Few reflections on the power of photography are as memorable as Roland Barthes’s discussion, in Camera Lucida (1981), of the “Winter Garden Photograph” of his deceased mother. It is on the basis of this “unreproducible” image that Barthes is able to reassure himself that photography is capable of capturing the truth of an individual. The decision not to include the photograph among the book’s images underscores the intensely personal nature of Barthes’s project, as does the telling confession that emerges from these somber passages. Following his mother’s death, we learn, Barthes struggled to concern himself with the fate of humanity in its totality. “My particularity could never again universalize itself,” he writes.1
As Fred Moten suggests in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), the inward retreat marked by these well-known reflections is symptomatic of greater limitations within the French author’s thinking about the visual...
University of California Press