Keeper of the Hearth/Picturing Roland Barthes’ Unseen Photograph

Abstract

This collection is far more beautiful than expected, an immersive and affecting emotional experience that accompanied the developing reality of COVID-19 and its disjointed unfolding of time. Most of all, Odette England’s book is an affirmation of photography’s relationship to memory – to the feeling of memory, to the kind of time travel photography affords and to the malleability of moments upon revisitation. England’s project began with a call for responses to Roland Barthes’s discussed but not shown ‘Winter Garden’ photograph, introduced to the world in his 1980 book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Prompting contributions from over two hundred artists and writers, England did so much more than compile a collection. ‘I’m growing a garden’, she proclaimed to her astounded postal worker. When Barthes describes gazing upon the ‘Winter Garden’ photograph, he speaks as one who has been chosen and drawn into a relationship with an object. But he had been seeking a photograph that contained his mother’s ‘essence’ and he found it – depicted here as a young girl. Did he choose this photograph as a site worthy of his focused remembrance activity or did it ‘choose’ him? Is he mistaken in what he sees in it? Does this unillustrated photograph even exist at all? In the pages of Camera Lucida, he breathes life into his mother’s photographic portrait (life he would sooner breathe back into her if only that were in his gift) because that is what he is able to do in his capacity as a skilled writer and philosopher. And he succeeds. Although held from view, this photograph – and thereby his mother – continue to fuel imaginations. Celebrating forty years since the publication of this seminal piece, England’s book is named for the little girl in the photograph – Henriette, feminine for Henry, meaning ‘keeper of the hearth’. Keeper of the Hearth sparks with intimate, mostly unnamed photographs – unobscured by the credits that appear only at the very end in alphabetical and not numerical order. Sparsely interspersed with personal anecdotes and insightful pieces of critical writing, staggered sheets of paper of varied opacity and weight add to the sensation that the reader is moving through a scrapbook – performing memory work. Each page is a special moment or memory shared – a gift. The generosity Barthes showed in putting his grief into words – and not simply showing the object of his grief – is echoed by these responses. Keeper of the Hearth is a testament to the generative power of vulnerability. The photographic submissions feel intensely personal, their meaning only occasionally enhanced by written testimony. Charlotte Cotton suggests that these contributions serve to ‘collectively stand in for Barthes’ withheld photograph’, many showing signs of wear as though overloved or handled. Subjects and landscapes are often obscured – not everything is given. Occasionally, only a caption or darkroom notations remain, or the photograph turns its back to the viewer – displaying instead the lined residue of a photograph album’s adhesive or the imprint of a subject that is made to appear as though pushing outwards beyond the constraints of the backing. Studies of the very old and the very young are recurrent themes; the nape of a neck, tendrils of hair, a weathered hand – evocative images that enable and often require the viewer’s own emotional investment. As I turn each page, these photographs are imbued with my own memories, hopes and worries – each amplified in the current moment by COVID-19. I encounter Angela Kelly’s contribution, the photograph of a girl peering out towards the photographer – her mother, oblivious to the capture as she speaks to someone beyond the frame – and am reminded to consider my own children’s experience of this moment. Selectively choosing which moments to capture, influencing their memory of this time, I identify with the woman photographing her toddler on a beach blanket. A few pages later, I am gifted the results of her shoot – a tightly cropped swirling of baby’s first hair. The pacing is impeccable. Bereavement intensifies and exposes emotional engagements with photographic portraits. Whether we have lost someone to COVID-19 or not, most of us are grieving in some sense right now. Grieving lost freedoms, lost connections – now more than ever – we depend on photographs and digital likenesses, to feel close to absent individuals. In this moment of social distancing, we cannot go to loved ones who are ill. When loved ones die, we cannot assemble to share in our grief – to perform what rituals are available. In this moment of not fully grievable losses, the photographs and testimonies shared in the pages of Keeper of the Hearth are all the more poignant. The photograph of an elderly woman over water brings to mind the eighty-year-old woman heard on the radio – the one who refused to accept the ventilator that could save a young life. I think of the stories that will die with these elders – no longer available to narrate family photographs. As I turn to the photograph of an adult hand over an elderly hand, I receive news of another friend’s lost grandparent and know that there was likely no one to hold his hand. In this moment when everything is forcibly separated, nothing can be separated. I cannot separate this book or this review from my experience of this present that is shifting backwards and forwards. That is what memory does and that is what this book accomplishes. Reviews