Photography between Desire and Grief

Roland Barthes and F. Holland Day

SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH

ROLAND BARTHES FELT PHOTOGRAPHY. In fact, feeling photography was one of his central concerns. In Camera Lucida, his unconventional, personal attempt to grasp the essence of photography, he declares, "Affect was what I didn't want to reduce. As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for 'sentimental' reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think."

For Barthes, a critical contemplation of photography—noticing, observing, thinking—begins only after feeling. Seeing produces an emotional response, which in turn encourages reflection. Barthes seeks to forestall the scholarly leap from perception to observation, to linger in the in-between moment of feeling, and to make his critical work account for his emotional response. He does not have a language for such reactions, nor for what elicits them, and in fact, he proclaims: "What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance." Nevertheless, Camera Lucida is his provocative, inchoate attempt to describe photography's affective power.

Refusing to give up feeling, to reduce affect, Barthes challenges himself as observer: "Being irreducible, it was thereby what I wanted, what I ought to reduce the Photograph to; but could I retain an affective intentionality, a view of the object which was immediately steeped in desire, repulsion, nostalgia, euphoria?" "Affective intentionality" suggests an active and deliberate method of regarding a photograph. It is not simply an affective response that Barthes proposes to retain, but an affective mode of approaching the photograph. In other words, he hopes to do more than passively record the emotional effects images have on him (although he does, in fact, record such effects throughout Camera Lucida). Instead, he seeks to use affect as one of the lenses through which he sees and grasps an image. Ultimately, it is a view of the photograph seen in and through emotion that he takes as his object of analysis.

Camera Lucida thus encourages one to attend to feeling when studying photographs, and in this way to more fully account for the power of photographic images. This is an intriguing critical challenge, and one that several scholars, notably Carol Mavor, have answered very successfully. But it is also a critical mode with potential shortcomings, for it is hard to attend to emotion without overly attending to one's self in the process; it is easy to lose sight of the ends to which one is "putting one's self in the picture" (to borrow a phrase from Jo Spence). Elsewhere I have questioned Barthes's method for subsuming the histories of photographic subjects beneath his own personal reflections. Here, however, instead of returning to what Barthes's mode obscures, I would like to consider what Barthes's affective approach to photography might uniquely enable one to see.

In this essay I both take up and shift Barthes's affective intent by attempting to see feeling in photographs. Rather than revealing how photographs make me feel, I'm interested in how others have forecast feeling in their propositions about and practice of photography. In this essay I take feeling itself as a question and a theme, attending to the ways in which desire, repulsion, nostalgia, and euphoria are represented and revealed in photographs. I do so primarily with regard to a photographer who was keenly devoted to his own "affective intentionality," namely, F. Holland Day.

I read Barthes's propositions in relation to Day's photographs, and view Day's photographs as theoretical instantiations in themselves. I don't mean to suggest that Day's images illustrate Barthes's theses, but instead to show the ways in which both struggle to make visible a photography alive to feeling. Barthes as spectator and Day as photographer uniquely rendered desire and grief in their work, and they called upon others to feel photography with them. Through different means they ultimately came to the same understanding of photography, one in which feeling intervenes in the relationship between photographic signifier and signified. Barthes and Day propose a queer theory of photography in which feeling opens the index onto other worlds, collapses disparate times, and conjoins the material and the spiritual.

F. HOLLAND DAY: A BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL NOTE

Day's place in the history of photography has been, until recently, a disruptive presence or an ignored absence. He was an American Pictorialist photographer and, at the turn of the twentieth century, one of the most influential advocates of photography as an art form. A wealthy publisher from Norwood, Massachusetts, Day was colleague and friend to Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence White, mentor to Edward Steichen as well as Alvin Langdon Coburn (his cousin), and colleague and ultimately competitor of Alfred Stieglitz. Day promoted the art of photography nationally through the Boston Camera Club, and internationally through his exhibitions of the New School of American Photography in London (1900) and Paris (1901). As early as 1895, he was elected to the prestigious British photography salon the Linked Ring.

The now much-rehearsed tension between Day and Stieglitz emerged over Day's European exhibitions, and the two men largely parted ways at that time. With his influential journal Camera Work, Stieglitz shaped much of the debate about fine art photography in the United States from New York, and eventually changed the direction of artistic photographic practice, celebrating the unmanipulated, sharp focus, "straight" image in the early twentieth century. In the art historical record, Stieglitz has greatly overshadowed Day, despite their comparable influence at the turn of the century. According to an established scholarly...