Image Warfare, Retro-Tableaux and the Multimediated Self

Nicholas Zurbrugg

De Montfort University, Leicester

Projecting the contradictions of twentieth century image culture into an apocalyptic future in which photo-imaging is replaced by the cybercultural impact of ‘crystal image meal’, William Burroughs’ novel Nova Express depicts a society addicted to ‘millions of images’ (1964: 53). Here, Burroughs envisages a sci-fi cosmos manipulated by a ‘death-dwarf’ who boasts how he ‘can just blast it out and control you gooks right down to the molecule’, so long as he too gets his ‘image fix’ (1964: 53-4).

image: WILLIAM BURROUGHS, TOWERS OPEN FIRE, 1963

As stills from Antony Balch’s film Towers Open Fire (1963) suggest, Burroughs tends to adopt the persona of the ‘image-warrior’, technologically cutting-up word and image in order to subvert mainstream imaging. The mid-to-late twentieth century, Burroughs suggests, increasingly enters into states of ‘image warfare’, in which different kinds of words and images fight for authority, more often than not neutralising one another’s credibility.

Retreating from Burroughs’ apocalyptic vision to the slightly less threatening horizons of present times, this paper attempts to examine the ways in which the early-to-mid twentieth century’s modernist sensibility and the mid-to-late twentieth century’s postmodern sensibility explore surprisingly similar reservations and surprisingly parallel enthusiasms when considering the impact of photographic imaging.

Like Burroughs, postmoderns such as Jean Baudrillard and Roland Barthes often associate the confusions of contemporary image-culture with predominantly negative kinds of ‘image fix’. Commercial imaging, they suggest, really does fulfill Burroughs’ prediction that ever more sophisticated images will ultimately ‘control you gooks right down to the molecule’ by sedating whole populations with this or that kind of ‘image fix’ (1964: 53-4). Cult TV programmes such as ‘Big Brother’ and ‘The Weakest Link’, for example, constantly supply image ‘addicts’ with voyeuristic dramatizations of interpersonal betrayal.

In Paul Virilio’s terms, we are all increasingly the voluntary victims of what he deplores as the iconic ‘terrorism’ of the ever more commercialized imagery that he associates with the ‘hyperviolence and hypersexuality’ (1999) frequently characterizing the young British artists associated with the ‘Sensation’ exhibition.

image: VERY MAGAZINE ADVERT, 1998

As advertisements for arts and life-style magazines such as VERY suggest, commercial fashion advertising and commercially fashionable art increasingly converge. In both advertising and art we are likely to confront the same ‘cool’ catwalk stare and pose, as super-artists and supermodels become one and the same.

image from: SERGE BRAMLEY/BETTINA RHEIMS LIFE OF CHRIST, 1997

One thinks for example of the image of Salome in the French photographers Serge Bramley’s and Bettina Rheims’ recent Life of Christ (1997) series of giant photographs, where the model posing as Salome adopts much the same studied vacancy as VERY magazine’s cover-girl. Combining high-chic eroticism and self-consciously simulated macabre detail, this juxtaposition of Salome’s nipple and a waxwork severed head seems to evoke the same kind of highly contrived cosmetic detail - and the same kind of fashionably soft-pornographic immediacy - that one finds in such nineteenth century tableaux as Lord Leighton’s Psamathe (1879-80).

image: LORD LEIGHTON, Psamathe, 1879-80.

At the same time, the supposedly sacred images in the Life of Christ series also share much of the voyeuristic appeal of Bramley’s and Rheims’s earlier Hotel Room (1992) photo-series featuring amateur models selected more or less at random from casual passers-by.

image from: SERGE BRAMLEY/ BETTINA RHEIMS HOTEL ROOMS, 1992

The charade-like playfulness of these Hotel Rooms photographs offers a curiously nonchalant semi-eroticism as opposed to the more serious ‘professionalism’ of hard-core pornography. Such images, one might suggest, are sub-pornographic tableaux, neither fish nor fowl, and neither wholly fair nor wholly foul.

In turn, Bramley’s and Rheims’ religious photographs evince a similarly nonchalant vacuity. What becomes lost in each of these two series of photographs, in other words, is both profane intensity and sacred intensity. In both series of photographs one finds oneself confronting a curious kind of post-auratic high chic imaging in which both erotic and aesthetic energies become de-energised, as they enter the low-voltage ‘circuitry’ of commercial high-fashion imaging.

In the Life of Christ series, Bramley’s and Rheims’ models are unmistakably professional ‘models’, professionally ‘modelling’ this or that biblical figure or situation, and at best authentically presenting the professional authenticity of fashion models modelling contemporary biblical chic. Likewise, in the Hotel Rooms series, Bramley’s and Rheims’ amateur models are unmistakably amateur ‘models’, ‘modelling’ or demonstrating or simulating this or that pornographic pose, rather than literally enacting any particular erotic action.

And in much the same way, the flamboyant nudity of the enfant terrible of young British Art, Tracey Emin, is at best a process of self-consciously playing at being an bohemian artist, playing at being a ‘bad girl’, or playing at being a model – as the photograph tellingly titled Naked Photos – Life Model Goes Mad, (1996), conveniently demonstrates.

image: TRACEY EMIN, NAKED PHOTOS - LIFE MODEL GOES MAD, 1996

What seems most obvious here is the fact that Emin has not ‘gone mad’ at all, but is at best posing at ‘going mad’ – if the process of a model painting in the nude really means ‘going mad’. Maybe this photograph might more appropriately be titled ‘Young Wannabe Goes Exhibitionist’.

Here, as in the Bramley and Rheims photographs, photographic imaging culminates not so much in the intensity of what Virilio calls ‘hyperviolence’ and ‘hypersexuality’ (1999), as in the banality of a kind of hyper-chic, hyperstylized Déjeuner dans le Studio. Once again, one confronts work at least partially evincing the carefully posed sensuality of such Victorian studies as Lord Leighton’s Psamathe.

Contemporary photography’s increasing overlaps with post-auratic – or more accurately, sub-auratic - commercial imaging become still more clear if we consider the ways in which fashionable imaging apes past and present painting.

While there was a certain shock value to Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), there is at best a curiously ambivalent, hyper-realist and hyper-romantic chic to Malcolm McLaren’s popmodern parody of this composition in the photograph entitled Go Wild in the Country used for the LP cover of the record See Jungle! See Jungle! (1981) by punk rock group BOW WOW WOW.

image: MANET, DEJEUNER SUR L’HERBE, 1863

image: MALCOLM MCLAREN, BOW WOW WOW LP COVER, 1981

If Nick Logan, editor of The Face magazine, hails this as ‘the best rock n’roll photo ever taken’ (Logan, quoted by McLaren, 1986: 192), it is perhaps because of the partially innocent and partially prurient panache with which it impudently recycles what McLaren calls Manet’s ‘matter-of-fact’ portrayal of nudity. But as McLaren rather more accurately adds, it also revamps the ‘classic eighties exploitation newspaper shot of a pop group caught in the act, where the girl’ – in this instance, thirteen year old lead singer Annabella Lewin – ‘would be the only one who would notice the intruder (the photographer)’ (1986: 192).

As McLaren indicates, he found he had successfully masterminded a ‘colour snapshot’ that was sufficiently ‘provocative, classy, noble and rock n’roll’ to dissolve almost all boundaries between the ad star, art star, style star, pop star and porn star. All that remained was for ‘Cropped pictures of just Annabella’s nude body’ (1986: 192) to be fed to the UK press for lowbrow delectation and condemnation, and for an uncropped, large-scale print to invite more highbrow confusion, when exhibited in the 1986 Sydney Biennale.

image: LUKE ROBERTS, MY CHILDHOOD VISION OF MOTHER MARY MACKILLOP GALLOPING PAST THE ALPHA CONVENT BRINGING

MORE JOEYS TO WESTERN QUEENSLAND, 1994

While the Brisbane painter Luke Roberts’ portrait of the first Australian saint – My Childhood Vision of Mother Mary MacKillop galloping past the Alpha Convent bringing more Joeys to Western Queensland (1994) – offers a more persuasive whimsical vision, the same kind of McLarenesque mix of popcorn and pop-porn surfaces in Pierre and Gilles’ photographic appropriation of this image.

In Roberts’ My Childhood Vision, stylized Southern Cross stars shine, an aboriginal angel unexpectedly crowns Mary MacKillop’s head with a halo and one senses an engagingly individualistic example of Western Queensland magic realism. Indeed, it might be tempting to applaud Roberts’ imaging as ‘inimitably’ Australian, were it not for the fact that it partially echoes the register of Russell Drysdale’s earlier landscapes and partially recycles Robert’s own alter ego as the cult performance artist/persona ‘Pope Alice’.

Furthermore, as Pierre et Gilles demonstrated just one year later, Robert’s vision readily lent itself to imitation in their Sainte Marie Mackillop (1995), a high-chic, high-kitch, high-camp photo-tableau starring both digital stars - and Australian disco diva and Neighbours starlet Kylie Minogue.

image: PIERRE ET GILLES, SAINTE MARIE MACKILLOP, 1995

Bridging pop, fashion, advertising, soft porn and gallery cultures, Pierre et Gilles’ images substantially justify both Brion Gysin’s quip that ‘Art dealing is the Uptown branch of the rag trade’ (1982: 76), and Virilio’s apprehension before a new lowbrow ‘Academy of the Avant-Garde’ rivalling the banality of ‘Soviet Realism’ (2000a). But whereas socialist realism over-stylises the heroism of the worker, this kind of café-society realism over-stylises yuppie hedonism, simultaneously compounding both the erosion and the pop-cultural ‘eros-ion’ of iconic authenticity.

At one extreme, Tracey Emin’s nude photographs play out a gestural version of Eartha Kitt’s anthem, ‘I Wanna be Evil’. Just as Eartha Kitt teased fans with the LP title That Bad Eartha, Tracey Emin seems to be acting out the role of ‘That Bad Tracey’.

At the other extreme, photographs such as Japanese artist Mariko Mori’s Empty Dream (1995) stage a more puritanical mix of partially realistic and partially surrealistic fantasies. Set against a Disneyesque holiday playground, the artist’s multiple presence as a Barbie-Doll mermaid crowns a kitsch fresco awaiting the finishing touch of a United Colours of Benetton logo.

image: MARIKO MORI’S EMPTY DREAM, 1995

To some extent this seductive scene reminds one of the film Jaws. But whereas the fusion of beachside fun and beachside fins in Jaws creates a certain terror, here we confront little more than an amusing triviality generally tickling our sense of childish ‘wonder’, right down to the moronocule. But ultimately there’s little ‘wonder’ here. Mori’s background imaging attains a kind of hyped-up travel brochure fictionality, her little mermaid figures seem like extras in a video clip joint, and her Pierre et Gilles-style digitized flashes of light seem yet another predictably generic ‘special’ effect.

image: SAM TAYLOR-WOOD, 15 SECONDS, 2000

Likewise, in the British artist Sam Taylor-Wood’s giant photographic fresco 15 Seconds (2000), we see British rock star Elton John and assorted artistic friends in another pop-cultural ‘retro-tableau’ reminiscent of the nineteenth century mega-imaging in Lord Leighton’s Fatidica (1893-4) and Andromache (1886-88).

image: LORD LEIGHTON, Fatidica, 1893-4

image: LORD LEIGHTON, CAPTIVE ANDROMACHE, 1886-88

Here, one might say, Taylor-Wood’s epic evocation of the King of English Pop offers an amusing contemporary counterpart to Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen (1851).

image: LANDSEER, MONARCH OF THE GLEN, 1851

Confronting Taylor-Wood’s photo-mural, we are once again invited to admire artists and models at play, as Elton John auto-simulates Elton John. Far from enacting such questions as ‘To be or not to be?’, Taylor-Wood’s players proffer their best profile, model their most flattering hair-style and at best resolve the dilemma: ‘Toupee, or not toupee?’ Not surprisingly, theoretical responses to contemporary imaging such as Jean Baudrillard’s America (1986) equate all multimediated iconography with the kind of mass-mediated pop cultural hype commemorated by Taylor-Wood’s 15 Seconds.

Deploring the inauthenticity of ‘The advertisements which cut into the films on TV’ as ‘an outrage’, Baudrillard still more misanthropically argues that ‘most television programmes never even reach the “aesthetic” level and are, basically, of the same order as advertisements’. In such circumstances, Baudrillard concludes, ‘if everything on television is, without exception, part of a low-calorie (or even no-calorie) diet, then what good is it complaining?’ (1988a: 101-102).

In this respect, Baudrillard’s comments about American media culture seem to echo precisely the same apprehension before imaging technologies offered by such pessimistic modernist polemic as Charles Baudelaire’s critique of ‘Americomania’ (1992: 198) in his ‘Further Notes on Edgar Poe’ (1857).

Anticipating the way in which Baudrillard’s America dismisses mass-mediated culture as being oblivious to the ‘strangeness of another world’ far removed from the ‘bourgeois dream’ (1988a: 73), Baudelaire’s review of ‘The Universal Exhibition of 1855’ denounces the way in which ‘americanized’ and ‘industrial’ thought obscure ‘the differences that mark the phenomena of the physical and the moral worlds, the natural and the supernatural’ (1992: 121).

To be sure, at his most optimistic, in ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1859-60), Baudelaire equates the ‘mysterious beauty’ of ‘Modernity’ with urban incarnations of ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent’ (1992: 403).

But in his more conservative writings, such as his reflections on ‘The Salon of 1859’, Baudelaire insists that images of this kind of fleeting ‘element of strangeness’ (1992: 119) should not - and indeed, cannot - be technologically mediated. Warning that ‘when industry erupts into the sphere of art, it becomes the latter’s mortal enemy’, he predicts disaster whenever the ‘photographic industry’ is ‘allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and the imaginary’ (1992: 296-97).

In turn, books such as Baudrillard’s The Perfect Crime (1995) warn that those ‘trying to persuade us that technology will inevitably produce good’ are in fact dreaming of ‘extirpating all the magic from thought’ and are ‘trying to wipe out all the supernatural reflexes of thought’ (1996a: 16).

But at his most incisive, Baudrillard also fascinatingly identifies the compatibility between what Cool Memories 11 (1990) calls the ‘more advanced stage of the image’ (1996b: 44), and what Baudelaire thinks of as the ‘mysterious beauty’ of ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent’ (1992: 403).

Elaborating America’s earlier meditations upon the ways in which New York breakdancers seem to perfect the same kind of ‘ironic, indolent pose of the dead’ that he associates with the ‘heroic gesture’ in ‘Chinese opera’ and on ‘Etruscan tombs’ (1986b: 19), Cool Memories 11 still more approvingly observes:

You have to be a perfect dancer to dance immobility, like these solitary breakdancers … Their bodies only move at long intervals, like the hand of a clock stopping for a minute on every second, spending an hour on each position. This is freeze-act, as elsewhere one finds the freeze-phrase (the fragment which fixes the writing) or the freeze-frame in cinema, which fixes the entire movement of the city. This immobility is not an inertia, but a paroxysm which boils movement down into its opposite. The same dialectic was already present in Chinese opera or in animal dances - an art of stupor, slowness, bewitchment. This is the art of the photograph too, where the unreal pose wins out over real movement and the ‘dissolve’, with the result that a more intense, more advanced stage of the image is achieved in photography today than in cinema. (1996b: 44)

Baudrillard’s analyses of image-culture clearly diverge in two distinct directions. On the one hand, the most apocalyptic paragraphs of books such as Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil (1990), equate late postmodern media with an exploding and imploding image-culture which ‘makes all valuation impossible’ (1993: 5).

On the other hand, the less obvious counter-currents in The Transparency of Evil clearly share the suggestion in Cool Memories 11 that late postmodern image-culture also evinces the more positive distinction of articulating ‘a more intense, more advanced stage of the image’. Implicit here is the suggestion that postmodern media-culture is ‘more advanced’ than modernist culture, in terms of both its negative spiral into ‘fractal’ confusion, and its positive ascent into the ‘more intense’ imaging that The Transparency of Evil associates with the ‘force’ and the charm’ of the ‘unmoving image’ and the ‘freeze frame’, when reasoning:

What things dream of, what we dream of, is not motion but this more intense immobility. The force of the unmoving image: the force of the mythic opera. Even the cinema cultivates the myth of slow motion and the freeze-frame as moments of highest drama. And the paradoxical contribution to television may turn out to be the restoration of all its charm to the silence of the image. (1993: 155)

This emphasis upon iconic ‘restoration’ assumes still more compelling chronological overtones when read in tandem with Baudrillard’s subsequent discussion of what he describes as photography’s rediscovery of auratic imaging in his essay ‘For illusion isn’t the opposite of reality...’ (1998). At this point, Baudrillard significantly reverses Walter Benjamin’s account of the decline of artistic aura in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936).

Implicitly questioning Benjamin’s mid-30s suggestion that ‘that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art’ (1979: 223), Baudrillard’s late-90s essay fascinatingly argues that photography’s finest mechanical ‘productions’, such as the photographs of the Spanish artist David Nebreda, often generate undeniable auratic impact.

At his most pessimistic, Baudrillard substantially shares both Benjamin’s pessimism regarding mechanical reproduction, and Burroughs’ sense that we live in a culture of conflicting imaging, of declining imaging and of ever more artificial imaging, in which statements of unambiguous value become increasingly rare.

But at his most optimistic, Baudrillard also unexpectedly asserts that certain successful photographic images transcend these problems, and initiate what he calls: ‘a kind of thunderstruck effect, a form of suspense and phenomenal immobility which interrupts the precipitation of events’. It is precisely because it reaches beyond the general hubbub of iconic confusion, Baudrillard concludes, that the finest contemporary photographic imaging compels our attention in terms of the ways in which it has ‘recovered’ what he defines as ‘the aura’ that photography ‘lost with the coming of cinema’ (1999a: 134).

While Baudrillard’s influential critiques of the negative impact of commercial mass-media seductively compound Benjamin’s more apocalyptic conclusions, his recent essays and interviews increasingly emphasise imaging technologies’ more reassuring potential as ‘an instrument of magic’ (1997a: 38). At his most subjective, Baudrillard remarks that even though he thinks of himself primarily as a writer rather than as a photographer, he has ‘experienced what I’d have to call my greatest sense of pleasure … in the realm of images’ (1997a: 37).

And even when arguing more generally and objectively, Baudrillard contends that the ‘silence of photographs’ restores ‘the immobility and the silence of the image’, rescuing, refining and generally ‘wrenching’ objects from ‘the thunderous context of the real world’ (1997b: 31). At this point, one might argue, Baudrillard’s ideas fascinatingly overlap with the more contemplative agendas of modernists such as Stéphane Mallarmé.

Firstly, Baudrillard’s celebration of the ways in which photography ‘plunges’ objects into silence, ‘wrenching them’ from the ‘real world’ (1997b: 31) echoes Mallarmé’s call for ‘perfect and neutral silence’ where ‘the mind may seek its own native land again’, beyond ‘sonorous tumult’ (1970: 114).

Secondly, Baudrillard’s celebration of those ‘effects of light’ which create ‘a sense of emptiness’, in which a potentially photographic object ‘imposes itself’ (1997a: 34) similarly echoes Mallarmé’s call for poets to ‘elicit emptiness from ourselves’, in order that ‘a sublime attraction may lovingly deliver us’ from mundane reality ‘and shed glittering lights … through empty space’ (1970: 113),

Like other apocalyptic postmodern artists such as Burroughs, Baudrillard seems most interesting in terms of the ways in which his vision simultaneously emphasises both the infelicities and the felicities of contemporary imaging, and in Theodor Adorno’s terms, recognises that ‘the dialectic of the lowest has the same value as the dialectic of the highest, rather than the latter simply decaying’ (1992: 53).

Characterising Los Angeles as an inflammable, artificial construction, Burroughs for example, cynically comments, ‘The sky is as thin as paper. The whole place could go up in ten minutes. That’s the charm of Los Angeles’ (1981: 127). In turn, according to Baudrillard’s ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ (1978), Los Angeles is ‘nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture ... made up, of childhood signals and faked phantasms’ (1983: 26).

But while dismissing the facades of Los Angeles and New York as a cinematic ‘backdrop which could collapse at any moment’, Burroughs’ notes on ‘Robert Walker’s Spliced New York’ also suggest that when a photographer is ‘as good as Walker is’, their images may well capture ‘the meaning of meaninglessness, the pattern of chaos, the underlying unities of disparate elements’ (1985: 66)

Image: ROBERT WALKER, NEW YORK PHOTOGRAPH, c.1980s

Characterising Walker’s figures as being akin to ‘A walking corpse, a body without a soul!’ (1985: 66), Burroughs implies that Walker’s photographs explore the same limboesque paralysis freezing those modernist citizens in Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’, who ‘One by one … were all becoming shades’ (1996: 255).

For his part, Baudrillard often seems to doubt whether postmodern photography can ever really emulate modernist literature’s most potent insights, and in his interviews in Paroxysm (1997), he initially argues that ‘what Barthes calls the “punctum”, that absent point, that nothingness at the heart of the image which gives it power’, now ‘no longer exists’. Authentic images generating ‘punctum’ or generating ‘aura’, Baudrillard suggests, now appear to be eclipsed by the ‘profusion’ of mass-cultural images of ‘pathos-laden, ideological, spectacular death’ (1998: 93).

But several pages later, Baudrillard qualifies this generalisation when elaborating his sense that certain kinds of ‘freeze-frame’ photographs evince an ‘extraordinary aura’. Attaining a ‘high degree of condensation’ and at their most forceful, ‘symbolically enclosing death’, such images arise, he suggests, when the artist manages ‘to clear the decks both inside and around themselves’. On such occasions, ‘It’s you - and it isn’t you - who are acting at that moment’, as the camera captures what he characterises as a ‘vanityless form of singularity’ (1998: 99).

On the one hand, it is precisely this kind of ‘singularity’ that seems to be absent from the self-conscious modelling, posing and auto-simulation in what I have generally characterised as the ‘retro-tableaux’ of Serge Bramley and Bettina Rheims; Tracey Emin, Mariko Mori, Sam Taylor-Wood and Pierre et Gilles.

On the other hand, it is precisely this quality of authenticity, singularity and integrity that Baudrillard identifies when discussing the horrifyingly emaciated and self-mutilated self-portraits of the Spanish photographer David Nebreda.

Image: DAVID NEBREDA, SELF-PORTRAIT, 1989

According to Baudrillard’s L’Échange impossible the intensity of Nebreda’s extraordinary images derives from their exceptional ‘simultaneity of object and sign’ (1999b: 160). Here, Baudrillard observes, the ‘living signs’ of Nebreda’s tormented body inscribe and incarnate his ‘own death’ in a kind of ‘living money’, far removed from the ‘dead signs’ and the ‘monkey money’ exchanged within ‘the commerce of aesthetic values’ (1999b: 159-60).

From the vantage point of Baudrillard’s and Burroughs’ late postmodern theoretical writings, we can now look back - via Roland Barthes’ classic postmodern theoretical writings - to the ways in which Marcel Proust’s classic modernist writings and Samuel Beckett’s classic postmodernist writings, offer surprisingly similar analyses of the impact of photo-imaging. Indeed, more often than not, Proust’s and Beckett’s writings fascinatingly foreshadow Burroughs’ and Baudrillard’s most perceptive positive and negative accounts of media culture.

According to Barthes’ Camera Lucida, most photographs simply produce the kind of ‘average’ and ‘general’ and ‘inconsequential’ effect that he associates with ‘studium’ (1981: 26-7), and which Proust identifies with voluntary, habitual, everyday existence. In Beckettian terms, ‘studium’ reflects ‘the petty cash of current facts’ (1970a: 123), whereas ‘punctum’ denotes those things which, if they consent to be named, do so ‘with reluctance’ (1963: 78).

image: ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, PHIL GLASS AND BOB WILSON

Introducing his concept of ‘punctum’ in terms of his response to Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Phil Glass and Bob Wilson, Barthes explains:

Wilson holds me, though I cannot sat why, i.e., say where: is it the eyes, the skin, the position of the hands, the track shoes? The effect is certain but unlocatable, it does not find its sign, its name; it is sharp and yet lands in a vague zone of myself; it is acute yet muffled; it cries out in silence. (1981: 53)

While Barthes admits that he ‘cannot say’ (1981: 51) how or why this ‘unlocatable’ impact occurs, he concludes that such semantically ‘undevelopable’ revelations ‘brings the photograph close to the Haiku’, where ‘everything is given, without provoking the desire for or even the possibility of a rhetorical expansion’. In both cases, Barthes suggests, ‘we might (we must) speak of an intense immobility: linked to a detail (to a detonator), an explosion makes a little star on the pane of a text or of the photograph’ (1981: 49).

The most striking photographic ‘star’ observed by Barthes irradiates a photograph of his mother, which seems alive with her ‘unique being’ (1981: 71). This quality of tenderness, and this photographic translation of his mother’s tenderness, he contends, ‘belonged to no system’ and therefore remain ‘out-of-play’ (1981: 69), beyond ‘your studium: period, clothes, photogeny’ (1981: 73).

Interestingly, Barthes finds that he can most accurately evoke photographic ‘punctum’ by analogy to the most intense perceptual moments in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27) such as the painful vertigo overwhelming Proust’s narrator Marcel, when he simultaneously recalls his dead grandmother’s past presence and present absence.

The most powerful photographs, Barthes explains, generate: ‘a sentiment as certain as remembrance, just as Proust experienced it one day when … there suddenly came to him his grandmother’s true face, “whose loving reality I was experiencing for the first time, in an involuntary and complete memory”’ (Barthes, 1981: 70).

Sharing Proust’s fascination for the ways in which the most powerful photographs both revive the dead, and remind us that the dead are dead and that we too will die, Barthes finds himself compelled to ‘shudder’, before photography’s merciless intimations of his own mortality. ‘Whether or not the subject is already dead’, Barthes concludes, ‘every photograph is this catastrophe’ (1981: 96).

Tellingly, this is an extraverbal ‘catastrophe’. As Barthes repeatedly suggests, the most powerful photographs produce a sense of revelation or ‘satori’ in which ‘words fail’ (1981: 109), leaving him with virtually ‘nothing to say’ (1981: 93), and nothing to do except gesture pitifully towards the desired image.

‘In front of the Winter Garden Photograph’, he exp