Portal Pressed Flat
Anna Lee, July 2020

One of the most famous photographs in art history is a story. It goes like this: the French literary theorist and critic, Roland Barthes, lived with his mother his entire life. He was devastated by her death. As he went through her things, he found a photo of her as a little girl in which she looked more particularly like herself than in any other photograph he had ever seen. Whether or not this is true is not for any of us to say, so he doesn’t show us the image. 

“I had discovered this photograph by moving back through Time,” he writes in Camera Lucida. (1)

“I worked back through a life, not my own, but the life of someone I love,” he explains. (2)

It is a moment that moves him to introduce the term punctum:

“A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me),” he theorizes. (3)

This metaphorical prick has opened a discursive space for photography to meet affect—a space shaped like a gyre. 

But at the moment, I’m more interested in the screw that cut through the photogram before winding its way into the wall. It flattens the angle iron against the sheet of plexi, strands of Sheilah’s jet black wig, and a photo of Little Dani with her grandmother on the beach. It seals them, like amber, to a photogram where Sheilah and Dani pressed themselves together in a dark room, against a paper that registered their bodies as a two-headed, variegated form.

The woman on the beach’s name is Roz, which sounds a lot like Rose. She wears a blue swimsuit and a tan eyepatch; that much we can see. Her homophobia is a memory held by her granddaughter, Dani, and shared by Sheilah, who never had the chance to meet her. The double whammy of trying to endear ourselves to someone long gone, for whom we never existed. 

Dani says the beach was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. How does she remember her grandmother, I wonder? beyond the pair of hands that she held while she barreled ahead, belly first. Little Dani faces out. Proxy Sheilah faces in. Photograms allow live subjects to define their own forms through proximity, duration, and the less familiar shapes of love: motion, pressure, the desire to let light in or out.

(1) Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 71.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid, 27.