Roland Barthes

Revamped Barthes:

She disappeared last night, from the house in which I sit. Downstairs in the basement, I’ve been spending my time today going through boxes of photos. I watch their evolution back in time, as they turn from digital, to colored quick film, Polaroids, and back in to the simple snapshots, until we end with our start, the black and white image. I come across a picture I haven’t seen before, my grandmother holding my mothers shoulders, her older sister at her side holding the family pets. The cat stirs as the dog jumps up the leg of my aunt, who she calms by holding his head. Both my grandmother and mother seem distracted by something off to their right in the distance, as if at the last moment before the shutter someone has arrived in the yard. The little girl my grandmother holds close picks at her fingers as she waits, less than patiently, for the photo to be taken. Knowing my mother, you can see that she was dressed up for this day, barrettes in hair and pink scarf around the neck. This is the beginning stage of her personality, slowly seeing the personality of the woman I know shining through the image. Her stare can only be contributed to the envy of her sister, getting to wear the clothes she wants, those more relaxed fashion and less forcibly feminine. Staring at this photo, I see a little girl that I would, normally, only be able to comment on as cute. Looking closer, seeing her personality shine through, I can’t help but see this photo and feel myself become maternal, wanting so badly to care for and love this girl who had no idea what was to come, before she knew me, before she’d know death.
She seems ready with energy, explaining the tight grasp in which her mother holds her. That fidgeting hand seems ready to swing at her side as she runs out of the frame, instinctively prepared for the moment she has her chance. Her will is apparent and her desire is present, almost as if to say “No one can stop me, I answer to no one”. It is not malicious, it does not seem angry or resentful, just filled with will. It is strange to see the memory of another in such a light, surrounding a figure I know so well as giving and willing to do for others. In her last few years there was no need for escape from her surroundings, as there was no escape from her future. It is this seeming desire to be let loose and her own that shows me a girl, a history, I had not known; a forever willing mother as the once unwilling child. It is in this photo that I constitute the reason for photography and the Photograph. We, in life, look for the answers to explain the way we are and what is to come, often curious as to what brings us to this point in life. Looking at this photo has brought me to a deeper understanding. Moving back through life into the experience of seeing my mother in the child mind, I can’t help but feel more connected to my past and the woman in the photo. It has given me an experience that I have come to see as unique to itself, the photo has achieved something I did not know it could, the impossible science of the unique being.
I cannot say that this is just another family photo, as that limits what constitutes the family. As we go in life, we expand our families past the scientific definition and into the outreaches of the human family. Just as I cannot cut short my family in this family photo, I cannot do the same to my mother or the other individuals within the frame. It is because of this frame in which they stand that I cannot deny them. The photography medium keeps us from ignoring the past, capturing a moment, a period, in time to be held as a gift for the memory; I can never deny that the moment has been there. Each reaction, my mother and grandmothers gaze out of the frame, the dog against my aunt’s leg, or the struggle of the cat to release from the grasp, is motionless, as if the world itself held still for the photographer to draw it all down. Their deaths are held closely in the mind by this photo itself, the face like the mask that covers the grave, holding on to the positive of the person we knew. With each old image revealed, we are brought closer, closer to their lives and closer to the imposed melancholy each expression gives us. It is the eerie presence of both the life of their early selves and the understanding that their deaths have come that give this photo the importance of any popular work, or better. My photo cannot be shared with anyone else in the same way I cannot comprehend the importance of others’. It is my own escape to understanding of the past and its history, beyond that of my own, creating a connection between my mother and me that, without this image, may have slipped into the cracks of the flaw-filled human memory.