Falling...

I've been finally getting to grips with Roland Barthes' last book, 'Camera Lucida', written just before his death in 1980. I've written about my relationship with Barthes' writing on photography before [blog posts passim], but I confess that although I've owned this last volume of his for some years, I've let it lie until now, except for the occasional dip into its pages. I was reading some of it earlier over a pint in the pub, and I was struck particularly by a couple of things. At one point he hits on something that has been at the back of my mind for ages: the fact that a photograph taken of oneself at any time in one's life, is at some indeterminate point in the future, effectively, one's death-mask.

He phrased it as 'death in person'. It reminded me of a post I made on August 21st, 2021: it shows me as a toddler, sitting on the front lawn of Fairview, surrounded by my Herefordshire family: four generations together, captured in a tiny slice of time - in retrospect, I think it really should be five generations, as the matriarchs pictured were my great-great aunts: my great-grandparents already having died by then. However, this brings me to what I feel to be the perfect - and most poetic - definition of photography, which Barthes makes early on in the book. It's worth quoting the paragraph in its entirety and remembering that his time on this Earth was almost up when he wrote it:

'For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches - and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.'

Beautiful. I wish I'd coined the phrase 'cameras are clocks for seeing' as it encapsulates exactly my thinking on the nature of the photographic image. If I ever in my dotage lay claim to the phrase, then here is my affidavit on the matter: I didn't. And just like the tiny slices of my life frozen by the 'photographic mechanism', this blog, once I'm gone, will stand as a written parallel to the death mask of all of those images captured of me throughout my life: again, oriens morior, moriens orior...