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 	 Toward a Photography of Love: The Tain of the Photograph in
      Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red

      *E.L. McCallum*
      / Michigan State University/
      emc@msu.edu 

      (c) 2007 E.L. McCallum.
      All rights reserved.

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          Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

          Susan Sontag, On Photography

   1. To speak of ending in a photograph, as Susan Sontag does, would
      seem to aver photography's orientation towards death, an
      association it has held since its inception and one that has
      become practically axiomatic in photography theory. While Sontag
      means that our photophilia will turn everything eventually into an
      image (24), I'd like to ask what it means to end in a photograph,
      and what kind of end the photograph presents. For that matter, I'd
      like to interrogate the different ways of being a photograph. Will
      literature, too, end in a photograph or come to a photo finish?
      Does this end perhaps open up the form a photograph can take,
      complicating the truism that photography is thanatography? Might
      photography's end be a proliferation rather than a singular event?

   2. Because film photography is, as Derek Attridge has pointed out,
      "analogically bound to the referent," it faces a challenge in the
      digital age when the photograph "can always /not/ be the direct
      effect of the referent on sensitized paper" (86). The change from
      emulsion to pixels impels us to rethink fundamentally what
      photography might be. Can we compare image pixels to those that
      comprise words? The change in medium raises the question of
      whether there is a change in the photographic relation as well:
      would photography no longer work through analogy, or for that
      matter through the contiguity of the negative and the printing
      paper? These questions push us headlong into the theory of digital
      images. But before we reach that end, before we consider what end
      has photography, or literature, come to in the age of the digital,
      I'd like to turn back and offer a palinode on the theory of the
      photographic image. Examining what's behind the photographic image
      leverages a space to consider how the verbal medium for
      photography might come between film and digital.

   3. One can read Sontag's claim as tracing out the conventional
      analogy between life and death, living and photography. To be
      sure, some of the most widely read photography theory focuses on
      death as the way of figuring ending in a photograph. Sontag
      herself sweepingly claims that "all photographs are memento mori"
      (15). Similarly, remarking on a photograph of himself in Camera
      Lucida (the book he wrote after the death of his mother), Roland
      Barthes tells us that "death is the eidos of that photograph"
      (15). Even critics who do not explicitly link photography with
      death tie it to implicitly deathly things: AndrÃ(c) Bazin, for
      instance, after suggesting that "the practice of embalming the
      dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor" in all of the
      plastic arts (9), goes on to claim later that photography in
      particular "embalms time" (14). Eduardo Cadava's more recent
      reading of photography in the oeuvre of Walter Benjamin leads him
      to attest that "photography is a mode of bereavement. It speaks to
      us of mortification" (11). Geoffrey Batchen reveals that the link
      might reach back to portrait photography's earliest days, when
      subjects' "heads were inevitably supported by a standing metal
      device to keep them steady for the necessary seconds. Photography
      insisted that if one wanted to look lifelike in the eventual
      photograph, one first had to pose as if dead" (62); even so,
      "photography was a visual inscription of the passing of time and
      therefore also an intimation of every viewer's own inevitable
      passing" (133).

   4. Bazin's and Batchen's revelation of time as key to photography's
      thanatographic inscription is congruent with Christian Metz's
      insights when comparing film and photography. Metz uses the
      photograph's stillness and silence against film's motion and
      multisensory appeal to support his assertion that photography is a
      thanatography. But Metz goes further, noting that through its
      linkage with death, the photograph "is an instantaneous abduction
      of the object out of the world into another world, into another
      kind of time" (158). It is the temporal disjunction of the
      photograph, in contrast to the film's display of
      temporality--which, however similarly severed from the indexical
      moment, is nonetheless replayed in "an unfolding time similar to
      that of life" (158)--that most clearly demarcates the photograph
      from film in Metz's account. He cites Phillipe Dubois's remark
      that "with each photograph, a tiny piece of time brutally and
      forever escapes its ordinary fate, and thus is protected against
      its own loss" (158). Likewise, Barthes's conception of photography
      is so imbued with time that he declares that "cameras in short
      were clocks for seeing" (15). Photography's baleful association
      has become a usured figure for articulating the problems of
      absence and temporality that the medium engages. Batchen,
      reflecting on protophotographic theory, avers that Daguerre "like
      Talbot, seems to be suggesting that the primary subject of every
      photograph is time itself" (12).

   5. If photography is really about time, it may be aligned with
      narrative. Batchen notes that "in stopping or turning back time,
      photography appeared once again to be playing with life and death"
      (132). But if photography's engagement with time and ends is like
      narrative's, might it also turn to concerns other than death that
      as a literary form narrative has, like love or loss or
      immortality? The persistent alliance of death and photography
      needs to be troubled as it settles into axiom, because a too-pat
      conflation of death and ending occludes other concerns with time
      that photography theory can articulate.

   6. Little else but time comes to an end in the photograph. We might
      even ask of Metz, what kind of time? If "another kind of time"
      emerges, is it not linear time but layered time--whether a moment
      excised and pastiched into a future time, or the more immediate
      folding of time that digital photography, with its instant
      playback or easy proliferation on a network, affords. The fixing
      of the image--which evokes the cultural associations with
      death--happens in the middle of the photographic process, before
      the image circulates. Perhaps, then, photography's association
      with death might recast that figure as the middle, rather than the
      end. The photograph would offer itself as the tain of time,
      bouncing the past into the future like the silver backing on a
      mirror that bounces our image back to our eyes.

   7. The photograph, however, offers not simply to perpetuate a moment
      or event beyond its time, nor does it merely indicate the absence
      or displaced trace of the depicted, but produces a new fold in the
      networks of meaning. When the photograph itself is supplanted by
      or transformed into verbal description, what happens to the absent
      or lost object/time of the photograph? It is not now doubly
      absented, but oscillating between the impossible "photograph"
      (which may or may not exist as actual object) and the verbal
      description. To reevaluate absence and time in photography is to
      intimate that the disjunction of the image might offer an escape
      route from death, provide a residue whose unending potential for
      recombination suggests a tantalizing immortality. The interplay of
      presence and absence, folded space and the space enfolded, invites
      us to consider such recombination and folding by examining some
      absent photographs, by which I mean photographs that structure a
      text but that do not appear as visual representations. These
      absent photographs, rather than silencing or subtracting by their
      absence, organize openings around which meanings can collect and
      layer across linear time. As verbal objects, these depictions
      function as photographs despite the difference in medium.

   8. My concern, therefore, is less with the possibilities of visual
      narrative than with the narrative of the visual. Camera Lucida is
      compelling in no small part because there Barthes narrates the
      visual and challenges the presumption that what is seen is
      necessarily present. Perhaps one of the most memorable images in
      the book is the unreproduced photograph of his late mother, the
      image Barthes calls the "Winter Garden photograph" (70). Barthes
      is not the only writer who verbally produces an absent photograph,
      and the reversal of the usual order of representation--the
      photograph being the absent object that is represented rather than
      representing the absent object--opens up a space to rethink the
      possibilities and parameters of photography in relation to
      narrative. As Attridge argues, "Barthes's practice . . . shows
      that the referent is not the source of photography's special
      power--although the referential may indeed be crucial" (87).
      Verbal photographs produce a kind of hypotyposis that hinges on
      the absence of the depicted object, namely the visual photograph.
      In seeing not Barthes's mother (a doubly-layered referent) but the
      absent image of his mother, we not only perceive an experience
      analogous to Barthes's experience of originary loss, but are
      vulnerable to be wounded by the punctum of the verbal photograph.
      Yet rather than work extensively with well-thumbed texts of Sontag
      and Barthes--texts which nonetheless remain in contact with my
      concerns here, because their insights incessantly return from the
      dead like photographs--I want to elucidate the problem of
      narrating photographyy by reading a more recent text that narrates
      absent photographs.[1 <#foot1>]

   9. Anne Carson's novel in verse, The Autobiography of Red, concludes
      its main narrative section with a series of photographs, or at
      least chapters that claim to be photographs. This is, therefore, a
      text that almost literally ends with a photograph, whose
      trajectory is predicated on a series of final or closing shots.
      The book is composed of seven parts, the longest of which,
      "Autobiography of Red: A Romance," offers the most extensive and
      detailed narrative of the seven. The "Romance" has 48 one- or
      two-page chapters, most pithily titled by a single word, making it
      all the more notable that the section ends with a series of
      chapters titled "Photographs" and having different subtitles
      (although the very last one, "The Flashes in Which a Man Possesses
      Himself" offers a remarkable contrast to this pattern). The reader
      encounters five shorter sections before the "Romance" and one
      final segment, an "Interview," after it. My initial focus is on
      the "Romance," a modern rewriting of the ancient poet
      Stesichoros's tale of the red, winged monster Geryon, since the
      relation between narrative and photography is most explicit there.
      In Carson's version, Geryon grows from childhood to manhood,
      becoming a photographer and negotiating both his monstrosity and
      his unrequited love for Herakles. More classically, Geryon was a
      mythic monster whose murder and the murder of whose cattle was one
      of Hercules's labors. Stesichoros's writing of the tale, Carson
      points out in an early section, breaks free of the Homeric
      convention of relying on a specific adjective for each noun ("When
      Homer mentions blood, blood is /black/ . . . Homer's epithets are
      a fixed diction" [4]). Steisichoros also adopts the monster's
      view, rather than the hero's. These ancient innovations and the
      fact that their explication frames the "Romance" invite us to
      reflect on how we might understand the interventions Carson makes
      in thinking about photography. If film photography fixes the image
      to the paper, what does Carson's verbal photography fix--or unfix?


            I. A Fine Romance

  10. The Autobiography of Red poses a number of visual and narrative
      paradoxes, and these hinge on photography. Perhaps the most
      obvious one is that Red did not write this Autobiography. Rather,
      a largely unmarked narrator tells the life story of Geryon, a
      monster who becomes a photographer. And while the text offers a
      recognizable trajectory through a life, and Geryon is in fact red,
      it becomes clear that the referent of "Autobiography of Red" may
      not be the Romance itself or the novel as a whole, but rather
      elements in the text--the series of photographs described at the
      end. In other words, the autobiography referred to is visual, not
      verbal, and the title is eponymous, not categorical. Indeed, the
      autobiography as an object in the narrative is referred to as
      having "recently taken the form of a photographic essay" (60),
      although this mention, midway through Geryon's life story,
      curiously destablilizes the form of its object, implicitly raising
      the question of whether the photographs at the end are part of
      this same photographic essay.

  11. A second complication of Autobiography of Red is its range of
      composite references. In what might be called the romance's front
      matter--two essayistic sections on the poet Stesichoros and three
      list-like appendices--we learn of the historical poet's long poem
      on the red, winged monster Geryon who was killed by the hero
      Herakles for his red cattle. The first section begins with
      second-order representation, already reflecting on how the story
      is being recounted: Stesichoros's poem survives only in fragments,
      some of which are still being discovered, we are told. This
      prolegomenon foregrounds the form of the fragment and renders
      Stesichoros a rather postmodern poet: "the fragments of the
      Geryoneis itself read as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial
      narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a
      box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat"
      (6-7). This excerpt instigates Carson's theory of photography in
      this text: the fragmentation and jarring juxtapositions typify
      what photographs do to what they depict. That the fragments are
      still being discovered, moreover, intimates how photographs
      function in our daily lives: buried in boxes, files, or albums,
      they are still being uncovered as the sands of clutter shift to
      turn them up either purposefully or inadvertently.

  12. The "Romance"'s ending photographs are, first of all, not visual
      images, but rather page-or-two-long verbal descriptions of
      scenarios, a snapshot of what readers conventionally project to be
      a more extensive, more continuous experience of what transpires
      with the protagonists--Geryon, Herakles, and Ancash--on their trip
      to the volcano Incchantikas. In narrative terms, this mode seems
      to be summary. Each of the chapters has as its first line what
      appears to be a description of the photograph that is the
      chapter's subject. The first five are fairly concrete, evident
      descriptions: "It is a photograph of four people sitting around a
      table with hands in front of them" (136) or "a close up photograph
      of Geryon's left pant leg just below the knee" (137). But the last
      two shift from concrete, visualizable nouns to more abstract,
      existential claims: "It was a photograph just like the old days.
      Or was it?" (142), or "It was a photograph he didn't take; no one
      here took it" (145).[2 <#foot2>] None of these chapters is
      ekphrastic; the chapters not describe verbally some visual
      representation or work of art. Instead, these chapters narrate the
      moment or situation in which Geryon takes the photo. Because the
      attention turns to the instigating moment in the process of
      representation rather than to what is captured by that process,
      the novel refuses ekphrasis. The context, not the object, is
      described, and yet the description creates the absent photograph
      by pointing to it. Strikingly, the instant of recording the image
      is absent from the text; our attention turns to the context of the
      photographic process and misses the moment when the shutter
      clicks. Just as a photograph, according to Metz and Barthes and
      Sontag, excises a moment from the stream or continuum of
      experience, so too does this text excise the photograph from the
      coherence of the experience in the narrative.

  13. The peculiarity of the narrative's shift into photographically
      packaged moments raises the questions: Why is this part of the
      narrative framed through photographs, or, more precisely,
      photographing? Why do the titular photographs emerge only at the
      end point in the "Romance," since Geryon has been at work on this
      photographic autobiography for many years?[3 <#foot3>] What sort
      of end do they spell?

  14. The easy answer to the question why the "Romance" ends in
      photographs is that Geryon's a photographer, this is his story,
      and the photographs' surfacing indicate Geryon's growing mastery
      over recounting his autobiography. But this answer is complicated
      before we even arrive at the photographic ending, precisely
      because "Autobiography of Red" has no single referent and each
      form of the autobiography carries with it its own peculiar time.
      There are the autobiographies marked by the time of production:
      Geryon's first autobiography in the form of a sculpture, as his
      mother's overheard phone conversation informs us (35), and the
      photographic essay form that Geryon's autobiography takes not
      quite midway through the book (60) and which is elaborated for
      nearly thirty years beyond the adolescent moment when the shift to
      photography takes place. Indeed, the composition of the latter
      runs parallel to the trajectory of the Romance entitled
      "Autobiography of Red," displacing the titular referent. There are
      also the autobiographies which are marked by the retrospective
      temporality of narration: the story of Geryon as the protagonist
      of the Romance, and the stories of Geryon as a composite of
      ancient and postmodern mythic monsters that make up Carson's
      novel's beguiling range of reference. This montage of possible
      autobiographies of red renders the photo-essay autobiography as a
      largely absent object that we only glimpse at telling moments.
      Geryon's self-authored autobiography thus becomes like Barthes's
      Winter Garden photograph, an absent image hypotypotically
      organizing the verbal exploration of the meaning of photography
      and time.

  15. The turn to photograph chapters at the end of the novel should be
      understood in relation to the end of the nineteenth chapter, set
      on the morning when Herakles first breaks up with Geryon. The
      mid-novel chapter thus marks what ought to have been the end of
      the romance, had Geryon not carried the torch for his lost love
      for decades more. The last lines of chapter XIX directly reference
      the autobiography as object, observing that "in Geryon's
      autobiography/ this page has a photograph of some red rabbit
      giggle tied with white ribbon./ He has titled it 'Jealous of My
      Little Sensations'" (62). The breakup happens when they should be
      still in their youth, not middle age; only the last lines describe
      the autobiography from the retrospective time of the narration.
      This is an unspecified future time--when taking the photographs is
      anterior to assembling and titling them--different from the time
      of the breakup or the photographing, which is implied to be his
      adolescence. The temporal rupture marks the trauma of Herakles's
      breaking up with Geryon, yet the event can only be inferred from
      the actions and responses of the two in this chapter. The turn to
      the photo-autobiography at the end, moreover, recapitulates the
      Romance's concluding turn towards photographic chapters and makes
      the object stand in for the event. That Geryon had been lying in
      bed planning this autobiography the very morning of the breakup
      (60) indicates that the autobiographical project is going on in
      parallel with the unfolding events of the romance (in the sense of
      affair). The question is then why we only become aware of this
      parallel register of representation at this time, and so briefly.
      While this paralleling connects Geryon's photography with his
      romance, it also points to the layering of time that photography
      enables, and suggests that Geryon has trouble giving up the
      romance because it has come unstuck in time. Photography becomes
      the way that Geryon learns to deal with his own monstrous sense of
      the timelessness of the romance. Through Geryon's example, Carson
      demonstrates how photography's temporality is not an end, an
      arrival at stasis, but an experience of duration; with this move
      she also aligns photography with love.

  16. These closing lines of chapter XIX unquestionably mark a temporal
      disjuncture in the chapter's narration that echoes the
      fragmentation of time Metz, among others, finds in the
      photograph's power. The title of the chapter, "From the Archaic to
      the Fast Self," contains within it the ambiguity between stasis
      and dynamism that Carson's theory of photography unfolds through
      its verbal photographs. If on first read the "fast self" is the
      one speedily slipping away (as youth does), the phrase also
      describes the self made fast, as if fixed in the photographic
      medium. The temporal displacement of a photograph is moreover
      enacted in this particular narrational turn, in the prolepsis to
      the moment of narrating the story from some future point. This
      morning/this chapter, which initiates Geryon's struggle to
      represent himself by the (to Geryon devastating) breakup with
      Herakles, is also the first moment that mentions a photograph and
      its title. The disruptive temporality of this chapter is our first
      hint that this photographic novel of development will not be
      following the usual progressive trajectory. The autobiography thus
      starts from its middle to rework the problem of ending by folding
      proleptically upon itself.

  17. Yet this photograph is odd for other reasons as well. The
      synaesthetic paradox of a photograph of a rabbit giggle
      foregrounds the text's concern with the way representation works
      and with the limits of photographic representation. The
      monstrosity of showing sound provides an apt figure for the kind
      of temporality the photograph evokes--the impossibility of
      conveying the past to the future except through a description that
      can only induce us imaginatively to concoct the impossible
      temporal plenitude. Geryon is a photographer who aims for the edge
      between sound and sight, while Carson's verbal photographs mark a
      similar synaesthetic edge in their image-pressure on the word. The
      introduction of radical sensory difference in this text's
      depiction of photography indicates one way in which Carson is
      breaking away fixed forms of representation, just as Stesichoros
      breaks from Homeric epithet. The monstrosity of Carson's
      photography, however, unfixes vision as the privileged and
      singular medium of the photograph, suggesting that we rethink
      photography as a synaesthesia of touch and sight, or sound and
      sight, much as written language is.

  18. The synaesthetic density of description in Carson's poetic theory
      of photography offers insight into thinking the relation of
      photography and narrative. Might photography's fragmentation and
      the complex temporal layering it enables seduce narrative away
      from linearity to embrace collage? (The film Memento's
      photographic and retrojected narrative offers a telling example of
      how photography assimilates narrative to its own time). If
      photography excises a moment from a continuum of experience, can
      photographs even tell a story? Sontag suggests that perhaps it
      cannot, arguing that we never understand anything from a
      photograph because it is excised from the flow of experience.[4
      <#foot4>] Her claim, however, hinges not only on the fragmentary
      nature of the photograph, its capacity to atomize reality, but on
      the presumption that such atomization impedes narration or any
      other form of linkage among elements. Carson is not simply pushing
      the limits of photography from the visual into the verbal but in
      her emphasis on the fragment, and her formal reliance on verse,
      she also pushes the limits of narrative and its tendency to work
      against atomizing forces, as if challenging Sontag's claims
      directly. By ending in photographs "Romance" disperses rather than
      culminates the narrative, and opens up the possibility that an
      autobiography, a narrative, or a photograph might not end in
      death. At every level of this text, Carson invites us to consider
      how fragments narrate; fragments are if anything more likely to be
      taken up into narrative relations as we seek to put a story to
      them to fill out their whole. But should we perceive that
      filling-in as positive or as negative space? Fragments in a
      series, especially those that purportedly relate in some way
      beyond mere juxtaposition, can produce relations complex enough so
      as to organize the fragments /and/ their gaps into meaning.

  19. Photographs, if they can be said to narrate, would seem to do so
      primarily in the narrative mode of summary, telling in far less
      time than it takes the events to unfold. This presumes, however,
      that we can take in visual representation instantaneously, rather
      than slowly over time.[5 <#foot5>] Do photographs ever actually
      function as scene, telling the story in the same amount of time as
      it would take for the events to happen? In this novel's case, the
      absence of the visual image slows down the telling and its
      relation to the event in order to produce the more immediate and
      intensified experience of scene. At a narrational level, the shift
      in this romance toward photographic moments at the end marks a
      turn from summary into scene, a recalibrating of the relation
      between story and discourse. But one must also consider why the
      photographs themselves, or their descriptions, swap the concrete
      for the abstract; this shift in focus implies a turn from some
      actual experience, some material presence before the camera, to
      the processing of the meaning of that materiality. That the final
      chapter is not a photograph but "Flashes" marks an endpoint to
      this trajectory: "flashes" are still material but they are also
      ephemeral, and photography could be said to be the trace of that
      material ephemerality. We are to attend not to the object but to
      the tension between the object illuminated in its moment and the
      network of gestures, meanings, signs that link that time/space to
      the present moment of photographic reception. The increasing
      abstraction of the photographs' captions directs our attention
      toward time, which the narrative shift to photographs underscores
      in its focus on the interrelated processes of showing and seeing
      (and their dissimilar temporalities).

  20. By its end, the romance presents a doubled mode of narration,
      foregrounding the seeing as well as the telling (or
      narration-as-showing). The opening of this second order, however,
      also coincides with the introduction of mechanical perception and
      representation into the human activity of creation--a monstrous
      encounter indeed.[6 <#foot6>] Where the story and the photograph
      might have recorded or represented the same events in parallel but
      disparate media, this doubling means that the narrative records
      the event of photographic recording (if that is what narrative or
      photography does). The leap from shutter click to shutter click is
      less disruptive; moving from photograph to photograph logically
      accounts for the progression through the chapters.

  21. As the narrative turns explicitly photographic, becoming less a
      tale of events in the hero's life and more a tale of the taking of
      pictures, Geryon inserts himself into the mode of representation
      alongside the narrator, minimizing his role as the subject of
      representation and being instead the instigator of the process. At
      once not only are the readers distanced from the tale into which
      they had been absorbed, becoming more aware of its layers of
      mediation both visual and narrative, but Geryon himself is
      distanced from his photographic objects. At the end of the chapter
      that comes just before the photograph chapters Geryon thinks, "I
      am disappearing. . . but the photographs were worth it" (135), as
      if the next sequence of chapters is the residue or remnant from
      his disappearance (a reversal of the photograph's gradual
      manifestation on the page under the darkroom's red light). Geryon
      is travelling with his ex, Herakles, and Herakles's new boyfriend
      Ancash--so no wonder he feels rendered invisible, and struggles
      with negotiating the appropriate distance. Ordinarily--that is, if
      we were simply absorbed in the identification with the protagonist
      and the events he experiences--we might say that the camera serves
      prophylactically, protecting Geryon from being too involved in the
      subject of the story and photography. But that would only be if
      the object of the narrative and the object of the photography in
      this text were the same--and they are not.

  22. Rather, I suggest that the role of photographing at this point is
      apotropaïc: it serves to extend and subtend what is happening, to
      stave off the end of the narrative. Indeed, Sontag argues that
      photographing is not merely passive observation, but active
      participation in a scene: "it is a way of at least tacitly, often
      explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep happening"
      (12). So Geryon's photographs, and the titular torsion towards
      them, carve out a space for him to participate in the narrative
      itself, not only its events but its telling, just as much as the
      photographs' emergence in the narrative signals his own
      self-realization. At the same time, photographing wards
      off--/pace/ phototheory's deathly obsession--the end.

  23. The photo finish of this novel, then, defers the end of the story
      as much as of Geryon's relation to Herakles, and in doing so it
      transforms both. His photography helps him establish a new
      relationship to Herakles as well as to Ancash, and not just by
      giving him something to do while tagging along with them.
      Photography is what enables Geryon's /Bildungsroman/: his
      autobiography is a story of formation or development as a
      photographer. A recidivist fling with Herakles at the climax of
      the "Romance"--for which Ancash gives Geryon a walloping--serves
      to convince Geryon that he has something other than his lovelorn
      connection to Herakles for which to be responsible: he has his
      creative vision to proliferate. This proliferation, the novel's
      photo finish, redefines "end" not as resolution or culmination but
      as expansion or dissemination. The very last chapter, "The Flashes
      in Which a Man Possesses Himself," returns us to the scene of
      photographing and compares it to the fires of a bakery oven;
      Ancash sees the flames, Herakles (lustily) the bakers, and Geryon
      a volcano over which the three of them soar, "immortality at their
      faces,/ night at their back" (146). Without a camera, Geryon
      nonetheless pictures the moment in a flash of inspiration.
      Photography, at the end of the Romance, has become fully
      insinuated into actuality, as the box/lightsource/recording
      mechanism/image configuration of the men's figures silhouetted by
      the oven suggests.

  24. But the book's culminating photographic turn also speaks to larger
      truths for novels in the age of the image. It's not just that, as
      Sontag claims, "everything exists to end in a photograph," but
      that this end must be understood to transform narrative, becoming
      an aim rather than a stopping point. In this case the end shows
      Geryon's turn towards the actual, it shows him learning how to
      make something of himself without the camera, and demonstrates
      that the end of photography is an aim rather than a finality. If
      the end /is/ in a photograph, or series of photographs, and the
      constant flutter of the shutter is an attempt to stave off that
      end, then ending becomes a set of relations or a matrix sustaining
      a meaningful tension. On this view, narrative's typical death
      drive is subverted or diverted by the recourse to photography.[7
      <#foot7>]


            II. Punct-Time

  25. In his recent reading of Barthes's punctum as an anti-theatrical
      aesthetic, Michael Fried argues that the punctum emerges through
      the difference between seeing and being shown. "The punctum, we
      might say, is seen by Barthes but not because it has been shown to
      him by the photographer, for whom it does not exist" (546). The
      difference in the agency of the presenter--human intention or
      accident--implies that photography can be pitted against narrative
      just as Sontag had speculated. That is, the antitheatricality of
      photographs means that they mark an impasse in the narrative
      relation between photographer and observer: they cannot see the
      same object, and indeed what moves the observer is something to
      which the photographer is impervious. On the other hand, Fried's
      suggestion that the punctum emerges in this gap between showing
      and seeing evokes a visual dialectics that can engage narrative
      differently, folded along the lines of the observer's relation to
      the object itself.

  26. Although this antitheatrical mode entails "depicting figures who
      appear deeply absorbed in what they are doing, thinking, and
      feeling and who therefore also appear wholly oblivious to being
      beheld" (549), and thus invites us back in to a realist or even
      mimetic practice of representation, the insurmountable
      misalignment of the photographer and the observer that the gap
      between showing and seeing produces diverts us from the mimetic.
      Yet the indexical claim of photographs remains; photographs
      refract the difference between mimesis and indexicality. The
      materiality of the image certainly plays a role in this
      refraction. As Mary Ann Doane points out, "the historicity of a
      medium is foregrounded, not escaped" as we look at old photographs
      and films (144). Precisely because time does not stand still in a
      photograph, the peculiarly layered temporality of photographs
      means that for all their apparent guarantee of being anchored in
      reality, and for all their evocation of realist descriptive codes,
      what photographs let us see is not what they show. If photographs
      are agential machines, not just clocks, for seeing, how might they
      serve as monstrous witnesses to an event?

  27. Exploiting this misalignment, Carson's book is avowedly not
      mimetic; it plays on the opacity as well as on the transparency of
      the surface of representation--the beauty of the line of poetry or
      the power of the figure is as wounding as any thing, event, or
      experience it tells of--even as it foregrounds the accident of
      witnessing, the chance embedded in seeing rather than being shown.
      Fried's contention about the punctum as, in essence, what the
      photographer is blind to, articulates the paradox of Carson's
      photographic thematics of witnessing, although her work goes
      beyond his in attending to what the more tangible or palpable
      effects of that witnessing are. Opening out from the visual to the
      tangible, Carson's photographs explore the tension between the
      opacity of the representational surface and the power to
      move--witnessing being a form of seeing that touches one, tangibly
      brings one into a hermeneutic circuit even as it keeps one on the
      outside of the experience witnessed. In their appeal to "what
      moves me" Carson's photographs say "this" or "here," employing the
      deictic shifters of language to secure the photograph's indexical
      nature.

  28. The synaesthetic power of the punctum, thus, is central to what
      Carson brings to a theory of photography. Although Barthes posits
      the punctum as that accident that pricks, bruises, or is poignant
      to the photograph's viewer (27), and he articulated the punctum as
      the most tangible effect of the photograph, the punctum is not so
      much something present in the photograph as it is the performative
      of the photograph. In Barthes's hands, the punctum rather subtly
      becomes the site where narrative attaches itself to the image: "on
      account of her necklace, the black woman in her Sunday best has
      had, for me, a whole life external to her portrait" (57), he
      confesses. The punctum is precisely where narrative intersects
      with the photograph; what grabs or strikes us about a particular
      image is where we start to speculate on a host of other
      interpretive relations extending from the photograph. Narrative
      enters where the visual transubstantiates into the felt.

  29. Perhaps because this last part of Carson's "Romance" lays before
      us a series of photographic puncta, projecting a sensation beyond
      the moment of the text, the photograph chapters grow increasingly
      to be about time. The first photograph chapter concerns itself
      with the time it takes a stoned person to set up a photograph; it
      is permeated with overt but also fairly straightforward markings
      of time. Only later does time emerge more paradoxically in the
      photographs:

          In the photograph the face of
          Herakles is white. It is the face
          of an old man. It is a photograph of the future, thought
          Geryon months later when he
          was standing in his darkroom
          looking down at the acid bath and watching likeness come
          groping out of the bones. (144)

  30. This is a narrative of the punctum. Geryon's realization arrives
      in the temporal mode that Barthes locates in the photographic
      punctum--a simultaneous "this will be and this has been," a sense
      of the future anteriority of death. What strikes Geryon here is
      the likeness as it emerges in its unlikeness. As Barthes notes,
      "this punctum, more or less blurred beneath the abundance and the
      disparity of contemporary photographs, is vividly legible in
      historical photographs: there is always a defeat of Time in them"
      (96). This reading of the punctum suggests that the apotropaïc
      turn to photography at the end of the novel is not a resolution so
      much as a transformation, a conversion of something with a
      definite temporal end into something that can defeat time. The
      punctum provides a transversal across time through the photograph.
      For this reason, it offers a vector for narrative.

  31. Fried's reading intimates that every photograph could come to have
      a punctum and could come to be antitheatrical insofar as its
      meaning unpredictably unfolds through the passage of time.
      Time--through the persistence or duration of the photograph--opens
      up surprises in the photograph, renders seen what is not shown.
      This view counters the exclusion of narrative from photography in
      Sontag's work, for Sontag's objection to photographs having
      narrative capabilities served only insofar as it viewed
      photographs in the instantaneity of the present.

  32. Carson's verbal photographs, however, provide a different fold of
      time, a more layered temporality, revealing the processes of
      narrative alongside a montage of temporalities. The anachronicity
      of the passage from Carson is striking; in the present of
      developing the photograph, Geryon discerns that the image, which
      would be already lodged in the past, having been taken, is
      actually taken from the future. Like a photograph's fragmenting
      disruption of the stream of lived time, this temporal disturbance
      in the narration marks the moment from which Geryon looks back on
      his obsession from the safe distance of having resolved it. In
      addition, the narrative prolepsis shifts us into the moment of
      seeing the image rather than the moment of taking the image, in
      stark contrast to the time of the narration of the rest of the
      photograph chapters.

  33. The disparity calls attention to how the present of narration is
      implicated in the look at the photograph. The present of looking
      at the photograph recalls that the image is perpetually thrown or
      projected into the present. The photograph, as Metz noted, is
      always hearkening from sometime else. Because of its multiple,
      complex temporality of simultaneously now and then, the photograph
      can be construed as a fragment that disrupts a moment's contextual
      set of spatio-temporal relations, which insofar as they evoke
      narrative, fill in and smooth over the disjunction. Although Fried
      wants to suggest that "it would be truer to Barthes's less than
      fully articulated argument to think of the punctum of death as
      latent in contemporary photographs, to be brought out, developed
      (as in the photographic sense of the term), by the inexorable
      passage of time" (561), such a view rests heavily on the portrait
      photograph (just as Barthes relies on this genre), and thus keeps
      the thematics oriented towards death as the key figure for
      temporal change. Does a landscape or monument die in a photograph?
      Indeed, such depiction may be the only way for us forgetful beings
      to comprehend such a death. While of course photographs can reveal
      landscapes that are no longer there, this return to the theme of
      the death in/of the photographic subject, the ending of everything
      in a photograph, marks a familiar anxiety over the death or
      disappearance of the Subject in the postmodern era. Is not
      everything we make, actually, an embodiment or projection of our
      own death, and photography just realizes that a little more
      insistently? What then is unique about photography's baleful end
      time? Metz's discussion of the radical decontextualization of
      space and time that photography instigates challenges us to
      rethink the end of photography for what is shown. Yet the
      important thing we gain in thinking the temporality of the punctum
      is the idea that photographs continue to develop, even after they
      are "fixed" onto the page.[8 <#foot8>] If the punctum hinges on
      what we can see in a photograph, it thwarts the terminal sense of
      the "end" of a photograph through the unceasing return of seeing,
      and establishes the means by which narrative can enfold the image.

  34. Notwithstanding the significance of the final photos of the
      "Romance," it is the theory of photography that Carson gives us
      outside the "Romance" section that might help us not only to
      capitalize on Metz's and Fried's readings but divert us from a
      death-driven interpretation of photography. The novel's first
      theory of photography is found in the description of Stesichoros's
      poem in the very first section of the text: "The fragments of the
      Geryoneis read as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial
      narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a
      box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat.
      The fragment numbers tell you roughly how the pieces fell out of
      the box" (6-7). On the one hand, this description rather
      strikingly compares to how photographic images fall out of the box
      of the camera, their numbered positions on the strip of film (to
      choose that archaic form of the film camera) or on the index print
      showing their order of appearance and hearkening back to an
      implicitly linear temporal order of their taking. Of course,
      individual photographs would not be tied to that linear emergence
      from the box; they are always independent of that order, selected
      for their various purposes and iterated elsewhere.

  35. The radical fragmentation and dissonant juxtaposition described in
      what I'm calling Carson's first theory of photography colludes
      with how Metz and Barthes perceive photography's mode of
      representation, for a photographic image will always hearken back
      metonymically to some other space and time and object from which
      it hails, whose light waves it records. Just as we presume
      Stesichoros's now fragmented poem recapitulates a whole text, so
      too are photographs seen to be fragments from a past, coherent
      experience now indexically posted to a future moment. This
      metonymy, however, rather than tethering to wholeness, fragments
      the holism of the photograph's recording of the real. Those
      metonymic temporal linkages, moreover, invoke narrative's peculiar
      conjunction of the present of narration-time and the past of
      narrated-time. The photograph is always an object embedded in
      different, contingent relations, as varied as meat and lecture
      notes and song lyrics; its intervention in the world disrupts the
      presumption of spatio-temporal continuity, and displacing even the
      non-photographic objects in "reality" around it. As Metz claims,
      the essence of the photograph is the fragment, "an instantaneous
      abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into
      another kind of time" (158). While Metz wants us to understand
      this "object" as the thing photographed, reading him with Carson
      suggests that the abducted object is in fact the photograph
      itself. The abduction of the object, however, disrupts the
      relations in that first world, because the future anterior promise
      of the photograph warrants that it will come back to haunt the
      scene of its inception.

  36. The moment when Geryon develops the image of Herakles's face in
      the darkroom is striking because its narration is so temporally
      disruptive, just like a photograph. The moment comes at the end of
      the photograph chapter, "Photographs: Like and Not Like"; the
      first line describes the photograph: "It was a photograph just
      like the old days. Or was it?" (142). At first we may think this
      is a more existential claim than the line (for example from a
      previous chapter) that describes a photograph of a dead guinea pig
      on a plate, and this difference signals that the photo montage has
      shifted from the concrete to the abstract. And we can understand
      this existential claim to tie in with the story's development:
      Herakles has cheated on Ancash by sleeping with Geryon, so Geryon
      tries out that relationship from the old days and realizes it is
      not just like then. (Indeed, when Ancash confronts him, asks him
      how it felt, Geryon says "degrading" [144], although whether the
      feeling is what has changed or Geryon has changed is notably
      ambiguous.) But what has also happened is that the concrete
      description of the image has been displaced from the first line to
      the end of the chapter, while the first line captures the
      subjective reaction Geryon has to the image. Thus, here the
      narrative displays or rather stages the punctum. It is not our
      punctum, for the same reason that Barthes ostensibly will not
      reveal the Winter Garden photograph: it won't strike or wound
      /us/.[9 <#foot9>] By showing the effects of the punctum, the
      unexpected or startling revelation of Herakles's old-man face, the
      narrative lets us see Geryon's ambivalence about Herakles, or even
      his desire to be free of him, which he cannot admit himself (what
      the photographer, in this instance, was blind to). This staging is
      concomitant with the fact that the narrative's scope is now moving
      out beyond the moment Geryon took the photograph to complete the
      plot arc of picture-taking, showing us how the image turns out as
      well as how Geryon first reacts to it. The opening up of an arc of
      time, of duration, enables both the showing of the punctum's
      effect (on Geryon, and on us through that focalization) and
      unfolds the immediacy of photography to the mode of temporal
      distance that Fried posits as making the punctum possible. The
      punctum Geryon experiences marks him as different from, if only
      incrementally, the photographer who could not see Herakles's aged
      face at the moment of the shutter click.

  37. If the penultimate photograph chapter displaces its photographic
      concreteness, slipping into the guise of existential or abstract
      claims but--as the chapter develops as the photograph
      develops--reasserting its investment in the concrete or "real,"
      this chapter claims its solidarity with the previous photograph
      chapters. The last (explicitly) photograph chapter, on the other
      hand, seems to describe an impossible image: "It was a photograph
      he didn't take; no one here took it," captions the image linked
      with the seventh chapter, "Photographs: #1748" (145). Yet this
      photograph is in a sense the most real of all those in the novel,
      or at least the most honest, as none of these purely fictional
      images were ever actually taken. It prepares us for the final
      chapter of the romance, which leaves behind the
      photograph--although not photography, or the photographic
      event--altogether. In this transition the way we understand the
      photograph to represent changes; we exchange what it is possible
      for photographs to show for what they let us see. Carson thus
      provokes us to imagine photography without or beyond the
      photographer.

  38. The frankness of the chapter "Photographs: #1748" suggests why the
      photographs take over the romance's narration in the end--indeed,
      shows why this text exists to end in a photograph. This
      end-moment, this climax of the narrative is inextricable from the
      incision of the photograph, even if that incision is itself
      fictional. And so this moment too, even though it is not even
      fictionally photographically recorded, nonetheless must be framed
      imagistically; the essence of photography has so fully overtaken
      the narrative that all of the text's representations must be on
      photographic terms, in the tension between seeing and showing that
      the photograph so monstrously encapsulates in its time of
      development. And yet, rather than give in to serving visuality,
      the novel becomes the image the verbal portrayal would represent;
      the novel lets us see something beyond what it shows. Carson seems
      not to give us the photographs as visual objects, nor, I would
      argue, does she really give us the verbal representation of a
      visual image, in part because she is depicting the moment of
      representing, not the content of representation. Yet in so doing,
      she gives us a new kind of photograph. As Barthes uses the punctum
      to show us something beyond visual representation, to communicate
      a being-moved that is neither visual nor verbal but--because it is
      bodily--synaesthetically linked to both, Carson takes us to a
      level of photography beyond deixis. Its innovation is not
      unrelated to the novel's being in verse, for verse intimates more
      than prose does, insofar as prose, like a certain kind of
      documentary aspect of photography, essays to give us the full
      picture and disavows the impossibility of that promise, whereas
      verse always holds back from full verbalization.

  39. What the photograph purports to show is something
      impossible--Geryon's self-portrait on his flight into the volcano:

          He peers down
          at the earth heart of Incchantikas dumping all its photons out
          her ancient eye and he
          smiles for
          the camera: "The Only Secret People Keep." (145)

      Like the previous photographs, the image records the shutter's
      click, but here, because the camera turns on the photographer, the
      subject or event registered by that click is recorded as well.
      Notably, the camera must be aligned with the volcano, "dumping all
      its photons out her ancient eye." The scene is that with his
      camera Geryon records being seen by the volcano. Or is it?

  40. This photograph chapter is called #1748, unlike the previous
      photographic chapters which all are subtitled by words. The
      photograph, however, appears to be titled "The Only Secret People
      Keep," although the title only emerges in the chapter, as the
      narrative reclaims the moment of the shutter click from its
      position as the caption. This displacement of photograph caption
      into narrative underscores the curiosity of the numbered chapter.
      The #1748 refers to the number of the Emily Dickinson poem that
      serves as the epigraph to the "Romance" part of the Autobiography.
      The "Romance"--and here I invoke not just the section of this book
      but also the genre--tells of Geryon's travel adventures and
      thematically links the myth of the yazcamac, the people who came
      back from being thrown into the volcano, who are thus eyewitnesses
      to immortality, with Dickinson's poem which begins, "The reticent
      volcano keeps/ His never slumbering plan--" and ends, "The only
      secret people keep/ Is Immortality" (qtd. in Carson 22). The title
      of the photograph is the penultimate line of the poem, which
      tempts us with the question, is the impossible photograph of
      Geryon flying into the volcano supposed to be an image of
      Immortality? To affirm so would be to turn Carson's warping of the
      axiomatic link between death and photography towards a positive
      end that suffers the persistence of the representation of the
      subject long after the subject has passed. Certainly a
      photograph's persistence out of its own time and space, its
      long-term iterabilities, suggests that photographs might
      instantiate not death but immortality. But the photograph itself
      bears an inevitable degradation in its material existence--no more
      a recipe for immortality than Ozymandias's monument. Barthes's
      refusal to republish the Winter Garden photograph is not merely
      that "it exists only for me" but that "it cannot in any way
      constitute the visible object of a science" (73)--as if a science
      in some way precludes a capacity to wound. But what is the
      empirical object here? Despite his ostensible refusal to reveal
      the image, Barthes does, consistently, verbally, let us see it all
      through the second part of the book: that verbal description /is/
      the photograph for us, and has its own punctum effect. The
      poignancy of the Winter Garden photograph is as invisible as the
      photograph itself, yet both become objects of our knowledge in
      some way. As what matters, what endures, that objectivity or that
      visibility seduces us to link a photograph to immortality rather
      than to mortality; but on the contrary, it is the more ephemeral
      element of the photograph's evocative sensations that tenders the
      photograph over to immortality.[10 <#foot10>]

  41. The impossibility of the image the volcano snaps of Geryon, its
      arrival as a final chapter in a series that has become
      increasingly abstract, tantalizes us with the question of whether
      immortality is secret because it is not visible. Is this last
      chapter an image of immortality? Tempting as this interpretation
      may be, I think this is not the most interesting question to pose,
      partly because it presumes a kind of representational logic that
      hinges on metaphor and eschews the metonymic workings of
      photography. Rather we might inquire: What kind of immortal
      witness are the dead in the photographs, who reach out to touch us
      not as subjects but as the punctum's temporal projection? What
      secret are they not keeping by their metonymical testimony? Are
      secrets only silences, or are they things that are hidden from
      view, buried? Insofar as the punctum comes from the other side of
      the camera, instantiating the photograph as the obverse of
      reality, it conceals as much as it reveals. What is the
      photographer blind to--what is the tain of the photograph?

  42. The tain, which is what, itself invisible, disappearing or folding
      behind the image, makes the image work, is distinct from that
      detail in the image we might not readily see. For instance, what
      is not quite apparent to us in this photograph from Carson is the
      apparatus, caught up as we may be in the gesture of
      representation. The immortal photograph Geryon takes in his flight
      over Incchantikas is for Ancash to remember him by: "This is a
      memory of our / beauty. He peers down" (145). But the equipment
      Geryon has taken is a tape recorder. On his flight, he hits "record."

  43. The fact that the climax of the novel hinges on the recording of
      experience--encapsulated by the taking of the photographs, not by
      the looking at them--suggests that ultimately this text is not
      about the death-drives of narrative, moving toward resolution of a
      discombobulated equilibrium, but about narrative possibilities of
      the life-drive and its combinatorial force; the flashes of
      inspiration titling the final chapter of the "Romance" are not
      just metaphorical. The struggle is also Geryon's struggle over
      whether and how to be taken. Who will take Geryon's picture? Who
      will take Geryon? These two questions are imbricated in the novel,
      so as to transform the death-drive of photography into love. For
      Geryon to be taken, to be loved, he must love himself, become
      real, throw himself into experience--Carson reformulates such
      stock self-help-book themes to show how the real, the actual,
      comes after the photograph, not before it. The novel pursues
      Geoffrey Batchen's question, "when is a photograph made?" through
      the parallel /Bildungsroman/ paradigm to turn it, palinodically,
      towards "when is experience unmade?" The very fragmentation and
      temporal disruption of the photograph, its presumptive immediacy
      disavowing the deferral of the image's coming into being, its
      inherent /Nachträglichkeit/, generates our experience even as it
      seems to document it. The tape recorder, which Geryon flicks on as
      he flies over the volcano, has become his apotropaïc defense; he
      won't give up his monstrosity, his imbrication with the mechanical
      registering of experience, so easily. Precisely because of its
      interest in the paradoxical, even monstrous, combinations of sound
      and the visible, verbal and visual, cameras and tape recorders,
      the Autobiography remains a narrative about photography's ability
      to produce experience moebiously, recombining life and story and
      their relation with a twist, rather than fixing, as Metz posits
      photography does, a slice of time in a sort of /petit mort/. The
      fragments of time or reality that Metz and others perceive as
      photography's essence are also what makes possible a series of
      recombinations that overcome such a fixity. Photographs offer not
      motion but motility.


            III. What a Difference a Tain Makes

  44. The claim that the novel's depiction of the photographs refuses
      ekphrasis might seem surprising, particularly given the novel's
      rewriting of ancient Greek mythology, where ekphrasis was
      invented. I make this claim not only to suggest that the novel is
      doing more than describing photographs, even imagined ones, but to
      emphasize the change in relations of representation that the
      book's theory of photography introduces, how it contests the
      presumably descriptive mode of photography itself. Just as
      Stesichoros changes the mode of representation through his more
      creative and open-ended use of adjectives, so too does Carson
      challenge our conventional understanding of the photographic
      relation through her non-ekphrastic photographs.

  45. The story of how Geryon resolves his unrequited romance with
      Herakles and becomes an eyewitness to immortality is enmeshed in a
      parallel, second-order story of how these fragments, these
      photographs, come to be and how they relate to Geryon's life in
      complex, often anachronistic ways. The conventional,
      subject-focused tale of Geryon's transformation into an active
      agent in his own representation thus renders him instead a
      secondary character in the objects' narrative. Such splitting
      recapitulates photography's own twofold functioning: the human
      agency of the photographer and the mechanical action of the camera
      or tape recorder.[11 <#foot11>] The novel's negotiation between
      human agent and instrumental object mirrors the narrative of
      photography itself as a representational process. The tain of the
      photograph might come to be understood as the third term in this
      deconstruction that interrupts mimetic or indexical relation of
      subject and object.

  46. Monique Tschofen ponders the question that Carson's first chapter
      poses in subtitle: "What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?" and
      replies that through his use of adjectives "one 'difference'
      Stesichoros makes is thus to find a way of using language that
      invites us to perceive with all of our bodily senses--to make us
      feel" (39). "He lets us see that words say but that they also
      show, that they make us think, but they also make us feel" (40),
      Tschofen argues. Her insights tie in with the notion of punctum as
      a specific kind of synaesthesia at work in these verbal
      photographs, as Carson plays off the felt and the thought, the
      sensible and the intelligible in her photo chapters. Carson's
      sensible approach commingles sound and sight just as language
      itself does, and helps us account for the monstrous hybrid of
      Geryon's recurring synaesthetic experiences (it's not just during
      his tape-recorded photographic flight at the end; much earlier,
      for instance, he frets over the noises colors make, roses "roaring
      across the garden at him," the "silver light of stars crashing
      against/ the window screen," grass clicking [84]).

  47. If in the narrative of the taking of the picture what strikes us
      is the click of the shutter, a click we can hear no more than we
      can see the scene before us, that click is also the moment when in
      the making of a photograph a narrative is sutured. Barthes relies
      on narrative to explain why or how the punctum wounds or moves
      him; narrative comes to mediate the synaesthetic experience of
      seeing and feeling. That same moving is at work in Carson's
      oscillation between the events of making and looking, between the
      sensory appeal of language and what it renders intelligible.
      Carson's language is unquestionably sensual, not the least because
      its poetic form foregrounds the sensory, while the artful
      concreteness of the diction gives texture and vivid dimension to
      the language. Yet that sensory appeal produces a punctum. How are
      we struck, as Geryon is struck, by Herakles's likeness emerging in
      the photographic bath? It is, of course, not a question of we but
      of I: what I am struck by as I read these photographs is the
      deadpan tone of "pants leg."

  48. Tschofen points out, furthermore, that Carson views Stesichoros's
      invention of the palinode, the counter-song, as his contribution
      to narrative, as a second difference he makes. Let us similarly
      give weight to the fact that Barthes launches his discussion of
      the Winter Garden photograph as a palinode. He ends Part One with
      the suggestion that his examination of public photographs thus far
      has honed his understanding of how his desire works, but has not
      enabled him to discover the nature of photography: "I would have
      to make my recantation, my palinode" (60). Does the palinode form
      explain the absence of the mother's photograph, perhaps better
      than Barthes's parenthetical determination that we could not see
      how he sees this photograph? It certainly helps explain why we are
      blind to that photograph. The absent referent provides the
      palinode: Stesichoros's ancient fragmented text, the Winter Garden
      photograph, Geryon's autobiography. The palinode serves as the
      backing, the tain, which brings the image on the surface, the ode,
      into sharper focus.

  49. While Tschofen astutely turns the question of the difference
      Stesichoros makes to "what difference does Anne Carson's writing
      make?" (40), her answer invites more photographic development.
      Drawing on Carson's claim about her own work that "words bounce,"
      Tschofen suggests that "words bounce when they connect with other
      words and with the people who use them" (41). Through this
      "bounce," Tschofen suggests, "Carson shows us ways to break free
      from the constraints of the past" while she simultaneously "asks
      us to connect with it" (41). If we take this "bounce" of words to
      be akin to the "bounce" of a light beam off the tain of the
      mirror, the return path of the palinode, the parallel opens up to
      emphasize the transformations in understanding that such a
      "bounce" entails. Moreover, Tschofen's insistence on what
      difference Carson's writing makes as a dual temporality that both
      frees us from the past and connects us to it is strikingly
      isomorphic with the photograph's temporality, its simultaneous
      fragmentation from the originary temporal flow and its indexically
      seducing us back to that past, even when we never experienced it
      directly.

  50. Tschofen's reading of the significance of the palinode picks up
      implicitly on this idea of bounce, and she does so through
      Geryon's own figuration as a photographer, suggesting that he is
      "a creature of reversals destined to go back to the beginning and
      revise his own ending" (44). Stesichoros's palinode took back the
      story he made that ticked off Helen and made her blind him; the
      palinode thus narrates from what cannot be seen. The construction
      of the ode and the palinode sets up a relation between stories
      that opens up the ending, which typically resolves into stasis or
      equilibrium, into a circuit of meaning strung in the tension
      between seen and unseen, as well as the dialectic of shown and
      seen. A counter-song bounces or reverberates with the song it
      counters, and in that reverberation reveals new aspects, undoing
      some of the initial meanings, underplaying or redeploying others,
      but opening up space for the palimpsestic blurring of the original
      in relation to the new song. It is not unlike the way memory works
      by photographs; the pictures come to palinodically erase the event
      we actually experienced. We complete the ode and turn to the
      palinode, which counters the story told in the ode. Perhaps this
      helps explain why, after the photographic chapters, the book turns
      to an interview with Stesichoros, since an interview offers a
      forum in which to bounce ideas around.

  51. The interview as a form is anti-narrative, dialogical, and in this
      instance paradoxical in its relation to what has come before. Like
      a photograph, an interview usually comes after some event, some
      achievement, as a kind of post-hoc representation that also takes
      on its own autonomy, its own iterations. Rather than give any
      clear insight into what happened in the Romance, however,
      Stesichoros tells of his seeing. Yet his seeing is really Gertrude
      Stein's seeing: an atelier in 1907 with paintings covering the
      walls right up to the ceiling (147), where "naturally I saw what I
      saw" and "I saw everything everyone saw" (148), phrases that echo
      Stein's Everybody's Autobiography, where she notes that "my eyes
      have always told me more than my ears. Anything you hear gets to
      be a noise but a thing you see, well of course it has some sound
      but not the sound of noise" (89). Stein describes her previous
      autobiography (of Alice B. Toklas) as "a description and a
      creation of something that having happened was in a way happening
      again but as it had been which is history which is newspaper which
      is illustration but is not a simple narrative of what is happening
      not as if it had happened not as if it is happening but as if it
      is existing simply that thing" (312).

  52. In this passage, Stein transforms description--what photographs
      are conventionally understood to be doing in their mechanical
      seeing--into creation. The concatenation of disparate things that
      that "happening" is to be--newspaper, illustration,
      history--recalls Stesichoros's meat scraps and song lyrics and
      lecture notes in the box with his poem fragments. And like meat
      scraps and lecture notes and song lyrics, the illustration,
      newspaper, and history are all fragments that refer to or conjure
      both something else, something meaningful, and the items in
      themselves. Similarly, Carson's description of Geryon creates his
      process of creating, produces a text "as if it is existing simply
      that thing."

  53. In that interview, Stesichoros not only sees as if he were
      Gertrude Stein but also speaks like her: "What is the difference
      between a volcano and a guinea pig is not a description why is it
      like it is a description" (148). This claim bookends the theory of
      photography from the first section. If asking to what object the
      title "Autobiography of Red" refers complicates referentiality in
      the text, either by multiplying or differently connecting the
      title and the referent(s), it does so in order to begin to
      articulate this theory of photography as a /problem/ of likeness,
      not a /solution/ that solidifies a representation to its real
      object. If the theory of photography finds the photograph to be
      inherently fragmentary, then that too helps us to see better why
      photography would be a problem of likeness. As a problem of
      likeness, photography is not based in likeness but in difference.
      And if we lose the idea that photography comes from likeness, can
      we shake free of the idea that photography's end is inextricably
      linked with death, rather than with the recombination of the
      likenesses?

  54. It is therefore no accident that this version of Geryon's story is
      a romance, not a tragedy. It is about the possibilities and
      potentialities for recombination rather than about the force of
      destiny played out within the tragic unities of time, space,
      action. As a romance it is a story of the tangled complications
      and combinations of love, and is also a romance in its engagement
      with the fantastic or supernatural--such as red-winged monsters
      flying over volcanoes to take pictures. Its notion of photography
      itself is also romantic, whether photography is theorized as a
      supernatural process for manipulating time, or a way to access a
      ghostly presence of real objects. The most important thing
      Carson's text does is redefine photography not in relation to
      death but in relation to love, and the theory of photography
      embedded in Stesichoros's Steinian sentence is crucial to that
      redefinition. "What is the difference between a volcano and a
      guinea pig is not a description why is it like it is a
      description." (148).

  55. Photography is typically construed to be about likeness, to
      produce a likeness; our habitual reliance on its capacity to
      document is one example of this presumption.[12 <#foot12>] As
      Sontag notes, "the photographic purchase on the world, with its
      limitless production of notes on reality, makes everything
      homologous" (111). Even though we know darn well its capacity for
      distortion, the photograph's power to describe lets it be taken
      for a mirror. As we do with the photograph, we habitually think
      that the mirror is a reflection of the world, of reality. We use
      the metaphor of the mirror to indicate some unmediated
      representational process. In our everyday presuppositions about
      photography's capacity to represent, as when we see photographs on
      someone's desk or in the newspaper, we presume that the image in
      the photograph is pretty much like what it depicts. But if that
      were the case, we would not have that disorienting reaction to our
      own photograph (do I look like that?) or eagerly play back digital
      images we've just taken to see how they look. This disorientation
      or impatience speaks to a fundamental truth about likeness of /in
      a photograph: it is not a similarity, but a radical difference
      that must be bridged by the description that accounts for "why is
      it like it."

  56. On this view, photography is a metonymic practice that
      fundamentally questions why is it like it. Barthes concurs, at
      least as far as metonymy goes; he begins Camera Lucida by
      considering that a photograph is a transmission of light waves
      that touch their subject and bounce back to be registered on the
      photographic film before they touch our eyes (3). Sontag, on the
      other hand, uses an implicitly metonymic view of photography to
      challenge our sense of how it produces likeness: "A photograph is
      not only like its subject . . . it is an extension of that
      subject; a potent means of acquiring it, of gaining control over
      it" (155). The photograph is radically contingent on its original
      context while nonetheless asserting some relational, even
      referential claim to have an originary or anterior object. Yet the
      indexicality of the photograph--on which both Barthes and C.S.
      Peirce rely--misleads us into thinking that photographs have a
      relation to the object. Photographs describe only insofar as they
      say why two completely disparate things--guinea pigs and
      volcanoes, for instance, or a photograph and its object--are like.
      If that likeness is based on contiguity or, rather, on a set of
      contiguous relations from object to camera to photograph, it
      nonetheless still poses a question. Indeed, indices, as Doane
      notes, "have no resemblance to their objects, which, nevertheless,
      cause them" (133). The question for photography, and for the
      Autobiography of Red, is how likeness could be founded on the
      contiguity rather than on the relational or referential claim.

  57. Contiguity, the underpinning of the figure of metonymy, is about
      spatial relations; the photograph's indexicality attests to a
      particular spatial configuration, viz., the presence of the
      photographed object in relation to the camera and the
      photographing subject or agent. By contrast, metaphoricity turns
      on a kind of likeness, a striking similarity in a field of
      difference that does not require the same spatial distinction. So
      the problem of likeness would seem to hinge on metaphorics.
      Certainly the sense that metaphor transports meaning across
      difference seems to encapsulate what a photograph does, temporally
      speaking: it transports meaning, an image, across a differential
      field of time and space. Yet when we try to say "why is it like
      it," why the photograph is like its represented object, we look to
      the insistence on the photograph's indexicality to guarantee its
      connection to that displaced time and space. As Peter Geimer
      observes, the indexicality of photography is repeatedly figured
      metaphorically, through the trace, as if the photograph operates
      like the photogram, which records the physical contact of the
      object itself on the light-sensitive medium, rather than recording
      a pattern of lightwaves. Geimer avers that "in the case of
      photography we must be careful to speak of continuity and touching
      in a rather narrow sense of the words. Or does the appearance of a
      ray of light qualify as direct physical contact . . . ? Does light
      'touch' the object upon which it shines? Is a lit surface an
      'imprint' of something?" (16). Yet while Geimer puts pressure on
      the tactile impression of the index (the footprint, the
      weathervane, the death mask), he does not give up entirely on
      contiguity, for contiguity makes possible the chance event, the
      contingencies captured by the photograph in its making. Poised
      between the mechanical and the human agent, and uncertain of how
      long it will take to make a photograph--a second for a click or
      decades for the image to be selected for printing or for the image
      to be seen--"photographers are only partly aware of what they are
      doing" (19).

  58. Geimer's questions open up the space (if you will) to think
      through the contiguity of photography by acknowledging and
      embracing the synaesthesia between the visual and the tactile that
      Carson's photographs anticipate and articulate so clearly. The
      indexical relation of the photographic object suggests to the
      observer that vision is material contact, rendering the seen as
      something fundamentally touching. This understanding of the
      contiguity of photographs frees us from "the old idea that some
      aspect of the depicted scene has gone into its photographic
      double" (Geimer 23), without relinquishing the idea that
      photographs have the power to attest which makes them so
      compelling. The indexical relation of the beholder to the object
      photographed suggests that we search for likeness along metonymic
      lines, to discern what touches. Likeness in photography thus
      hinges on metonymy rather on simile. Barthes's sense of his visual
      connection to Napoleon, mediated through the photograph of
      Bonaparte's brother, constructs the photograph as a long-durÃ(c)e
      rearview mirror.

  59. A mirror works because of its tain, the thin layer of silver
      backing on the glass that gives the glass its special
      reflectivity, that makes it a mirror and not a window. The tain of
      the mirror blocks our view but at the same time makes it possible
      to see differently. It alters--arguably creates--the visual
      dialectic, redirecting light waves from the object mirrored to the
      subject beholding; often, those are the "same" entity (although as
      Lacan suggests, they are not). The tain not only returns the gaze
      blindly but enables us to see behind ourselves. A mirror, through
      the tain, thus provides us with a metonymical relation to
      ourselves or mediates our metonymical relation to distant objects.
      I'm interested in this figure of the tain for what its analogy to
      photography reveals about the visual, given that photography has
      such a strong convention of direct representation, of being a
      mirror to the world. The mirror functions reassuringly as deixis.
      What, then, is the tain of the photograph?

  60. Although--or rather, because--silver is used in the printing of
      black and white photographs, where it forms the patterning on the
      page like the black of print letters or the colors whose
      lightwaves are reflected in the mirror, it is not the tain of the
      photograph. Silver composes the materiality of the photographic
      image rather than serving to redirect or re-destine the mirror
      image. In the gelatin photograph, silver operates like a metaphor,
      organizing samenesses (of tone or pattern or line) in a field of
      difference in order to convey meaning. In the mirror, silver
      functions metonymically, bending the spatial relations of light
      into a fold, a new set of contiguities. This elucidates the
      function of the tain: it works metonymically to fold space into
      new relations. It is the touch that redestines the image.

  61. Carson's thematics suggest that the tain of the photograph is not
      silver but red: red is the color of the negative strip, and the
      color of the darkroom light, in which the image emerges in its
      chemical bath, to be fixed onto the paper. Red is what we do not
      see in the process of the image's development but what lets us see
      the image's development and production. That same red light is the
      color of a volcano's lava flow, the earthly liquid glow emanating
      from below the solid black fragments of rock that break apart in
      the pulsion of the volcano's eruption (another illumination of
      material production). When Geryon flies over the volcano and
      witnesses the red glow, which redirects his life trajectory and
      maybe even makes him immortal, the push from below of the volcanic
      eruption is akin to, isomorphic with, the eruption of the image
      onto the photographic page. The chapter in which Geryon watches
      Herakles's face emerge in the photographic bath under the red
      light also recounts the moment when that photograph was taken: it
      is no coincidence that Herakles had looked then at Geryon and said
      "Volcano time?" (144). The unmarked ellipsis in the text between
      Herakles's comment and the photograph's emergence nonetheless
      erupts to redirect the timing of the story (the shift from moment
      of shutter click to time of processing) and the meaning of
      Herakles's question (is it a reference to Ancash's having exploded
      at Geryon? To Ancash's telling Geryon to use those wings and fly
      over the volcano? To the repetition of their previous plans to
      journey to a volcano? Is the time of volcano time a projection of
      the future or of the past or a queer time that is neither?). In
      the same way, photographs have their own volcano time, have
      erupted into our reality, emerging from the red bath into the
      light of day and disrupting the surface of that daily experience.
      As Sontag posits: "Instead of just recording reality, photographs
      have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby
      changing the very idea of reality, and of realism" (87). Red keeps
      the film blind to the manufacturing process, but also figures as
      what we do not see as we make images our reality. The read
      photograph redirects our gaze at reality and realism.

  62. Sontag's assertion does several things: it invites us to rethink
      Metz's claim about photography's power to fragment reality, a view
      that remains subtended by a theory of likeness (that the only way
      photographs fragment reality is if they bear some likeness to it);
      it suggests how photographs are aligned in relation to narrative
      (i.e., with rather than against) through their normative power to
      subordinate our seeing to what is shown; and it advises why we
      might want to understand photography through Carson's purely
      verbal text. For it is the power over seeing that Sontag discerns
      in photography's authority over realism that elucidates the
      difference of Carson's argument about the difference Stesichoros
      makes. In the forcefulness of their representational relation,
      photographs impart an extreme form of likeness. The chain of
      making--Geryon's making photographs as his autobiography, the
      narrative's shift to the level of Geryon's photograph making, and
      Carson's remaking of Geryon's story--not only challenges the idea
      that photography records reality, but opens up gaps within which
      the question "why is it like it" resonates. We pose this question
      when we see beyond or other than what we are shown--that is, when
      the punctum marks the opening for the duration of the photograph
      to assert itself whether through narrative or through synaesthetic
      condensation of a feeling into what we see. Carson's verse
      photographs do both. What wounds Barthes, if not Barthesian
      readers, is the temporal distance mapped by the image, a distance
      always resonant as loss (Camera Lucida is a work of mourning).
      What wounds us as Carson's photographic witnesses is the richness
      of what is left intimated but unsaid, the circumstances of the
      making of the image for what they suggest about the unshown image.
      Carson takes the antitheatricality Fried finds in Barthes's
      photography theory to a new level of anti-mirroring, rendering the
      tain of the photograph more dynamic than quicksilver. Carson's
      photographs propose that the tain of the photograph is the
      palinode that enables us to ask "Why is it like it?"

  63. The mirroring that photographs purportedly do describes yet also
      atomizes reality to such an extent that they invite a fascinated
      speculation or deduction from the evidence before one. Sontag is
      concerned that the pervasiveness of photography belies its lack of
      access to the world, to knowing the world, to understanding.
      "Strictly speaking," Sontag tells us, "one never understands
      anything from a photograph" (23). This claim works simultaneously
      to refute the access to reality that photography's documenting
      function promises, as well as to account for a necessary
      fascination with a photograph, that even if a photograph
      instantaneously shows us its subject, it takes time really to see
      what is in a photograph. What one understands of a photograph
      comes from the gap in the image's relation to the world. One may
      never understand anything a photograph shows, but one can
      understand something from what one sees in a photograph. That
      seeing is meaningful because of the temporal gaps and layers
      introduced by the photograph. If we reconsider the claims by Metz
      and others that as photographs fragment time, isolating moments
      one from another, they conceal how that moment, event, or object
      functions, we can revisit how we might understand something from a
      photograph, at least from some photographs. The recombinatorial
      power of the fragment is, importantly, a generative feature, and
      emerges from the question of "why is it like it?" as the force of
      (photographic) description.

  64. Just before she concludes her essay in which she makes the claim
      with which I begin, Sontag observes that, "in contrast to the
      amorous relation, which is based on how something looks,
      understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes
      place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which
      narrates can make us understand" (23). That Autobiography of Red
      is indeed a romance, a story about an amorous relation, explains
      why it so forcefully engages the problem of how photography looks,
      and why it must torque appearance figured as the photograph in
      words. Sontag sets the photograph as instantaneous appearance in
      opposition to narrative as a temporal understanding. But because
      as a romance Autobiography of Red is also a quest to understand
      that relationship, and Geryon seeks that understanding through
      photography and through a narrative that becomes photography,
      Sontag's opposition ought to be reconsidered. The fragmentation of
      Carson's narrative photographs paradoxically initiates a theory of
      photography in an ancient poet, but does so in order to revisit
      how we have understood temporality to work in the photograph:
      time's linearity and the disruption of that linearity by the
      photograph structure the metonymic relation of the image to its
      object. The verbal photographs demonstrate that the very
      contingency of photography, its simultaneous excision and
      interpellation of fragments of space in time, necessitates
      narrative--indeed, cannot shake it off. A photograph however lost
      from its original object inserts itself into a new narrative
      relation, underpinned by time's metonymy and propelled by the
      question of likeness.

  65. Which brings us back to the problem of the tain. The tain of the
      mirror helps transform light from wave to image, intervenes with
      contiguity to create likeness, bringing out the information or
      data that lightwaves carry. The tain of the photograph is that
      which intervenes to change the direction of the light's
      trajectory--the narrative's trajectory. The tain of the
      photograph, then, shows that the photograph is not an end, only a
      redirection: from image to narrative, from material to immaterial,
      conveying a play on the ambiguity of "like"--not just a question
      of likeness but of liking. The tain of the photograph, like the
      palinode, folds the narrative away from an ending, away from its
      death-drive towards fixity and stasis. The redirection
      participates in a transformation, and narrative lodges within
      transformation. If this is the autobiography of Red, it is because
      it is the story of the tain of the photograph, the obverse
      workings of photography as a practice of love. This is why no
      "real" photographs appear in the text. The tain of the photograph
      is what makes these verbal constructions photographs. It has less
      to do with the mythic indexicality of the subject's lightwaves
      registering on emulsion, and more to do with posing the
      photographic question of why is it like it, which is itself
      produced by the photograph's layered, volcanic temporality.
      Photographs cannot account for their production, cannot represent
      the red light of their tain. If "red" is the tain of the
      photograph, it is not only the special light that enables us to
      see the image as it emerges, or the film itself as it is
      manufactured, but the Doppler-shift of time moving away from us.
      We are the ones anchored in the present, while the moment captured
      in the snapshot is itself in motion, working along the complex
      temporality of the duration of the image, as the afterlife of a
      moment. The "red" of the figure of the photograph's tain is the
      touch of distance itself. The self-written story of this tain,
      then, provides the account of how intractably narrative folds into
      the monstrous matter of making.

  66. The tain or palinode of the photograph redirects our look at the
      "real world" and turns us instead to the sensation of the
      narrative image. If, today, everything exists to end in a
      photograph, that end bends the trajectory of indexicality beyond
      an affirmation of thereness. What "Autobiography of Red" "refers"
      to, then, is the transformative power of this reflection. It is
      and is not the life story of Geryon, red-winged monster
      photographer; it is and is not the photographic montage Geryon
      makes about his life; it is and is not the process of narrating
      that tells the story of photography's transformation of the real
      into something that makes us ask, why is it like it?

      / English Department
      Michigan State University
      emc@msu.edu /

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          Notes

      1 <#ref1>. There is no shortage of narrated photographs in
      postmodern literature. From Bob Perelman's poem "China," which
      purports to caption photographs of Chinese scenes, to the climax
      of John Edgar Wideman's Two Cities the absent photograph may be
      the quintessential figure of postmodern representation, providing
      the occasion for the collapse of narrative into description.

      2 <#ref2>. There are two senses of "take" in the last caption; not
      just the idiomatic expression of clicking the shutter to record
      the photograph, but also the possibility of appropriating an
      image, abducting it from its time or, rather, since the gesture is
      cast in the negative, a refusal to bring it along and thus leaving
      it behind.

      3 <#ref3>. Chapter VIII, "Click," narrates a youthful Geryon
      determinedly focused on taking a picture of his mother while she's
      trying to find out "who is this new kid you're spending all your
      time with?" (40). It's the beginning of Geryon's relationship with
      Herakles, so while the chapter hinges on the taking of the
      picture, the picture-taking is subordinated to the story of
      Geryon's silence about the relationship and his feelings. (In
      fact, Geryon "had recently relinquished speech" [40].) It's a
      silence that nonetheless speaks to readers. Such earlier
      references to photographic action remain distinctly different from
      the ending photographic chapters.

      4 <#ref4>. Sontag claims that "photographs do not explain: they
      acknowledge" (111), yet at the same time she underscores that they
      conceal as they reveal. Sontag aims to undermine the commonly held
      notion that photography is "an instrument for knowing things"
      (93). In her view, the "knowledge gained through still photographs
      will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or
      humanist" (24); with Barthes, this sentiment is transformed into
      the powerful notion of the punctum. Sontag's opposition of
      understanding and photography aligns narration and time against
      the image (23).

      5 <#ref5>. Arguably, this is what happens in Antonioni's Blow-Up,
      where the photographer comes to realize over the course of the
      weekend what the picture shows, in the same time frame that the
      murder mystery it seems to represent takes place. The development
      of the murder's mystery parallels the time of the development of
      the film into image.

      6 <#ref6>. Walter Benjamin notes that the first photographs
      "present the earliest image of the encounter of machine and man"
      (678).

      7 <#ref7>. See Peter Brooks's reading of Freud's Beyond the
      Pleasure Principle in Reading for the Plot for an exposition of
      this death drive in relation to narrative.

      8 <#ref8>. Geoffrey Batchen explores this dynamic at length in
      "Taking and Making," which opens with the question, "When is the
      photograph made?" and examines the selection of different prints
      by photographers depending on the aesthetic trends of the moment,
      for example Steiglitz's holding off for twenty-seven years before
      printing an image he took around 1889, and then not exhibiting it
      until 1921. Batchen concludes that photographs "exist only as a
      state of continual fabrication, constantly being made and remade
      within twists and turns of their own unruly passage through space
      and time" (106).

      9 <#ref9>. Of course, Barthes's Winter Garden photograph is so
      memorable precisely because it does wound us. Moreover, our
      perception of it changes as we read and re-read Camera Lucida in
      precisely the way that Fried's reading of the punctum as
      development invites. But this absent photograph only wounds us
      because it is a verbal photograph; because of the significance of
      that photograph to Barthes's palinode, that is the only way in
      which its punctum can be revealed.

      10 <#ref10>. Photography theory's obsession with death is thus
      really a fixation on the persistence of the afterlife of the
      image, what Doane describes as "the inescapable necessity of
      matter, despite its inevitable corrosion, decay, and degeneration"
      (146). The immortality of photographs is therefore not lodged in
      the materiality of the image on the paper, but in the punctum and
      its power to affect us. Along similar lines, Doane's reading of
      Gombrich and Krauss on the question of what a medium is leads her
      to posit that "the experience of a medium is necessarily
      determined by a dialectical relation between materiality and
      immateriality" (131).

      11 <#ref11>. Bazin notes that with photography, "for the first
      time, between the originating object and its reproduction there
      intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent" (13). He
      thus emphasizes the objective aspect of photography and downplays
      the agency of the photographer. As Sontag has observed, the
      question of what the photographer really adds is certainly still
      significant, but by elucidating the paradoxes of the figure of the
      professional photographer she underscores the importance of human
      agency in photography. See her "Photographic Evangels" chapter.

      12 <#ref12>. Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, foregrounds this
      aspect by beginning his essay on photography with a discussion of
      the likenesses of a film diva and of a grandmother (47-48). While
      he contends that as time passes, the significance of likeness
      fades as a photograph archives the elements it documents, he
      concludes that this residual organization of elements in old
      photographs is in fact not an organization yet at all, but rather
      that "the photograph gathers fragments around a nothing" (56)
      underscores my larger concern in this essay with fragmentation and
      photography.


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