Having attributed its absence to grief, and thus having neglected the fraught politics of visibility on which Barthes’s theory is premised, it is only recently, and in the light of the instructive interventions of Kaja Silverman, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, and Jonathan Beller, that I have thoroughly reconstructed my point of view. It is an image whose presence (and absence) in the book plainly has a transformative effect on his thinking with and about photography, but the vagaries of grief are unpredictable, and photographs can indeed wound. I’ve thought for quite some time that Roland Barthes’s grief at the recent death of his mother was the sole and logical reason for his withdrawing from us the image of his dearly departed mother as a young girl in the famous Winter Garden Photograph, of which he writes at length in Camera Lucida. The privation of History protects and tames the colonizer’s imagination as viewer. Typically, there is in this grammar of description the perspective of “declension,” not of simultaneity, and its point of initiation is solipsistic. Roland Barthes in conversation with Guy Mandery 1 They are the ones I use in my text to make certain points. The photographs I choose have an argumentative value. Part 1: Solipsism, Stigmata, and Silencing Invocations Copyright: The Richard Avedon Foundation. Richard Avedon, William Casby, born in slavery, Algiers, Louisiana, March 24, 1963.
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