ABSTRACT
‘Collecting Loss’ develops themes from Pleasures Taken (Mavor, Duke University Press, 1995) with an emphasis on the fetishization of photographs and old clothes (exemplified, on the one hand, in Elin O'Hara Slavick's own girlhood dresses that she has stitched with haunting memories of her childhood, and on the other hand in the lush photographs taken by Sally Mann and the Victorian photographer Clementina Hawarden). As Christian Boltanski has written: ‘What they [clothing and photographs] have in common is that they are simultaneously presence and absence. They are both an object and a souvenir of a subject, exactly as a cadaver is both an object and a souvenir of a subject.’ Reading an old photographic album made by her own grandmother against other maternal collections of plenitude (whether they be old clothes or photographs or domestic bric-a-brac), Mavor reveals how such accumulated goods are made to fill in for the pangs of loss: lost childhoods, lost family histories, lost memories, lost friends. Mixing corporeality and critical theory, Mavor engages with Emily Apter's notion of ‘maternal collectomania’ as a site of provocative meanings worthy of placement alongside more conventional discourses on visual representation and collecting.
