ABSTRACT
With an emphasis on memory, this chapter presents the second of my case studies of published works that lend themselves to sociological analysis via the concept of lamination. Two main works comprise the case study: Anette Kuhn’s Family Secrets and Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, perhaps the most influential book every written on the subject of photography. In both books, the material (paper) photograph plays a central role. In Family Secrets, the photograph is a writing surface. A series of photos from Kuhn’s childhood, containing inscriptions on the reverse (added by Kuhn’s mother), are analysed from socio-psychological and feminist perspectives. Probing and contesting their meanings, Kuhn problematises not just the photos but also the family as a social institution. Through an analysis of family snaps, the family is posited by Kuhn not as a place of sanctuary, but as the site of trauma in both formative and ongoing identity struggles. Ultimately, in Family Secrets, the paper photograph becomes a kind of territory or battleground in a contest over the representations of memories between a mother and a daughter. In Camera Lucida, Barthes also discusses the role of the mother in his perceptions of family photographs, but this time in more glowing terms. Following his mother’s death, a grieving Barthes searched for a photo that would reveal her likeness as he remembered it most fondly. Barthes eventually found what he was looking for, but in a rather surprising way – he rediscovered the face he loved in a photograph of his mother as a small child. This picture, which he does not reveal to us, has come to be known as ‘the Winter Garden Photograph’, and it was apparently the inspiration for Camera Lucida, his celebrated meditation on the ontological significance of the photographic image. In both books, then, the photograph is conceptualised as a memory device, a trigger for the act of writing. And the writings that were produced, in each case, reveal much about lamination and its links to memory and materialities.
