Thought Series #2571 1998 © Bill Jacobson
Artist, writer and curator Odette England asked more than 200 photographers, artists, and writers to respond to Winter Garden Photograph, Roland Barthes’ mythical image of his recently deceased mother when she was five years old. It was an image Barthes wrote extensively about in his book Camera Lucida but refused to reproduce, somehow building on its memory and mythology.
England’s resulting publication, Keeper of The Hearth, published by Schilt Publishing on the 40th anniversary of Barthes’ book, might be the best photobook of 2020– we’re betting on it.
Humble’s Senior Editor Roula Seikaly spoke with England (and a special guest!) about her motivation behind the book.
Winter Garden, Unfixed 2017 Unfixed contact print on expired Kodak paper. © Phil Chang/M+B Gallery
Roula Seikaly: Camera Lucida is a foundational and celebrated text. Why center your project on "The Winter Garden Photograph" chapter, as opposed to other chapters, or the book in its entirety?
Odette England: The project does reflect Camera Lucida in its entirety by commemorating its 40th birthday. I chose to do this through the Winter Garden photograph specifically because it’s one of the mechanisms Barthes uses to illustrate in a personal way two key concepts he discusses in the book: those being the punctum and the studium. One of the points Barthes stresses is that a personal photograph meaningful to one person – in his case, a snapshot of his mother at the age of five – is incapable of having the same charge, the same effect for anyone else as for him.
Kris 2017 Archival Pigment Print © Kristine Potter
Seikaly: How does memory play into this?
England: Absence of the Winter Garden photograph in Camera Lucida is key because it helps to support Barthes’ argument that photography and memory don’t mix. For Barthes, memory was more sensation than image. And though photography and memory intertwine, there are different types of photographs, and different types of memory, and these tend not to function in the same ways, certainly not always harmoniously.
Susan Engel, in her book Context is Everything, writes that Every memory journeys from its first vivid moment within a person to its multifarious transformations and uses within the world. Every memory we have relies not only on our internal experience of recollection to maintain it, but also on public transaction. For Barthes, this involved sharing memories of his mother, whose loss he felt deeply, by concealing the object that both informed and deformed those memories.
The Winter Garden photograph was also a meaningful entry point for Keeper of the Hearth because as far as we know, no-one has seen it or can verify its existence. As photographers, we so often try to make visible the invisible, to give voice to the voiceless, to illuminate hidden or disguised concepts. Barthes describes the snapshot of his mother which we can ‘read’ as a photograph, through his words, but the more I read Camera Lucida, the less I feel I know that image. Perhaps because so many of the photography community are familiar with the text, it was a tantalizing challenge: how to articulate visually and/or textually a photograph that echoes, suggests, or reflects on one person’s description of an image we’ll never see.
As foundational and celebrated as Camera Lucida is, it’s also a challenging, problematic, subjective text, which Doug Nickel discusses in his essay.
Apparition 2013 Archival Pigment Print © Kelli Connell
Seikaly: Could you describe how the participating artists and their images came to you?
England: I started by asking four or five friends. Their excitement encouraged me to reach out more broadly including to people I didn’t know, or hadn’t met. Other than diversity I didn’t have any fixed criteria. What was lovely and generous is how many contributors starting proactively recommending people to me, sometimes 15 or 20 names at once. It didn’t take long to reach 100, then 150. It could easily have grown to 300.
I knew that the project would be a book and an exhibition, which is one of the reasons I asked each contributor to provide a physical print or object. Also, the Winter Garden Photograph was itself an object that Barthes supposedly kept on his desk and used as inspiration for writing.
Mother's Day, Manzanita Beach, Oregon 2018 Archival Pigment Print © Dru Donovan
Seikaly: If you had to choose, which image would you say is your favorite?
England: Choosing any one favorite image from Keeper of the Hearth would be like trying to choose my favorite photobook: it changes each time I look at the prints (which too is different to viewing them in book form) and depends on what mood I’m in. Some I love for what’s not in the photograph, for example, the backstory that accompanies the photograph and which isn’t in the book. Some, I love because I’ve come to develop a close relationship with the person. Others are just visually heady and make my heart sing.
First photograph, September 1952 1952 / 2017 Archival inkjet print from stereo photographic transparency © Mark Klett /Courtesy Henry N. Klett, Jr.
Seikaly: Contributor Phillip Prodger notes that Barthes thought The Winter Garden Photograph captured his mother's true essence. What do you think is their true essence?
England: For me, the essence of any photograph is the way in which it touches, whether that be physical, emotional, spiritual or otherwise. Nicholas Muellner, in his wonderful new book Lacuna Park, writes: A photograph is a surface for feeling. I think about that phrase a lot.
A photograph is also a question, a prompt, and an interface. A point where we the viewer meet and interact with the thing itself and its shadow. A transaction between body, imagination, environment. I think every photograph also has the capacity to exist as an afterimage, some more vivid and intense than others.
I love something that David Maisel said about the image he contributed, that a photograph is window, mirror, prism.
But because photographs are also social spaces, it’s easy to embellish ‘facts’ through them when we look, read, and respond to them. I say ‘facts’ with caution since I don’t believe any photograph can be fully factual.
Untitled 1996 Gelatin Silver Print © Shawn Michelle Smith
Seikaly: How does this manifest in your photographic practice?
In my own work, I’m interested in the tension between what can and cannot be held from a photograph to create understanding. With photography, there’s typically a need for resolution, to grab and own what an image portrays. It can be easy to think of photographs as complete and of-the-world, that their edges are definitive. I like pointing to photography’s leakiness through their object-hood and through mistakes and errors. Because photographs don’t offer a seamless story, they’re so much more loose and oozy.
In Camera Lucida, Barthes uses the word ‘contemplate’ in the context of the Winter Garden photograph and its essence, a Latin root the meaning of which is templum – a sacred space and time set aside for careful observation and deep thought in which one is wholly present. In classical antiquity, the templum also was a site for prophecy through the interpretation of signs in nature. I think there’s an interesting parallel to be drawn between the templum and the spaces of the photograph, the book, the gallery or museum, and the artist studio. Each requires one to view, reflect upon, and interpret to derive meaning. They are spaces that amplify looking, gazing, seeing, and noticing.
Remembrance. Salvador Bahia. Brazil 1980 Gelatin Silver Print © Rosalind Fox Solomon/Bruce Silverstein Gallery
Seikaly: Where did the title "Keeper of the Hearth" come from, and how does it encapsulate this project?
England: My friend Keavy Handley-Byrne named the book. I can't take any credit for it but I LOVE it and would feel wrong about offering any kind of reason they had. Keavy's awesome, I emailed them earlier today and they are happy to answer. It was hands-down - and instantly - the name when Keavy suggested it.
Keavy – can you share the backstory?
Keavy Handley-Byrne: Odette is being very complimentary -- I'm so grateful that I was able to work on the book as Odette's research assistant and be party to her brilliant execution of this book!
I love to find out the meanings of different names -- especially names that are less common in the US, or which have become somewhat old-fashioned. Barthes' mother was named Henriette, and the second half of Camera Lucida being so heavily about his search for his mother, and his eventual location of her spirit in the winter garden photograph, I wondered about what the name Henriette meant.
The first definition I found was "Keeper of the Hearth." That Henriette drives Barthes' writing in the second half of the book, that his grief over her death is something that so deeply touches him... it formed a clear picture in my mind of Henriette being at the center of Barthes' world, that she keeps watch over the hearth, which generates warmth for a home. In this case, it felt to me like an apt metaphor for how Henriette infuses Barthes' writing on photography with particular fervor.
Estes 2018 Archival Inkjet Print © John Houck
Seikaly: Thanks, Keavy! Odette – Someone in the audience at your SPE National lecture asked a great question that I'd like to revisit here: what do you think of revealing other artists' unseen photos?
England: Each of the artists who agreed to participate in the project was eager to contribute something, be it a photograph or text, or both. Sometimes it took folks longer than they thought to locate just the ‘right’ one or to decide between several options. Others seemed to know exactly which image best reflected the prompt given. I was careful to honor any requests by participants, for example, if they wanted their images to appear in a certain configuration. It made editing and sequencing more challenging, but in this case, for this project, it was essential. I was acutely aware of holding in my hands the lives and loves of more than 200 people.
I remember reading a piece by Erin Mitchell who said that through the absence of the Winter Garden photograph, Barthes controls its interpretation. But I do wonder if this overlooks the capacity for a viewer to use other routes to understanding a photograph. It may be that Barthes’ grief revealed in Camera Lucida is palpable and relatable in a way only possible through the snapshot’s absence.
For example, any ‘revealing’ of a photograph can happen verbally. We need not see a photograph for it to be in some way exposed. It’s one of the reasons why, when I presented the lecture at SPE, I focused on sharing texts from the contributors rather than my own words.
One of the best examples of why one chooses to keep unseen photographs hidden is Lucy Gallun’s wonderfully tender and raw essay.
Untitled Year unknown (found August, 2017) Found damaged snapshot © Andy Mattern/Elizabeth Houston Gallery
Seikaly: For you, what sustains the lasting potency of Camera Lucida overall, and "The Winter Garden Photograph" as an idea, an exercise?
England: I’m attracted to what I don’t know – and what I don’t know I don’t know. I love secrets, things that are ambiguous, things that are compelling and complex in equal measure. It’s that hinterland of photography and the winter garden photograph that I love to frolic in.