Could it be just a writer’s creative invention, an archetype of “the Photograph” rather than an actual photograph? Is Barthes telling us a lie in order to reveal a greater truth (about photography, about the permeability of truth and falsehood)? If so, it would link Barthes’s great reflection on photography to Walter Benjamin’s partially fictional Little History of Photography, which Barthes would have read in 1977 in a French translation in Nouvel Observateur. Perhaps, she speculates, the famous Winter Garden photograph of Barthes’s mother never even existed. Margaret Olin goes even further, proposing that the invisibility of the Winter Garden Photograph is a sign that Camera Lucida is meant to be read as a novel, rather than as a work of non-fiction. In that sense, the photograph of Barthes’s mother must be made an absent presence in order to maintain the deconstructive dynamic that animates the whole book. With Camera Lucida structured in every aspect in binary terms (as in the impossible opposition of studium and punctum), the missing Winter Garden Photograph has its doppelgänger in the Polaroid photograph by Daniel Boudinet that Barthes takes the trouble to reproduce in colour but never discusses. Indeed, a number of commentators have suggested that, just as Barthes decided to “’derive’ all Photography (its ‘nature’)” from this one absent photograph, there too, in that photograph’s retraction, should inquiring readers seek the essence of Barthes’s book. Given the care with which the whole book has been composed, this effect is surely no accident. Empathizing with the grief-stricken author, we find ourselves crying over a photograph that isn’t even there. It’s a brilliant rhetorical manoeuvre, inviting every reader to project their own image of a lost loved one into the void at the heart of his text. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days” But then, despite proposing that “something like an essence of the Photograph floated in this particular picture,” he refuses to reproduce it, claiming that, for us, “it would be nothing but an indifferent picture.” Roland Barthes describes this photograph, the so-called Winter Garden Photograph of his recently-deceased mother, in considerable detail in his book Camera Lucida: “The photograph was very old. 1981, 119p, trade paperback, covers bumped/scuffed, binding tight, text highlighted-ENGLISH LANGUAGE-35.00 for all 10, extra shipping for ths multiple book order.One of the most famous photographs in the history of photography has never been seen by its many interlocutors. Seuil/Ecrivains de toujours, 1979, 192p, livre de poche, paperback, covers bumped/scuffed, binding tight, text underlined on 8 pages only-FRENCH LANGUAGE + Le Bruissement De La Lange, Essais Critiques IV, Roland Barthes, Editions Du Seuil, 1984, 413p, trade pb, covers bumped/scuffed, CLEAN text, solid binding-FRENCH LANGUAGE + Sur Racine (ISBN: 2020050722 / 2-02-005072-2) Barthes, Roland, Editions du Seuil, 1972, 167p, trade pb, covers bumped/scuffed, CLEAN text, solid binding-FRENCH LANGuage + L'aventure sémiologique, Barthe, Roland, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1985, 368p, trade pb, covers bumped/scuffed, CLEAN text, solid binding, FRENCH LANGUAGE + Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. de Seuil, 1957, later 1980s printing, 247p, livre de poche, pb, covers bumped/scuffed, CLEAN text, solid binding-FRENCH LANGUAGE + SOLLERS ECRIVAIN, BARTHES, ROLAND, Seuil, 1979, 89p, livre de poche, trade pb, covers bumped/scuffed, text tanning/clean, binding solid + ROLAND BARTHES. trade paperback, covers lightly bumped/scuffed, binding tight, text has underlining/marginalia throughout-ENGLISH LANGUAGE- + Mythologies, Roland Barthes, Eds. paperback, covers lightly bumped/scuffed, binding tight, text clean/unmarked FRENCH LANGUAGE + S/Z, AN ESSAY. trade paperback, covers lightly bumped/scuffed, binding tight, text clean/unmarked + Systeme de la Mode.
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