In La Chambre claire, Roland Barthes presents a manner of detective story. The manner is nouveau roman, for the initial purpose of the investigation is to establish whether or not there is anything to investigate; it is only when he at last comes to concentrate on a crime that our hero is able to envisage a solution. That crime is foreshadowed throughout the first part of the investigation, but the detective is unable to perceive the clues, and therefore interrogates a random selection of documents and motives, which might indeed constitute evidence could they only be related to a crime. At this point the detective, having drawn an almost complete blank, resigns; what follows is a palinode, his apologia for his inevitable failure thereto. He knew of the crime throughout. The clues concerning the victim were laid by himself, and when the reader too discovers the crime, he is able to return and read the clues foreshadowing this revelation from the narrator's own perspective: 'Je ne savais pas encore . ', 'A ce point de ma recherche'.2 And to know of the crime was perhaps to solve it, for the detective has in his hands the one document which certifies the victim's identity definitively. Unsatisfactory solution. The proof goes merely to question the possibility of proof, of knowledge. Justice cannot be done; with the victim, the state of innocence has died. A childhood dream of clarity has been lost, and for knowledge there is neither consolation nor denouement, only an uneasy truce with the duration of plot. The detective is left with his investigation (his corruption) incomplete, and stops only to record that 'these things truly were', before concluding, in the shadow of the now familiar assassin: 'I should be glad of another death' .3 Who then is the victim? The victim is Barthes' mother, and, in true formalist fashion, the murderer is death. The one document which certifies her true identity is photographic; it cannot be shown, for the certainty it offers is private, and it affords no consolation even to the author. Yet this photograph is photography, and in it are explicit the crimes of photography. Photography is an emissary of death; the record it leaves is both undeniable and perfectly irreducible. The Photograph of the Jardin d'Hiver has in it an essence of photography; it is that essence of photography which establishes that photography does exist, and which allows Barthes' investigation an object. On it must be founded all that can be said about photography, for in it emotion and reality are one. A paradigm, then, exists, a paradigm that seals Barthes into the death it exhibits. Photography is death; the essence of the photograph is time. But it is an inarticulate essence, and we can say nothing of it but that its record is authentic and without value. It does not evoke, it merely records. The photograph that is, for Barthes, photography, is for us merely the picture of a child, and undistinguished as such from the countless photos of children that inhabit the history of photography; in many of which, perhaps, an identity is perfectly defined (for someone), and we, for whom identity is (if we are to believe Barthes) a matter of resemblance and recognition, cannot recognise, cannot know, cannot care. An essence of photography, an insoluble crime: 'aa a ete: je connais nos critiques: quoi! tout un livre (meme bref) pour decouvrir ce que je sais des le premier coup d'oeil. Oui, mais telle evidence peut etre soeur de la folie.'4 The obsessive fact remains, that the photograph is an emanation of the referent; its authenticity is indisputable; and yet, and yet ... even if we could, by document or experience, certify that the child we do not see in the photograph we are not shown was that person, that unique person, Barthes' mother, we should know only that the physical imprint was, that the light fell thus, that she resembled this. We cannot know that here, as in no other image, her personality was expressed, her whole identity was defined. The autlhenticity itself merely contributes to the effacing in time even from memory of an individual. The photograph lives only in the referent, and the insoluble crime is death.