjamin leads him to attest that “photography is a mode of bereavement. It speaks to us of mortification” (11). Geoffrey Batchen reveals that the link might reach back to portrait photography’s earliest days, when subjects’ “heads were inevitably supported by a standing metal device to keep them steady for the necessary seconds. Photography insisted that if one wanted to look lifelike in the eventual photograph, one first had to pose as if dead” (62); even so, “photography was a visual inscription of the passing of time and therefore also an intimation of every viewer’s own inevitable passing” (133). Bazin’s and Batchen’s revelation of time as key to photography’s thanatographic inscription is congruent with Christian Metz’s insights when comparing film and photography...