Written during a period of mourning shortly after his mother died, Camera Lucida sees Barthes reading a set of familial and historical photographs. He writes about the studium — the photograph within its cultural context — and the punctum, which is more subjective, personal; the element of the photograph over which its author, the photographer, has no final say. The punctum belongs, instead, to the spectator, the person viewing the photograph.
Among the photographs Barthes reads is one taken of his mother when she was five years old, and which he calls the “Winter Garden Photograph”. This photo, Barthes declares, is “the only photograph which assuredly existed for me”.
It is strange, this combination of “assurance” and “existence”. Because the photograph itself is not “reassuring”; rather, it is the fact it exists at all, that it speaks so personally to Barthes in his mourning, which provides it with weight, dimenson, existence. Assurance. But this assurance refuses disclosure on the page. It discloses itself in its entirety only in Barthes psychic affect, his sense of the photo as revelaing something both permanent and unsayable, incapable of reproduction except for the reproduction that is the reliving of pain, or trauma, while we are in mourning.
(“In mourning”: as if we entered mourning, as if we can leave. Is there escape? And, if there is, in what sense did we ever enter it? In what sense does trauma enter into us, disclose itself, unfold inside us?)
Barthes writes:
“(I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’; it cannot in any way constitute the visible object of a science; it cannot establish an objectivity, in the positive sense of the term; at most it would interest your studium: period, clothes, photogeny; but in it, for you, no wound.” (Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 73)
Barthes reads the “Winter Garden Photograph” as trauma: something that discloses itself. Something that is unseeable but specific, especially to the person for whom it is traumatic. For those who are not party to the event the event is visible, seeable, but the trauma itself is not; and thus what is really being seen or diclosed? A traumatic event may involve a perpetrator or perpetrators — one of whom may include the person or persons experiencing trauma — but the only possibility for the trauma to be recognised as trauma is that it be lived, experienced, as a kind of puntum: that which pricks, that which wounds, and goes on wounding.
The event, having taken place, cannot be undone.
In it, for you, only wound.
Literature and the Tortoise 