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From Clementina to Ksebier: The Photographic Attainment of the "Lady Amateur"Author(s): Carol ArmstrongSource: October, Vol. 91 (Winter, 2000), pp. 101-139Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779151 .Accessed: 28/01/2014 08:43

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From Clementina to KIisebier: The Photographic Attainment of the "Lady Amateur"

CAROL ARMSTRONG

I begin with two citations. One is a question-by now a classic in the history of feminist art history-and that is Linda Nochlin's famous 1971 query, "Why have there been no great women artists?"I The other is a statement made by Roland Barthes, in a very different sort of text from almost a decade later (1980), namely, Camera Lucida:

Ordinarily, the amateur is defined as the immaturity of the artist: someone who cannot-or who does not want to elevate him(her)self to the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the amateur, by contrast, who is the attainment (assumption) of the professional: because it is he (she) who sticks closest to the noeme (being/intelligence) of Photography.2

By now it hardly needs to be said that the answer to Nochlin's question is an institutional one: up until at least the end of the nineteenth century, the institu- tions of the family-and hence of psychic and social development-of art training-and hence of professionalization, advancement, and "mastery"-and of art judgement made it difficult for women to attain "greatness" in the fine arts. The answer would have to be different in the shorter history of photography, which coincides historically with both the modern confinement of women and the beginnings of their emancipation, because the question itself would be different, if not a bit nonsensical. One could certainly assert that there have been "great" women photographers, right from the start. At the same time, the very notion of

1. Linda Nochlin, "Why have there been no great women artists?" (1971), in Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), pp. 145-78. 2. Roland Barthes, La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard Seuil, Cahiers du Cinema, 1980), p. 154. (All translations mine; hereafter cited in the text and referred to by the translated title Camera Lucida.) Though in most ways Barthes's view of photography is an idiosyncratic one, he is not alone in claiming the "artless" photograph as the apogee of the medium. Similar points have been

OCTOBER 91, Winter 2000, pp. 101-139. ? 2000 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


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"greatness" in photography is a contested and problematical one, and has been so since the inception of the medium: which also means that the photographic canon is by its nature and history less secure than that of painting. The institu- tions of training, professionalization, and advancement were different: newer, without the force of longstanding rules, conventions, and exclusions, and not requiring-so many have claimed, at least-much skill or training. They were also more liminal-at the crossroads of then-emerging modern distinctions between the professional and the amateur, not to mention changes in the definition of the concept of the amateur, from an older, aristocratic notion of the lover, to the newer middle-class notion of the hobbyist, which in the case of photography means, among other things, the family-album snapshooter.3 Of course, there have always been male as well as female amateurs, but for obvious reasons it is not sur-

made, in different language, with different ideological commitments and to different ends, by John Szarkowski, erstwhile director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and by Janet Malcolm. See John Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), in particular the entry on Lartigue on p. 66: "The word amateur has two meanings. In its classical sense it is the antonym of professional, and refers to those who pursue a problem for love rather than for the rewards the world may offer. In this sense the word often identifies the most sophisticated practitioners in a field; many of photography's greatest names have been amateurs as pure as the crocuses of spring, and many others, though merce- naries during the week, have done their best work on weekends. The other and more popular meaning of the word identifies one who plays at his work: one not only less than fully competent, but less than fully serious. ... This is almost never enough." (He goes on to identify Lartigue as the exceptional talent who joined both senses of the word amateur in the playful photographs he took as a privileged bour- geois child, using the new handheld camera of the turn of the century.) See also Janet Malcolm, "The Family of Mann" (1994), Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography (New York: Aperture, 1997), pp. 169-76, in particular p. 170: "Within photography, Szarkowski distinguished between the calculated, well-made, undialectical photograph and the artless but vitally interesting snapshot, and he supported photographers who attempted the tour de force of the art snapshot." Malcolm goes on to note the canon that Szarkowski erects upon the double paradox of the artless "art snapshot," and to tie Sally Mann's family/art photographs to the "Szarkowski school," with its poetics of ambiguity and its "chanciness and . .. anxiety, disjunction, invasiveness, uncanniness" (p. 171). In being an art canon, this "school" parts and keeps company all at once with the Barthesian understanding of the photograph, which privileges the amateur photograph precisely because of its lack of pretensions to art status, and its commitment, at once pure and banal, to what Barthes calls the "ca a iti " of the photographic referent. In a different vein, Pierre Bourdieu also counts amateur photography (of the camera-club variety) as one of the medium's prime social and discursive arenas, on a spectrum ranging from the family photograph to camera art: see Pierre Bourdieu (with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Dominique Schnapper), Photography: A Middle-brow Art (1965), trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 3. On amateurism and early photography, see Grace Seiberling (with Carolyn Bloore), Amateurs, Photography, and the Mid-Victorian Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Seiberling sees amateurism as critical to the invention and ethos of early photography in Great Britain, and locates a sea change in the related cultures of photography and amateurism as early as the late 1850s.


From Clementina to Kiisebier 103

prising to find that women tended to occupy the category of the amateur more than that of the professional in the period that concerns me, and it is reasonable to expect that more women continue to occupy it now, indeed, that they continue to be the principal practitioners as well as archivists of family photography.4

That is one way, then, in which the "lady amateur" (first in the older and then in the newer sense) is integral to the history, if not the very being of photography. In this essay I want to look at three exceptional examples. The first two were British contemporaries, Clementina Lady Hawarden and Julia Margaret Cameron, the former with no more than a few years of photographic practice under her belt before she died in 1865, the latter with just over a decade of work, between the mid-1860s and mid-1870s. Clementina was almost forty when she took up photography, Cameron almost fifty.5 Both have now entered into the canon of early photography, though Cameron has been there longer and is better known to a wider public-hence a show like the recent one at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, by no means the first devoted to her.6 Clementina's fame even now remains rather more local. (She has recently been the subject of a monographic show at the Victoria and Albert, which was bequeathed the majority of her photographs.7) And both were "amateurs," in the

4. See Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994), pp. 55 ff., on Kodak advertising aimed specifically at female consumers, on the linking of the new camera (invented in 1888) and the "new woman," on the notion that photography was something that could be done on the run between other domestic activities, and on the promotion of children as subject- matter specifically suited to women photographers. Brian Coe and Paul Gates, in The Snapshot Photograph: The Rise of Popular Photography 1888-1939 (London: Ash and Grant, 1977), p. 18, illustrate these (mostly implied) links between amateurism and the woman photographer with a turn-of-the-century advertisement showing a mother photographing her children, accompanied by the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest," and the caption: 'Jack: Do you think baby will be quiet long enough to take her picture, Mama? Mama: The Kodak camera will catch her whether she moves or not: it is as 'quick as a wink."' I understand that Kodak itself has collected data suggesting that women are still the primary producers and consumers of family photography. 5. Rosalind Krauss, in "Photography's Discursive Spaces," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridg: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 131-50, distinguishes between the "careers" of nineteenth-century photographers and those of "another sort of artist" in terms of their brevity-a year for Auguste Salzmann, less than a decade for Roger Fenton, Gustave Le Gray, Henri Le Secq, and other "acknowledged 'masters' of the art" (p. 143)-which together with other differences suggests a discursive register for photography other than that of Fine Art, with its criteria of unity, continuity, and development of an "oeuvre." Moreover, many early photographers took up their brief practices in photography after a variety of other vocational pursuits. But this was a particular pattern for female photographers, and remained so longer, even after the lifelong photographic career became more normalized. 6. See Sylvia Wolf, Julia Margaret Cameron's Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 7. See Virginia Dodier, Clementina, Lady Hawarden: Studies from Life, 1857-1864 (New York: Aperture, 1999).


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older sense of the term-in fact, it is from one of Cameron's models that I derive the sobriquet "lady amateur."8

The third of my cases is unlike the first two: Gertrude KIisebier, the turn-of- the-century American photographer, whose photographic culture descends from Cameron's, through Cameron's son Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, a professional photographer in the 1880s who was one of the founders of the first secessionist movement in art photography, London's Linked Ring brotherhood, of which KIisebier was one of the two first female members. Only in her earliest moments as a late-thirties, post-motherhood art student and a photographer of her family could KIisebier be described as an amateur (of the newer sort); otherwise she was an accomplished professional with a flourishing portrait studio and a long career, who was also one of the founding pictorialist members of the Photo-Secession, and one of the first photographers to be shown at Stieglitz's gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. But KIisebier's most interesting photographs retain an uncanny connection to her amateur beginnings. They articulate the intimate dialectical structure of the relationship between amateurism and art photography that marked her period much more overtly than the work of any of her male cohorts could or did. And they may help to shed some light on what Barthes meant by describing amateurism as the attainment of photography.

Prologue on Camera Lucida: Ingredients of Another Photography Barthes's remark is made in the context of a passage that begins with a

comment about the photograph being an "imperious sign of my future death" (p. 151) and ends with a meditation on the modern structure of the relation between the public and the private, between interiority, intimacy, and identity.9 And it is inextricably tied to a larger effort to define the "essence" of photography as a sign system fundamentally different from others, recalcitrant toward cultural regimes and discursive spaces such as that of Art, and indeed, irreducible to the Law of the Father. That effort is worth rehearsing before I look at the ways in which the work of my three "lady amateurs" matches a Barthesian model of the photograph more closely than any other and with a particular, "pensive" self- reflexivity that was conditioned by the domestic framework of their practices.

Camera Lucida is written under the sign of the Mother-which is indexed, of course, in the famous but conspicuously absent "Winter Garden" snap of Barthes's

8. I refer to "Miss Agnes, Lady Amateur," who posed for Vivian the sorceress in Cameron's 1874 set of illustrations to Tennyson's Idylls of the King: see "A Reminiscence of Mrs. Cameron by a Lady Amateur," The Photographic News 30 (January 1, 1886), cited by Joan Lukitsch, Cameron: Her Work and Career (Rochester, N.Y.: International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, 1984), pp. 16-17. 9. Barthes, La chambre claire, p. 153: "L'dge de la Photographie correspond pricisement a l'irruption du prive dans le public. ...."


From Clementina to Kdsebier 105

mother as a child, long before Barthes's birth and her own death. Barthes mourns over that unshown snapshot of his mother like the Madonna lamenting the future death of her Son, an inverted maternal foreknowledge about the death contained in embryo in every birth that he applies to every photograph, and to Photography at large: it is the foundation on which he builds his theory of the general melan- cholia and specific poignance of photography.

The maternal presides over all else as well, and particularly over the nineteenth-century photographs reproduced in Camera Lucida, including the single place photograph in the book, Charles Clifford's 1850s view of the Alhambra in Grenada, captioned with "It is there that I would like to live." Next to that photograph, Barthes writes,

That desire for habitation ... is fantasmatic, thrown up by a sort of clairvoyance which seems to carry me forward to a utopian time, or to take me back, to I don't know where in myself.... In front of these land- scapes of my predilection, everything happens as if I was sure of having been there [in the past] or of having to go there [in the future]. Thus Freud said of the maternal body that 'there is no other place that one can say with such certainty that one has already been there.' Such, then, would be the essence of the landscape (chosen by desire): heimlich, awaking in me the Mother (not at all disquieting). (pp. 66-68)

In fact, that utopian place is also disquieting, if not in the Alhambra photograph itself, then in most of the other photographs that affect Barthes: for, willy-nilly, the heimlich of the Mother brings with it the unheimlich of her (and his) death, and that combination of desire and morbidity, eros and the death drive, the homey and the uncanny is seen to underwrite and overarch Photography, as Barthes conceives of it.

The reference to Freud is the clincher in that passage: in his 1919 essay, Freud first describes the way in which dictionary definitions of heimlich "develop in the direction of ambivalence [what he also describes as "intellectual uncertainty"], until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich . .. a [repressed] sub-species of heimlich."lo He then defines the uncanny as a fantasmatic elision of the difference between imagination and reality, in which the subject simultaneously regresses to the magical, animistic thinking of early childhood and shudders with the premonition of death, so that the world-particularly the familiar interior world of the home, which reproduces that of the mother's body--becomes a men- acing, spectral space, the site of the return of the dead, of eerie repetitions and doubles; in short, the scene of a haunting. Finally, Freud distinguishes between

10. Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny,"' in On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), pp. 122-61; see p. 131.


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the unconscious "uncanny" of everyday experience and the "uncanny" consciously produced in fairy tales, literature, and other aesthetic work. (Presumably photography incorporates aspects of both uncannies, though Barthes, not being interested in art photography, emphasizes the former.) In any event, the "punctum" that Barthes theorizes as being essential to the disquiet resident in photography, is nothing else but the photographic uncanny, buried in the homely, everyday, banal details of every-photograph. And as he makes clear, this too falls under the sign (and within the house) of the Mother.ll

If Barthes deems unexhibitable the "Winter Garden" snap of his mother as a young girl (which is haunted, at least for me, by another winter garden photograph-that of Kafka as a boy in Walter Benjamin's "A Short History of Photography"12), he does provide some stand-ins for it: the late photograph of Nadar's invalid wife that Barthes prefers to see as a picture of the photographer's mother, and that he decrees to be "one of the most beautiful photographs in the world" (p. 109);'3 and the snapshot of his own father as a child, which he labels "The Bloodline" ("La Souche"), and in which he finds evidence of the genetic connection between his grandmother and himself-a matrilineal line of descent, rather than the more obvious patrilineage running from his grandfather through his father to himself.14 These two surrogates for the image of his mother also speak to two other crucial components of Barthes's theory of the photograph, which both have to do with the reign of the Mother, her escape from the regimes of both the word and the image-Lacan's Symbolic and Imaginary--and her identification with the lawlessness of the Real:15 on the one hand, the photograph as the trace of the beloved face, looking at us, from beyond the grave, "directly in the eyes," which is enhanced by the frontal pose (Camera Lucida is full of faces and frontal poses); on the other hand, the photograph as bearer of the "genetic trait," which is one of its "umbilical" ties, as Barthes also phrases it, to the Real.16 Both

11. It is worth remarking that Barthes mentions Freud once more later on, in connection with a contrast between the Jewish law of the Father with its interdiction against images [of the Mother], and the maternal Imaginary of Christianity: La chambre claire, p. 117. 12. See Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography" (1931), in Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven: Leete's Island Books, 1980), pp. 199-216, in particular p. 206: "There in a narrow, almost humiliating child's suit, overburdened with braid, stands the boy [Kafka], about six years old, in a sort of winter garden landscape. Palm fronds stand frozen in the background..." 13. "Nadar donnant de sa mere (ou de sa femme, on ne sait) l'une des plus belles photos au monde.. ." (La chambre claire, p. 109). 14. Ibid., p. 161: "cette photo de mon ptre enfant ... certains lineaments rattachent son visage d celui de ma grand-mire et au mien." 15. For a Lacanian reading of La chambre claire, see Margaret Iversen, "What Is a Photograph?" Art History 17, no. 3 (September 1994), pp. 450-64. 16. Barthes, La chambre claire, pp. 171-72: "Car la Photographie a ce pouvoir-qu 'elle perd de plus en plus,



also function emblematically as harbingers of death, and in the "future anterior" of photography, they too speak of the uncanny. 17

It is true that there are precious few women in Camera Lucida: other than Barthes's invisible mother, and Nadar's wife, there is really only one other woman who stands out, and that is in Nadar's portrait of the invalid poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, whose foolish but kindly face is redolant, Barthes says, of the insipidity of her poetry, and somehow touching too. She is situated between the poignant photograph by Alexander Gardner of Lewis Payne, one of the Lincoln conspirators, taken on the eve or day of his execution, captioned "He is dead and he is going to die" and the "Bloodline" snap of Barthes's father as a child. With our hindsight knowledge of her impending death (which Nadar would photograph two years after the portrait in Camera Lucida was taken), Desbordes-Valmore partakes of the punctal "that has been" of photography as much as Payne under death sentence, forever awaiting a fate long ago met. Which is, of course, the critical definition of the "punctum": "there exists another punctum (another 'stigmata') besides the 'detail.' That other punctum, which is no longer a matter of form, but of intensity, is Time, the heart-rending emphasis of the noeme ('that- has-been') [of Photography], its pure representation" (p. 148). That is the "noeme" of photography on which the "lady amateurs" whom I address here seem to have had special purchase.

The maternal Real, the uncanny, the "genetic trait," the confrontation with the face, the poignant temporal paradox, the future-anterior "that-has-been" of the photograph: all these are features of photography as defined by Barthes that are embraced and pronounced in the work of the three women photographers I want to look at here. To those characteristics, I would add a few others before closing this section, as illustrated by the much degraded and faded The Set Table by Niepce, which Barthes calls the "first photograph," and the 1979 frontispiece by Daniel Boudinet, which is also the lone color photograph in the book, of a dim blue bedroom barely letting light in through the slightly frayed fabric of its cur- tains. The Niepce photograph is found enframed by text which treats photography as an "image without a code," "an emanation from a past reality," and a "magic" that pierces the viewer, rather than an "art" (p. 141). And rather than a language, or a text that is read. ("I cannot read a photograph"-"en dipit de ses codes, je ne puis lire une photo"- says Barthes, p. 141, testifying as well to a peculiar illegibility at the heart of photography.)

la pose frontale itant ordinairement jugie archaique-de me regarder droit dans les yeux"; pp. 161-62: "la Photographie, parfois, fait apparaitre ce qu'on ne percoit jamais d'un visage riel (ou reflichi dans un miroir): un trait genitique, le morceau de soi-mime ou d'un parent qui vient d'un ascendant. " 17. See Barthes, La chambre claire, p. 150, with regard to Gardner's portrait of Lewis Payne: "Mais le punctum, c'est: il va mourir. Je lis en mime temps: cela sera et cela a &t6; j'observe avec horreur un futur antirieur dont la mort est l'enjeu."


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At the same time, the Niepce photograph illustrates Barthes's allegiance to the chemical rather than mechanical aspect of photography:

For the noeme 'That has been' was not possible until the day when ... the discovery of the light sensitivity of silver halogens made it possible to capture and directly imprint the luminous rays emitted by a diversely lit object. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, comes a radiation which touches me, I who am here ... the photograph of the disappeared being touches me like the diverse rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord ties the body of the photographed object to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here truly a carnal medium, askin that I share with him or her who was photographed." (pp. 126-27, my emphasis).

(Perhaps it is unneccessary to add that the umbilical image in this passage is con- sistent with the larger maternal thematics of Camera Lucida.)

Ultimately, the fundamental chemicalness of photography is tied to its fragility--its mortality-too:

Not only is the photograph commonly on a kind of (perishable) paper, but, even when it is fixed on more durable supports, it is not less mortal: like a living organism, it is born straight out of silver grains which germinate, it blooms in a moment, and then ages. Attacked by light and humidity, it pales, becomes exhausted, and disappears (pp. 145-46).

Which is why Barthes is drawn to photographs that are "yellow[ed], fade[d] and effaced" (p. 147).

Chemistry, the "carnal medium" of light, the perishability of the photograph: tying together in an umbilical knot the birth and death of the photograph itself with the birth and death of its referent, these also are emphases of the work of at least two of my "lady amateurs." As is the theme of one last comment in Camera Lucida, made in the context of a discussion of the difference between the erotic and the pornographic, which seems to explain the book's enigmatic frontispiece: "the photograph is not unary, as soon as I become interested in the grain of the fabric" (p. 71). Which is to say, in cloth, the irregular detail of its weave, wrinkles, folds, and fissures, creating a "blind field" that offers irrefutable evidence of the indexicality of the photograph, or in other words, of its physical causation by and dependence on that which it represents. 18 It is that same "blind

18. See Barthes, La chambre claire, p. 91, on the concept of the "champ aveugle." For Barthes, who continues his argument concerning the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic, the concept of a "blind field" is intimately tied to that of the "punctum," and refers to that which is not actually visible in the photograph-either because it is off-frame, because it is not shown, or because it fissures the



field" of cloth, which functions as well as a light-trapping and light-diffusing surface doubling back on the support of the photograph itself, that is featured over and over again in Lady Clementina's untitled "photographic studies," with which I begin.

From its emphasis on the (un)heimlich to its celebration of the "blind field," what Camera Lucida proposes is a conception of photography that runs counter to the dominant attitudes of art photography, which would have it be an aesthetic medium fit to vie authoritatively with others in the same discursive domain: yield- ing a canon of "great" professional artists; predicated on visual intention and mastery of its optical apparatus, the camera; producing fine and original prints, formally unified, tonally pristine, and archivally preserved, epitomized in the state-of-the-art technophilia and ultra-sharp visual field of the pre-visualized "straight" photograph. That view of photography has its own teleology and its own modernist self-definition. The Barthesian understanding of photography is very much otherwise, subverting almost every rule of the photographic edifice con- structed by art history and the art museum. It is famous for its disregard of the "operator" in favor of the "spectator." But more important, for my purposes, are the various ingredients of an "amateur" photography that I have listed so far, all of which run dead against the very notion of "greatness" that an aesthetic canon such as that of the art history of photography depends upon. Without wishing to essentialize Barthes's "other" photography as somehow "feminine," I do want to suggest that there are good reasons for considering its hospitality to the woman photographer. For the ingredients of Barthes's photographic recipe that I have addressed thus far are much more evident and "piercing" in the work of the three women who are the subject of this essay than in the oeuvres of their professional brethren; indeed, their photographs may be said to allegorize that "other" photography.

Lady Clementina's Photographic Studies I turn to Clementina now, who was Lady Hawarden, the daughter of a titled

Scottish admiral and a Spanish mother, by marriage a viscountess and baroness.

focus of the image: "La prisence . .. de ce champ aveugle, c'est, je crois, ce qui distingue la photo erotique de la photo pornographique. La pornographie reprisente ordinairement le sexe. .. . La photo erotique, au contraire ... ne fait pas du sexe un object central; elle peut tres bien ne pas le montrer; elle entraine le spectateur hors de son cadre ... Le punctum est alors une sorte de hors-champ subtil, comme si l'image lancait le disir au-dela de ce qu 'elle donne ci voir" Because of its ties to invisibility and absence-what may be thought of as its "envagination" of the photograph's field of vision-I want to extend the concept of the "blind field" to cover (what it already covers by implication) the unrationalizable indeterminacy of the photograph's non-unary field of meaning, and the poignance of its excessive ties to its external referent.


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(Her husband was Cornwallis Maude, fourth Viscount Hawarden and Baron de Montalt of Hawarden.) She bore most of her ten children-eight girls and two boys, two of whom died as infants-and had raised several of them, before she took up photography in the late 1850s, using as her studio a large empty room in the South Kensington house that the family lived in when they moved to London in 1859, and posing her daughters in a series of uncaptioned "Photographic Studies" made over the course of a half-dozen years. She exhibited and won medals as an amateur in the Photographic Society in 1863 and 1864, and won the approval of both Lewis Carroll-another prominent amateur (who did not like Cameron's work)-and one of the two reigning professional pictorialists of the day, Oscar Rejlander, who wrote her obituary in January 1865 in The British Journal of Photography: "She has gone to the source of all light," he said, upon her sudden death of pneumonia.19

Over six hundred of Clementina's photographs wound up in the Victoria and Albert. Nowhere is their amateurism evidenced more clearly than in the torn corners that speak of private album contexts and a fine disregard for archival preservation, both of which enhance the innate perishability of the photograph of which Barthes speaks. But their amateurism is indexed as well in their insistent interiority and their focus on Clementina's own family. Most of them feature Clementina's elder daughters in a light-bathed corner, surrounded by yards of swathed fabric, adopting vaguely melancholic poses that hint at familiar but not quite identifiable narratives. Sometimes Clementina posed her younger children in the same windowed interior space. Occasionally she photographed her daughters outside on the same balcony glimpsed through the window of the interiorized photographs. Rarely, there are scenes of a man and a woman together, which are evocative of courtship, or of the separate spheres and alienation between the sexes. The overwhelming majority of Clementina's "Photographic Studies," however, are concerned with women alone or women together, accompanied only by mirrors, windows, walls, fabric, and light.

All the elements of Clementina's photography can be found in one spatially constricted photograph of her second daughter, Clementina Maude, seated alone in a rococo ballgown confection by the window. With her head against the wall, one hand at her throat and another sunk in the bunched and gathered dress fabric in her lap, she evokes both drapery-laden drawing-room portraits of girls in their coming-out costumes, and a thick history of melancholic female figures. In this she was not alone-neither her pose, nor her dressing-up, nor even the window situation were peculiar to her mother's photographs: there are photographs by Clementina's champion Lewis Carroll that contain all of those ingredients. But Carroll's photographs are evenly lit by light which threatens neither to engulf nor

19. Oscar Rejlander, The BritishJournal of Photography (January 27, 1865), p. 38, cited in Mark Haworth- Booth, The Golden Age of British Photography, 1839-1900 (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1984), p. 120.


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Clementina Lady Howarden. Photographic Study (Clementina Maude). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 1863-64.

to vanish their contents as it does in Clementina's photographs; they lack Clementina's self-reflexive pensiveness--this is Barthes's term as well20-about light, the opening that lets light into the room that contains it, and the subject that it constitutes.

Onto the blank wall next to her Clementina Maude casts a shadow, which doubles her gesture and competes with the diagonal of light let in by the window, while it also eats into her shoulder and throat, and suffuses the folds of her dress nearest the wall in obscurity. On the other side of her, the window allows light to fall upon her shoulder, arm, underskirt ruffles, and dress train, simultaneously specifying the construction of her gown, losing its way in the skirt's diaphanous intricacy, and all but bleaching it out at the right; at once engendering, penetrat- ing, and dissipating it. Submerged in herself, caught between the ends of the spectrum that bring her into existence and take her out of it as well, Clementina Maude becomes a self-reflexive figure of photographic chiaroscuro and a demon- stration of her mother's dallying with such infractions as backlighting and over-

20. See Barthes, La chambre claire, p. 65: "Au fond la Photographie est subversive, non lorsqu'elle effraie, revulse ou mime stigmatise, mais lorsqu 'elle est pensive."


Howarden. Photographic Study (Clementina Maude). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 1861-62.

and underexposure. As the posed recipient of her mother's gaze, she also renders the conflation of narcissism and tenderness, self-absorption and object-fixation that is characteristic of that gaze. Covered by a veritable field of cloth, she folds together empathetic and erotic engagements with the feel of fabric on flesh, in which the "carnal medium" of light stands in for the caressing hand, and the linked surfaces of dress, wall, and photograph for the body of the beloved child, grown to womanhood like her mother, who is invisible but forever implicated just outside the photograph.

The "photographic study" is closed at right by a dark piece of lacy curtain that hinges the edge of the photograph to the edge of window, and spells out the relation between the photograph's surface and its contents. As a piece of that which continues beyond the edge of the image, that fragment of window drapery


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implies the off-frame: not only the mother Clementina, her skirts and draperies and her dressing-up, but also the larger world outside the corner and enclosure that the photograph equates with itself. For the lace at right brackets and points back to the window which causes the play of light and shadow on the surface at left, and which mingles an evanescent, barely legible reflection of Clementina Maude's skirt inside the window, the balcony and facades beyond it that lie outside the window, and the window's construction itself-its sash and frame, its gleaming latch and one of its dark handles, not to mention its pane of glass. Those window elements are detailed, as if to suggest the possibility of its opening and yet state the fact of its closing. At the same time, the window shows how the photograph as a whole offers a range from the visible to the less visible, to the virtually invisible, with both the faint reflection of the skirt just this side of the window and the glimpse of the balcony balustrade just the other side of it collapsed together at the blind end of the spectrum. This "photographic study," that is to say, speaks of its own "blind field" constitution: its visibility is built upon the invisible, that which is within its frame upon that which is without it.

All of Clementina's "photographic studies" speak thus, indexing the exterior which is always just beyond the confines of the photographed interior, either in the light that streams into the room from the outside or in the balconied views


114 OCTOBER

glimpsed through windowpanes. These images speak to the division and the threshold-the connection and the cut-between interior and exterior, private and public, the fact of confinement and the fantasy of escape that it enframes, in the very means of the photograph: light, and the opening that lets light into the camera lucida. At the same time, they speak to the claustral condition-at once claustrophilia and claustrophobia-that is their enabling circumstance. That condition is amplified in those photographs, reiterated over and over again, in which mirrors simultaneously expand one figure into two and contract and crowd the cornered space of the room, as in a photograph of Clementina's eldest child, Isabella, seated en dishabillM as if she were at her toilette, at a mirror that stands before a star-wallpapered wall, redoubling its confining surface. Isabella's camisole falls off her shoulder, inviting the light's caress, as she contemplates herself in a mirror image that includes the reflection of the balustrade beyond the window, mapping window onto mirror, and outside world onto inside surface, and showing one to be as much a figment as the other. Hemmed in by the mirror's simultane- ous expansion and flattening of space, her reflection at once doubles and diminishes her, unfolding her body to the gaze and reducing it to a featureless

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shadow, not unlike the play of materialization and dematerialization in which her sister is caught in the "photographic study" discussed above.

There are relatives of those repeated mirror-studies, in which one sister embraces the other, or stands in full ballgown regalia by the window greeting her street-clothed sibling, who now appears as a personification of the outside world, born of the same light that enters the room. Clementina Maude, on the outside, doubles Isabella's gesture, on the inside, down to her gloved hand mimicking Isabella's bare one as they both hang on to the window's framework-to that which divides and connects them, while also dividing and connecting inside and outside, and repeating the photograph's larger armature, so that it divides and connects us and them, then and now as well. Dark-clothed to her sister's white gauze striped with dark lace-together they reverse and confuse the logic of out- door brightness and indoor dimness-Clementina Maude looks much like the shadowy mimesis of Isabella seen in the mirror study just discussed. Until one sees her hand touching Isabella's arm, as if piercing the mirror surface to grasp her, fulfilling Narcissus's wish and turning from reflection into companion and lover. Within the larger series of Clementina's "photographic studies," these affect to bring the mirror image alive, externalizing the ego's specular double, eliding the difference between image and reality, as well as between mirror and window, and imaginatively opening out the interior to the exterior by means of that elision, but then closing it off again by the insistent narrowness of the depicted encounter.

Among the types of "photographic study" encountered in Clementina's practice-single women seated in room corners, women at mirrors, two women embracing each other, one or two women in costume involved in some unspeci- fied relationship, and so on-there is a subset of reclining women. One of the latter, again featuring Clementina Maude, summarizes the issues that I have addressed so far, while also introducing the problem of the legibility of the photograph's narrative alibi. With its balconied window, its stripes of light, its tilted mirror and mirror image, simultaneously expanding and contracting space, crazily skewing the room corner so that that which is heimlich, familiar and so often repeated, begins to turn unheimlich, it explicates its own making and layers together several of Clementina's most privileged motifs. Clementina Maude is in costume, and sports the same self-reflexive, hand-to-cheek gesture found elsewhere, while the corner in which she lies is more than ever crowded, and thus places her in another subset of images, those with fussy Victorian furnishings intruding upon the light-striped emptiness of the room and providing the camera with detail to record. A striped sheet beneath Clementina Maude's head and upper torso is reflected in the mirror on one side of her, and wars with a paisley throw beneath her lower body on the other side of her; where the two surfaces meet, they form a "V" of fringed, light-filled empty space that somehow echoes the torn corners of the photograph. And then a light-catching vase, at once alone and crowded, both recorded incident and reflective surface, is poised almost


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absurdly on the brink of a table squeezed behind the divan, and there is nothing to articulate the reason for its presence.

Uncaptioned, this photograph evokes a promiscuous number of stories, characters, and stock figures: from vaguely orientalist odalisques to Sleeping Beauty to Juliet, Desdemona, and Ophelia. Again, the pose and its associations link it to a host of earlier and later nineteenth-century pictorialist images, from Henry Peach Robinson's Sleep, with its seamlessly collaged-in elements all evenly sharp, and its prior text (Mathew Arnold's "Tristram and Iseult"), to Lewis Carroll's compulsively repeated, transparently rendered series of Victorian Lolitas, to a world of Pre- Raphaelite paintings and photographs, in which the distinction between one medium and the other counts for very little.21 But unlike all these, Clementina's photograph is insistent in its narrative openness while it ties that indeterminacy to its medium-specific meditation on itself, speaking to the semiotic lawlessness, the

21. On Henry Peach Robinson's work, see Ellen Handy (with Brian Lukacher and Shelley Rice), Pictorial Effect Naturalist Vision: The Photographs and Theories of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum, 1994).



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illegibility that Barthes describes as definitive of photography, more immediately than any other photographic work of her time.

There are other window-corner studies in which the lack of explanatory caption seems to permit and even encourage a kind of hamming: exaggerated theatrical poses evoking states of abandonment, hysteria, rage, and despair, whose very excess at the same time points to the images' captionlessness, and to the lack of narrative stability and closure that flows inevitably from the absence of captions. In another text, "The Photographic Message," Barthes has written of the photograph's reversal of the logic of illustration, such that the caption "illustrates" the photograph rather than the other way around-which also means that to be read the photograph requires a caption more than other kinds of images.22 Clementina's photographs seem to "illustrate" that conception of the photograph-as-inverted-

22. See Roland Barthes, "The Photographic Message," in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 3-20. On the question of the photographic illustration in the nineteenth centuy, see also my Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1844-1875 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).


118 OCTOBER

illustration, too, while also speaking to another of Barthes's observations, which is his sense of the special relationship that photography has to theater: "'Pictorialism' is nothing but an exaggeration of that which Photography thinks of itself. It is, however ... not through Painting that Photography touches on art, but through Theater" (p. 55).23 In these exaggeratedly theatrical photographs, that relationship to theater is spelled out in the self-reflexive competition between the histrionic diagonals of falling light and shadow, and fabric-wrapped female body-- between light as the means of the photograph and gesture as the means of theater-that they also put on display. Indeed, it is a peculiarity of Clementina's "photographic studies" that impalpable light becomes not only a "carnal medium," as Barthes says, but a protagonist, if not the main player in some obscure erotic drama-the shower of gold that falls upon Danae, for instance.

Some of Clementina's "photographic studies" evoke more directly recogniz- able, less equivocal stories-as in a Cinderella series that she undertook, replete with a broom here, a lifted skirt there, suggesting the trying on of a slipper; ragged, short-skirted undress in some photographs contrasted to nebulously eighteenth-century faux-shepherdess costume in others. Still, her fairy tales are marked in their difference from those illustrated by both her professional and her amateur associates, such as the Little Red Riding Hoods done by Robinson and Carroll, which stick close to the old order of illustration, where the text is prior to the image. And even her Cinderellas contain her signature emphases on light, windows, and mirrors-they are variations on those themes, adding their more reducible alibis to the set in such a way as, paradoxically, to proliferate further the plurality of signifieds of the series as a whole. Anyway, with or without the Cinderella set, Clementina's work tended more generally in the direction opened up by the theatricalized studies, with their aporetic attitudes to the legibility of photographic incident-to both the readability of the photograph's text and the intelligibility of photographic detail (as in the sudden emergence of darkly distinct, arm-strained sleeve folds out of the larger bleached field of the photograph, or the confusion of reflection and transparency on the sharply sashed, lace-draped windowpane).

And overall, their pensive shifting of thematic focus away from the narrative pretext external and anterior to them, inward toward their own medium, was their distinction. It was Clementina's lady-amateurism that made that photographic pensiveness possible: her photographs all but say that themselves. It was her in- camera eschewal of mastery, of the control of light entering the camera, and of the

23. These remarks are a continuation of Barthes's discussion of what distinguishes photography from painting; they follow immediately on his remark that whereas the camera obscura came out of painting and thus was not the defining technical feature of photography, "the essential thing ... was the chemical discovery" (La chambre claire, p. 55).


From Clementina to Kasebier 119

wide world outside the camera, and her album-page-cornering of her own off- spring inside the camera, that allowed for the liberties she took with her photography. It was, that is to say, the four walls of her confinement-the limits presented by the cloistering of Clementina and her daughters within the domestic domain of the family and the home-that opened up her extraordinary free play in the shut rooms of self-reflexive photography, which were at the same time the apertured chambers of photographic fantasy, at once semiotically open and closed in on themselves.

Cameron's Family Photographs

Julia Margaret Cameron's "career" in photography began in 1864, just a year before Clementina's ended. Unlike Clementina's, hers was marked by its dia- logues with the work of other photographers, including that of Rejlander, from whom she is said to have learned the rudiments of her "technique." And the amateur work of Lewis Carroll, too: Carroll may not have cared much for Cameron's photographs, but aside from the fact that he photographed her with two of her six children in the late 1850s, before she became a photographer, there is also some evidence to suggest a two-way conversation between his and her photographs. That would include Cameron's twice-over depiction of Carroll's famous child muse, Alice Liddell, in 1872, fourteen years after Carroll had photographed her at the age of six, now grown to the age of twenty, in which Cameron repeated Carroll's profile cameo and frontal view, as if to chart what family photographs often record (and what Carroll wished to stave off): the aging of the child, the changes in her face and body as she grew to womanhood, the fact of her not stay- ing forever and ever the same, except in the that-has-been of the photograph that fixes her: in short, the paradox of the photograph and the inexorable movement of time in which its subjects are caught.

If Cameron conversed with Carroll's photographs, Carroll responded to Cameron's too. In 1864, during her first year of taking pictures, Cameron photographed the Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry on her honeymoon trip with the painter George Frederick Watts to Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, where Cameron lived with her own elderly husband, the colonial jurist Charles Hay Cameron, and her ever-expanding family of adopted children, grandchildren, servants, neighboring friends, and village people. (Cameron's photograph was part of a marriage pair, the pendant to which showed the long-bearded, twenty- odd-years-older Watts in a remarkably similar pose. Watts's patriarch to Terry's maiden: together they articulate the gender polarizations of Victorian culture, not to mention Cameron's double identification, with the subject and the object of the erotic-aesthetic gaze.) Carroll would photograph Terry the next year, in a similar melancholy mood, but at a greater distance, against an open window and an exterior brick wall rather than a luminous interior surface, in day dress rather than shift, and without the "self-strangling" gesture described by Nina


Julia Margaret Cameron. Ellen Terry (Sadness). 1864.

Auerbach.24 In the end, Cameron's photograph has more in common with Clementina's than with Carroll's; indeed, it was likely already a response to Clementina's torn-edged, window-cornered, sun-streaming, wallpapered camera lucidas, with their "blind fields," their indeterminate narratives and overtly posed poses, and their repeated bodice-loosened, bare-shouldered maidens, caressed by the "carnal medium" of light.

It would seem that Cameron was very much aware of Clementina's work; it may even have been the determining catalyst for her own as she began to take up the camera. That Clementina was Cameron's photographic mother (much more than Rejlander was her pictorialist father) can be seen even toward the end of her career; one of her illustrations to Tennyson's Idylls of the King, the 1874 photograph of Enid at her wardrobe, responded directly to another of Clementina's photographs of Clementina Maude, similarly lit and posed at an intricately worked cupboard. But, as might be expected, the most intense moment of dialogue between Cameron's and Clementina's photographs occurred when Cameron was

24. See Nina Auerbach, Ellen Terry, Player in Her Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 99. See also Morton H. Cohen, Reflections in a Looking Glass: A Centennial Celebration of Lewis Carroll, Photographer (New York: Aperture, 1998).



still a novice, just before and just after Clementina's death at the turn of 1864 into 1865. It was at that time that Cameron was particularly interested in same-sex or androgynous embraces, just as Clementina had been a few years before. Cameron represented it repeatedly in the form of two children in each other's arms, as in several multivalent representations of Gemini, Kingsley's "Water-Babies," the infant bridals of Aubrey de Vere and Bernardin de St.-Pierre, and the infants Jesus and John the Baptist (the multiplicity of possible textual alibis is worth remarking again); or two women clasped to each other's breasts, as in her staging of Sir Henry Taylor's fallen women "Flos and Iolande," which also evokes scenes of the Visitation.

Cameron's Flos and Ioland is as much concerned with the erotics of light as her portrait of Ellen Terry or any of Clementina's "photographic studies," to which it surely looks. It may even be understood as allegorizing the "love"-"tender ardor," Cameron called it in "Annals of My Glass House" of 1874, speaking of her

Cameron. Flos and Ioland. Victoria and Albert Museum. 1864-65.

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Cameron. My Ewen's Bride of the 13th of November 1869. 1869.

manner of handling her camera lenses-that is at the etymological root of "amateur."25 And the image flaunts as well what is not only another feature of the Barthesian view of the photograph-the stress on its production through chemistry rather more than its mediation by the camera, its alchemical happening rather than the art and science of its optics-but testimony too to Cameron's disregard of professional mastery of the lens in favor of the lover's love of the medium's generative process, which embraces the two embracing women within its halo-like effusion of liquid light. Like the aleatory inconsistency of focus that Cameron also celebrates in "Annals of My Glass House," the traces of the uneven flow of collodion across her glass negative, along with the strands of hair caught in the emulsion and the cracks in the plate found in others, are dramatized in this photograph, against all the rules of proper technique, but in favor of showing the magic of the photograph's making-its development, one might say, of the child of light in the womb of chemistry.

That was an idiosyncracy of Cameron's amateur self-reflexivity, setting it apart from Clementina's brand of the same as well as from the work of other

25. See Julia Margaret Cameron, "Annals of My Glass House," Photographic Journal 51 (July 1927), pp. 296-301, reproduced in Mike Weaver, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1815-1879 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), pp. 154-57, and Vicki Goldberg, Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press), 1981, pp. 180-87, in particular p. 181.



contemporary pictorialists. It was also something Cameron indexed repeatedly, in her signature focus on the Christian mother-and-child, showing the adored body of the child as the yield of a specifically, self-reflexively photographic mode of gen- eration, and placing photography under the sign of the Mother, much as Barthes would do a century later, when he spoke of its "umbilical ties" to the Real, and lamented over the photograph of his own mother like the Madonna hovering over her child with the knowledge of his future fate: Cameron's Madonna photographs are allegorizations of what Barthes calls the noeme of photography, from within the house of the "lady amateur."26

Cameron made literary, mythological, and allegorical photographs aplenty; like Clementina she drew heavily on photography's founding connection to theater, specifically to the amateur home theatricals privileged by her (and Clementina's) class.27 (Once again it was precisely the home-bound amateurism that was the woman photographer's lot at this moment that made it possible to think so intensively and photographically about photography's theatrical foundation.) But Cameron also made what surely may be thought of as family photographs, though they are extraordinary ones, many of them with ambitions that went well beyond the confines of the family and the family album, and thus are as fundamentally different from what we conceive of as family album snapshots as Cameron's brand of aristocratic amateurism was from the hobbyism with which we are now familiar. Those photographs, some of which I want to attend to here, draw a different kind of connection between amateurism, the mother, and the Barthesian conception of the photograph.

For example, the album Cameron made for her sister Mia contained familiar diaristic images of babies (as in an 1865 photograph of Cameron's niece Mary Fisher, who eventually had eleven children, holding her first son Herbert in her arms) and weddings (as in the marriage of Annie Chinery to Cameron's third child and second son, Ewen, on November 13, 1869).28 One of the things that one sees in such photographs is the "genetic traits" shared by family members, something of which Barthes speaks (and for which we still look in family albums). But another thing, rarely seen in family photographs as we know them, is the emphasis, shared only by Clementina's family photographs, upon the partnership of cloth

26. See my "Cupid's Pencil of Light: Julia Margaret Cameron and the Maternalization of Photography," October 76, (Spring 1996), pp. 115-41. 27. Cameron nee Pattle was one of ten children of James Pattle of the East India Company and Adeline de l'Etang. Born in Calcutta, she was raised by her aristocratic maternal grandmother in Versailles from the age of three to eighteen, and at the age of twenty-three married the Council of India jurist Charles Hay Cameron, twenty-four years her senior, in 1838. The society of Cameron and her sisters, in short, was that of the social and cultural elite of colonial England. 28. See For My Best Beloved Sister Mia: An Album of Photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum, 1994). Cameron bore six children, five boys (one of whom died in infancy) and one girl. In addition, she raised five orphaned relatives and one foster child.


Cameron. Julia Norman. March 1868.

and the "carnal medium" of light: the subject of My Ewen's Bride, for instance- whose doubly possessive title emphasizes the family relationships in which the photograph is embedded-is as much the bride of light as she is of Ewen, and the glowing yardage, gathered, buttoned, and hemmed, of her white wedding dress and ghostly, enshrouding veil, is as much the image of her wooing, embracing, and penetration by the constitutive light of photography, under the watchful eye of her mother-in-law, as it is of her virginal nuptials and ritual unveiling.

And then there are portraits of Cameron's descendants, whose future deaths are announced in the past tense of the photographs that picture them, that speak of the (un)heimlich of the cycle of familial time with all the piquancy of the old family photograph, and then some. Such is the case in the stunningly funereal portrait of Julia Norman, Cameron's eldest child and only daughter, in 1868, five years before she died in her seventh childbirth-whether as a sybil, a Mary Magdalene, a shade, a female Grim Reaper, or a very elegant death's head, Cameron didn't say. (Julia Norman, by the way, was the same daughter whose husband gave Cameron her first camera as a gift, saying, "It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph."29) The puncta of the eyelashes, the mole, the dimple, and

29. Cameron herself recounted this anecdote in "Annals of My Glass House." It has been repeated ever after, beginning with Helmut Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work (New York: Aperture, 1975), p. 28.


Cameron. Julia Jackson. 1867.

particularly the chapped lips, thrown into relief by the portrait's overall general- ization, punctuate the "future anterior" of this photograph's that-has-been. They come in a close second to the punctum of eyes that meet ours from beyond the grave found in other frontal family portraits by Cameron, though the subtraction from the effect of the uncanny when the eyes are downcast is evident in Cameron's portrait of her daughter as well.

The two most photographed people in Cameron's household were her par- lor maid Mary Hillier, whom Cameron used to act the part of the Mother more often than her own daughter, daughter-in-law, or any of her nieces (she is seen, for example, in the photograph of Flos and Iolande); and Julia Prinsep Jackson Duckworth Stephen, her sister Mia's daughter, and the mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. As Cameron's domestic, Hillier figured the home-enframed context of Cameron's work, not to mention the intimate link between the space of the amateur and the realm of the maternal that Cameron's photographs propose. Hillier's profile also stood more than any other for Pre-Raphaelite repetition and for Cameron's efforts to make the photograph yield another nature besides the one given to the sitter by the superficial circumstances of birth and social stand- ing. As for Julia Duckworth nie Jackson, she was photographed repetitiously too, and her features were sometimes shot in stylish profile; but more often than not she was shown facing the camera head-on, and she was almost always photographed as "herself." And she was photographed over time, first at eighteen,


126 OCTOBER

round-faced and prior to her marriage to the barrister Herbert Duckworth, and last at twenty-eight, mature and deep-eyed, four years widowed and four years before her remarriage to Sir Leslie Stephen. Thus her aunt's photographs of her chart not only the generalized stages of womanhood-maidenhood, marriage, and widowhood-but also her individual maturation; again, just as we think of family photographs doing, but with the difference that Cameron's portraits insist on an atavistically spectral conception of the photograph. (As Barthes said, "Photography is like the primitive theater, like a Tableau Vivant, the figuration of the immobile, powdered face beneath which we see the dead" [p. 56].)

Julia was most photographed by Cameron during the year of her first marriage, when the name that Cameron gives her oscillates between her maiden name Jackson and her first married name Duckworth. The 1867 portraits are intensely repetitious, and almost all of them (with the exception of what is perhaps Cameron's best-known female portrait, of "Mrs. Herbert Duckworth" as a Renaissance cameo, and another in which the sitter looks meditatively downward, which Cameron declared "My Favorite Picture of All My Works") face outward, head-on, looking the viewer "directly in the eyes" (to use Barthes's words again), with eyes that are at once uncannily alive, and glassily dead. One set in particular thematizes the range of out-of-focus to in-focus that was both Cameron's signature and the means of Julia Jackson's coming into photographic being: so that gradually, both from one photograph to the next, and within individual photographs, her eyes and hair, and even the pores of her skin come into focus before our eyes. In the more out-of-focus ones of this set Julia appears as a ghost. But even (or especially) in the sharpest of them, where there is most differential focus, it is as if we are visited by a fantasmatic apparition, a phantom that appears and disappears, fades in and out, addressing the fundamental photographic (and etymological) connection between "specter" and "spectrum," spirit, spook, and light. They also suggest a link between the psychological punctum described by Barthes, and the physiological "punctum" of the optometrist: the tiny puncture of the tear duct that wets the eye, keeps it vital, and in photographic circumstances makes it glisten like glass. Which perhaps helps to explain another association, of relevance to Barthes's Camera Lucida, puzzled over by Freud in the essay on "The Uncanny": between dead and watching eyes and the effect of the unheimlich. And so, on many levels-in their beloved faces and their frontal outward-facingness, in their looking us directly in the eyes, in their peculiar status as revenants, in their punctal emanation from their referent, and in their uncanniness-they are perfect figurations of Barthes's conception of the photograph.so0

30. Barthes chooses Nadar-the facing portrait of his wife/mother. There is good reason for this: Nadar's photographs also illustrate Barthes's conception of the "noeme" of photography, as do "primitive" daguerreotypes (especially anonymous ones) of facing sitters. But none thematize the Barthesian understanding of the photograph, while also embodying it, better than these art-ambitious images by



In 1874, toward the end of her "career," Cameron captioned the last portrait she made of Julia Jackson Duckworth with a line from Byron: "She walks in beauty." (No doubt the caption occurred to her as an afterthought; it is unlikely she set out to illustrate Byron. Again, this tallies with the a posteriori logic of illustration that, according to Barthes, differentiates the photograph from previous illustrative imagery.) Though She Walks in Beauty shows Julia three-quarter-length, leaner of face and severer of aspect, hair up beneath a hat, and in dark clothing suggestive of widow's weeds, and though it relegates all detail to the background wall of ivy and the puckering of her dress at the sleeve, it is as much a picture of a haunting as any of the earlier portraits. We come full circle, for the pulling of the chain about her neck is reminiscent of Cameron's earliest portrait of a maiden bride, the light-filled picture of Ellen Terry against a wall dubbed "Sadness" after

Cameron, and none others engage his conception of the amateur as the "attainment" of the professional. (Portraitists, then and now, were the ne plus ultra of the professional.)

Cameron. She Walks in Beauty. 1874.


128 OCTOBER

the fact, and the wall of ivy is similar to the foliate background of the two Alice Liddell portraits of 1872, each dubbed with a caption other than the sitter's name, in which Cameron showed how Alice was older than she had been in Wonderland.

The portrait's whitely glowing, out-of-focus face comes forward because of its dark-enframed brightness, and makes of Julia the niece and widow a kind of gothic emanation from a mansion thicket, an evanescent spirit who (dis)appears out of a dense photographic surface that specifies its ties to the referent that was. She is clearly from pre-Kodak days and just as clearly more than the average family snap. But her familial portrayer was just as homebound as the Kodak snapshooter- to-be. Julia's spectral countenance was just as much a record of the passing of household time-of the round of birth, growth, marriage, and death-as kept by the mother's side of the family. And more keenly than the family snap to come, she stands as witness and testimony to the unheimlich resident in the heimlich of the home, to which, because of her own inside knowledge of the poignancy of family history, her aunt the mother and "lady amateur" had a special relation.

Gertrude Kisebier. First Photograph. Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection. Circa 1885.


Kiisebier Thanksgiving, Oceanside. Metropolitan Museum ofArt, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection. Before 1910.

Kasebier's Punctal Pictorialism

Gertrude Stanton Kdisebier was a different matter. She opened her first New York studio in 1897, in an upper story of the Women's Exchange (an organization that sold the handicrafts of "gentlewomen" who needed income) at Thirtieth and Fifth, and her last in 1920 in Greenwich Village, before her eyesight began to fail and her daughters took over her portrait business and kept it going until the Second World War. She became the first independently elected (that is, not on account of a husband) woman member of the Linked Ring in 1900, and was the only female founding member of the Photo-Secession when it started up in 1902. The first issue of Stieglitz's magazine Camera Work was devoted to her; she had ten photographs in the first exhibition at the "Little Galleries" at 291 Fifth Avenue (a block from her studio) in 1905; and shared a two-person exhibition with Clarence White the following year. She was a well-known and celebrated portraitist, and helped to teach the craft to another early member of both the Linked Ring and the Photo-Secession, the young Alvin Langdon Coburn, who portrayed her as a grande dame in 1903, when she was fifty-one to his twenty-one.31

That was one thing uKsebier shared with her "lady amateur" forebears: a career begun mid-life, after her childbirthing and most of her child-raising was done. Coming of age in Brooklyn, she had married German-born Eduard K~sebier when she was twenty-two. While his shellac business flourished, she bore three

31. See Barbara L. Michaels, Gertrude Kdsebier: The Photographer and Her Photographs (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992).


Left: Kisebier. Mother and Child (Mrs. Ward and Baby). 1903. Facing Page: Gertrude & Charles O'Malley, Newport, R.I. 1903.

children, Frederick, Gertrude, and Hermine, before enrolling in art school at the Pratt Institute in 1889 at the age of thirty-seven, when her children were fourteen, eleven, and nine, respectively. It was in that context that she began making photographs seriously, first on the side, and then as her main preoccupation. But she had taken her first photographs earlier on as a mother making private records of her family: her first photograph was one she took in 1885 or so of her husband Eduard and first-born Frederick staring out at the camera, one gaze each in the flattened fore- and middle-grounds of the detail-filled image. Though it is an old- fashioned albumen print from a collodion negative, this picture corresponds to the imminent arrival of a new moment both in photography and in amateurism, when dry-plate photography first dispensed with the need for the darkroom chemistry of the previous decades. The Kodak camera was in the offing, soon to become a leisure toy that Stieglitz would compare to the bicycle; and advertising would soon be specifically directed at women, as a way to expand the market for the handheld camera, the industrial processing of film, and the hobbyist's culture of "you press the button, we do the rest."32

Iisebier's photography soon moved out of that context and into the discursive spaces of art and professional portraiture. But the anecdotal structure and intimate framework of that early photograph animate much of her later work as

32. Both the bicycle and the camera were marketed as healthy pastimes for the "new woman" at the turn of the century-see Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, p. 56. It was this linkage between new modern leisure toys that Stieglitz addressed in "The Hand Camera-Its Present Importance" (1897), in Goldberg, Photography in Print, pp. 214-17.



well, including photographs made in the pictorialist media of IKsebier's genera- tion-platinum and gum-bichromate--many of which continued to chronicle the private life of the family, and to organize themselves around a collision between a foreground subject and a background punctum (or vice versa). Kdsebier remained committed to her particular brand of punctal pictorialism, and never showed any interest in the formalist rigor of the sharply flattened fragment of the last phase of the Photo-Secession (from which Kdsebier withdrew in 1912), or in the doctrine of the "straight" photograph that it inaugurated. Also, well into her pictorialist career she produced full-on family pictures that differ from her "first photograph" only in medium and format, such as the Thanksgiving photograph that she took sometime before 1910, where across the deep space of the photograph, with its familiar gathering of relatives and children (Eduard IKsebier, who died not long after, is the shadowy profile to the left), one meets the gaze of Kisebier's grand- daughter, held in the lap of her mother, backed by the glanz of gleaming glass.

The other founding member of the Photo-Secession with which Kisebier was most closely associated, and who became the leading representative of the pictorialist defection from Stieglitz's camp once Stieglitz renounced pictorialism, was Clarence White. Outside of her professional portrait work, what KIsebier was best known for was a pictorialist style that was very close to White's, as in the platinum triptychs that she made at the turn of the century. But even in these works, there is a significant difference, which has to do with the diarism that inserts itself fairly insistently into Kisebier's work, and the punctal quality of the glance that inter- rupts the internal unity and breaks the surface of so many of her photographs. Both are evident in the series of photographs that she made during a family sum- mer in Rhode Island in 1903, some of which were included in Stieglitz's Camera Work, while others were kept within the purview of the family. For example, the

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132 OCTOBER

platinum triptych she made of her older daughter Gertrude O'Malley looking through a picturebook with her son Charles testifies to several things that are ger- mane: Qisebier's continuing interest in the family photograph, her articulation of the space of familial domesticity as the founding condition of her production, and her unusual use of a visual vocabulary closely linked to the Kodak snapshot- casual framing, cropping, instantaneity, ad hoc, and stop-action anecdotalism, combined with platinum printing and the triptych format. If Cameron had made icons out of her family pictures, perhaps these are the reverse, pictorialist icons made back into family pictures.

Like Cameron, Kaisebier made maternity scenes the trademark of her pictorialist work early on; indeed, she was as much known for that "feminine" motif as her contemporary, painter Mary Cassatt-and if she associated her work with Cassatt's formula, it's not at all unlikely that it worked the other way as well, and that Cassatt doffed her hat to Kiisebier too. But there was one area in which KIisebier departed from Cassatt, and from most other renderers of mothers and children: not only in her emphasis on the child's independence-its squirming and straining away from the mother, sometimes combined with, sometimes instead of the cuddling and caressing that goes on in Cassatt's and others' depic- tions-but also in her focus on the child as the punctum of the family, rather than its nucleus. This went all the way back to Klisebier's earliest photograph, of her husband and son, and it shows up again in her pictorialist maternity scenes, as in the outward glance of baby Ward in a photograph of 1900, which ruptures the circle of mother and child while it also punctures the seamless gum bichromate surface of the image, to seize upon the viewer's attention, here and now outside of its space and time. It is worth remarking that Stieglitz made very similar photographs during this period, in his 1899-1900 Journal of a Baby, which depicted his first wife Emmeline and their daughter Kitty. However, those photographs emphasize the unity of the mother-and-child duo, even when their bodies are apart, in the umbilical cord of their mutual exchange of gazes. That cord is cut by Kiisebier more often than not, in such a way as to emphasize that cut's ties to the noeme of the photograph.

There is no more forceful use of the punctum of the child's outward gaze to disrupt the concord of the family and pierce the internal unity of the image than in a 1901 photograph of the Brandegee family with its double, tongue-in-cheek title, "Family" and "Harmony." Susan Brandegee, professional cellist, is positioned between husband, cello, and child, and the array of glances between the three subjects ranges gradually from the inward-directed, to the sidelong, to the outward-gazing: the child in the left forefront who looks us "directly in the eyes," introducing an uncanny note into the space of the home. Here, as elsewhere, IKisebier seems to have learned the lessons about differential focus first taught by Peter Henry Emerson in the 1880s, who based his theory of subjective photographic vision on Helmholtz's physiological optics, suggesting that photographs should not be uniformly sharp, but rather should have an area of focus corre-


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Kiisebier Harmony (Family). 1901.


Kasebier Clarence White and Family. Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection. 1908.

sponding to the way the human eye attends.33 Where so many took that to mean allover fuzziness, Kdisebier was one who did not: for in the foreground of this image there is also a moment of sudden focus and abrupt attention, all at once concentrated out of the gathering of alertness in the background gloom of the photograph-and it is the moment of the child's intransigent glance sharply meet- ing ours. Kdisebier would seem to have been particularly well-positioned to see the shading of the heimlich into the unheimlich that characterizes the home as well as the photograph.

33. See Peter Henry Emerson, "Naturalistic Photography" (1889), in Goldberg, Photography in Print, pp. 190-97. See also Handy, Pictorial Effect Naturalistic Vision.



That effect is found elsewhere as well: in a 1908 portrait of Clarence White and his (relatively harmonious) family, in which the spatial compression of the photograph yields less difference in degree of focus, but which is nevertheless punctuated by a series of separately unyielding glances out at us. Each one of those glances is islanded for all its closeness to the others; each one reads as an interjection of something unseen by the others-the children's gazes in particular, which are reminiscent of that "first photograph" of Kisebier's husband and son. Meanwhile the light glances off the whites of Jane White's eyes, in a manner strangely like the weirdly reflecting pane of glass behind her, making her outward glance another island of uncanny focus. While her husband, as the male head of the household and the object of IQsebier's pictorialist identification, is the centered subject of the photograph, Jane White, looming above him, is its most piercing figure. Her shining, glassy eyes articulate the logic of the punctal glance that orga- nizes the rest of the image, that disorganizes the family into an atomized series of separate, secretive cells, that is identified with light itself, the flat, cold surfaces off of which it bounces, and the interiority, apertures, and optics of the home-its doorways, windows, and mirrors. (There is even a kind of contrast that the photograph mounts between the framed and tamed picture at left and the ghostly glass house at right as possible models for the homebound pictorialist photograph.) Finally, those spectral eyes, at once bright with past life and as lifeless as the vacant white paper that they make present to us, spell the homely photographic equiva- lence of the vital and the morbid, the alive and the dead. In hindsight, which is none other than the "future anterior" of photography, the melancholic gazes of the White family conjure up the intrusion and germination of death within the heart and hearth of the family, and the photograph's access to it because of its own temporal paradox. As do all the other punctal glances of Kisebier's photographs, which speak, as Barthes does, of that "other punctum (another 'stigmata') besides the 'detail .. . Time, the heart-rending emphasis of the noeme ('that-has-been')" of photography.

Other photographs enunciate the ties that bind the punctum and the (un)heimlich in a more generalized and self-reflexive way. That is the case of a 1910 photograph dubbed Lollipops that deploys the same spatial structure of foreground theme and background incident (Hermine KIsebier Turner watching her daughter and niece) as before, though now its composition is more self-consciously based on Dutch genre-painting. Here, the uncanny is a matter of the intrusion of something unseen into a quintessential moment of snapshot cuteness, replete with lollipops, giant hairbow, and cuddled kitten: the light that descends the staircase behind IKisebier's grandchildren like an invisible presence, the eerie gathering of focus at the banister, the unreadable si

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