The Most Intimate Image
Meditations on the profound intimacy of the highly technical nature of photography.
Though much photography is commercial – billboards, magazines, movie promotions, and so on – the photograph is a medium that has always had an element of the deeply personal. Family photo albums or photo lockets are the obvious example, but there is also the photobooth strip tucked in a wallet, the polaroid taped into a locker, the blurry candid smartphone photo of a joyful night out. Even the commercial photograph takes on a personal, even intimate character in, for example, the poster of a movie star pinned up and idolised by a teenager in the privacy of their bedroom. For both Roland Barthes and Hervé Guibert, photography serves as an entry point into as well as a framing device for intimate life writing. In Camera Lucida and Ghost Image, each writer discusses the nature of photography as a way to discuss, and discover, themselves, while also illuminating photography’s capacity for intimacy despite (or perhaps because of) its highly technical character.
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Hervé Guibert, Self-portrait, in front of the Christ mirror. |
Though Camera Lucida begins rather differently from most of Barthes’ writing, opening with a first-person anecdote about a photograph of Napoleon’s brother, Barthes’ familiar philosophical approach is immediately evident. Barthes spends the first half of the text laying out his theory of photography. He contrasts the studium (the elements of general interest in a photograph – the figures, the landscape, the poses) with the punctum, which ‘punctuates’ the former and ‘pierces’ the viewer (26). The punctum, though not found in every photograph, is what animates or moves the viewer. Because this concept is quite abstract (and because a photograph’s punctum is not at all fixed or objective), Barthes must give specific examples, which provides the perfect gateway to talking about his mother (and, indirectly, himself). He is able to reflect on his mother as he knew her and on his relationship to and affection for her as he describes the concept of recognition in photographs of people we know (63-67). Perhaps Barthes was unable to write about her without some kind of pretext. Regardless, his choice to use the photograph as his subject is apt, as it is an ambiguous medium, at once highly technical and deeply personal, both showing ‘reality’ through its indexicality and mediating a potentially intimate connection between subject and observer.
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Sienne, photograph by Hervé Guibert, 1979. |
Barthes seems to try to convince the reader that writing about his mother is coincidental, that his theory of the punctum happens to require the example of the Winter Garden photograph – certainly not that the entire text is a setup for his very personal writing about his mother. Guibert, however, is less surreptitious in his approach to life writing. Guibert states his thesis in the opening line of the book’s first essay (‘Ghost Image’, for which the book is named) – ‘Photography is also an act of love’ – then immediately begins an autobiographical story about his mother (10). Throughout the text, the various essays similarly combine photography and personal writing. In ‘Example of a Travel Photograph’, Guibert makes a claim about photography – that the drive to photograph must be instinctive desire – then describes moments in his relationship with ‘T.’ almost as evidence for this claim (68-69). In this essay, as in nearly all of the text, the theoretical and the personal are not only coexisting, but drawing on one another for cohesion, evidence, and interest. This dynamic is also at play in Camera Lucida, but Guibert seems far more comfortable participating in the autobiographical, never separating his theory from his personal experience.
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Hervé Guibert, photographed by Ulf Andersen in Paris, 1988. |
Photography, in addition to operating as a point of entry or impetus for both texts, also serves as a structural framework for each. In Camera Lucida, there is a stylistic distinction between the two sections. After the more technical (though admittedly, at times, rather novelistic) first section of the text, the second section reads like a memoir, personal letter, or diary entry: ‘Now, one November evening shortly after my mother’s death, I was going through some photographs …’ (63). But because Barthes has set up the text as an analysis of photography, his evening of looking through photographs of his late mother is reframed as a search for the punctum. In this way, he can rather suddenly begin talking about his mother’s character, her walk, her ‘chic’, her taste in decor, her personal possessions, even her smell, under the guise of illustrating his theory (63-65). The photograph he eventually finds to demonstrate the punctum – conspicuously absent from this phototext – is curiously of his mother as a child, not as the woman he so lovingly describes, though he finds elements of the woman he knew and loved in the five-year-old girl – her ‘kindness’, for instance (69). Ultimately, Barthes’ discussion of his mother and the Winter Garden photograph is quite effective in illustrating his concept of the punctum, thus validating his inclusion of life writing in the text. Instead of the two sections feeling disjointed, Barthes’ construction of photography as a framing device produces a unified text that combines theory and memoir in complement.
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Hervé Guibert, in a photograph by Hans Georg Berger. |
In Ghost Image, each short essay has one thing in common: photography. Without that narrative glue, the fragments of prose would be interesting, but not cohesive; the text as a whole, with photography as its backbone, serves to present both a (mostly implicit) theory of photography as well as a fragmented, though strikingly intimate sketch of Guibert’s self. Where Barthes uses sections to delineate the technical and the personal in his text, Ghost Image combines the two throughout. Through varied photography-related topics – the identification photo, the x-ray, the home movie, the envisioned photograph that never existed – Guibert is able to explore sexuality, friendship, dreams and fantasies, childhood memories, his relationships with his parents, and various other areas of interest, including Goethe and ocular science. Guibert’s approach to photography is itself highly personal, even autobiographical, so the intimacy of his writing also serves to convey his theory. In ‘Advice’, Guibert’s thesis is explicit: an interesting photograph requires an ‘emotional antecedent’, some kind of love or profound interpersonal interest, from the photographer (89). This thesis is conveyed as advice to two young photographers with whom Guibert speaks; the autobiographical moments are the vehicle for the author’s theory.
| For both Barthes and Guibert, the photograph’s technical yet intimate nature inspires writing of a similar character. While Ghost Image requires the photographic framework for cohesion, Guibert’s theory is supported by the personal character of his writing; and in Camera Lucida, Barthes’ theory both allows entry to and is illuminated by his life writing. In each text, the technical and the personal work together – much like a photograph, produced mechanically but guided by an ‘act of love’. |
