Light in a Dark Room: Photography and Loss (review)

Photography, as Jay Prosser describes it in Light in a Dark Room, is a record of loss. Though we take most photographs to capture and preserve the present, the stillness of the photographic image simply emphasizes the untouchable distance of everything as it recedes into the past. In fact, photographs often capture details unnoticed in the present, which then remain as records of the vast tracts of experience we are too obtuse ever to possess. Going back to old photographs, therefore, is not always to recapture experience but often to realize, sometimes for the first time, how much we have missed.

Prosser offers two different accounts of this process. The first is derived, not unexpectedly, from Lacan, and it is offered in elucidation of the photographic theories of Roland Barthes. In this analysis, the photograph is an exceptionally powerful revelation of the Lacanian real, that which escapes ostensible reality only to return unexpectedly as trauma. Lacan's real is what is blotted out by our attempts to perceive and understand, and it appears in, and as a painful humiliation of, that understanding. The analogous category in Barthes is the punctum, the inexplicable pang that one feels in the presence of certain photographs, the emptiness they open up just where they were supposed to offer support. Prosser follows most other discussions of Barthes's Camera Lucida by pointing out the all-important absence of the key photograph in the discussion, the famous Winter Garden photograph of Barthes's mother, the omission of which is the only way that Barthes can convey to his readers the loss of a woman they never knew. The purpose of Prosser's chapter on Barthes is to examine the wound represented by this photograph and thus to understand Barthes not as a critic or a philosopher but rather as an example. Camera Lucida is to him a work of "ph/autography," self-writing displaced as the rewriting of photographic messages.

As an example, Barthes is supposed to serve as introduction to the other "ph/autographers" to follow: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gordon Parks, Elizabeth Bishop, and finally Prosser himself. The analysis begins to shift as soon as it turns to Lévi-Strauss, whose pictures of Brazil, resurrected for publication some sixty years after they were taken, document a world that is actually, and not metaphysically, lost. To be sure, Lévi-Strauss is struck, on examining his own photographs, by the "lack of something the lens is inherently unable to capture" (77), but the most dramatic lack documented by these photographs is the quite literal loss of the culture Lévi-Strauss had studied. As Prosser struggles to put it, "the referents of the photographs really have gone" (83). The Amazonian people Lévi-Strauss had photographed are distant and untouchable, not because of the mystery of time or the convolutions of experience, but because empirical social processes have wiped them out. In this sense, then, Barthes, Lacan, and the "ph/autographical" all turn out to be inappropriate and relatively useless introductions to the chapters that follow, simply because the real that is lost in these later instances is a quite literal real, lost because it has come to be suppressed by politics.

The most arresting part of Light in a Dark Room is its account of the death by photo-journalism of Flavio da Silva. Originally included in a 1961 Life photo-essay by Gordon Parks on poverty in Latin America, Flavio da Silva was swept up by a flood of readerly concern, brought to the United States, treated for his asthma, and then sent summarily back to a life that had already been altered almost out of recognition. Though Parks is originally motivated by political and personal concern, a concern so intense he wants to adopt Flavio, he succeeds only in transforming his would-be son into an embittered outcast. The losses in this case are painfully actual, and they extend to Flavio's entire neighborhood, which is bulldozed...