Abstract
Did their paths ever cross? Roland Barthes had not even been conceived when Walter Benjamin first visited Paris, but periods in the 1930s saw both figures living at the same time in the city. In moments of wild imagining I picture them passing on a boulevard, in a café, at the door of a shop selling fine stationery.
This, of course, is idle fantasy: there is no way of knowing if they ever came within sight of each other. But Kathrin Yacavone’s illuminating book explores a terrain where the writings of the two figures meet repeatedly: photography. This is a significant intervention: as Yacavone notes, hers is the first book ‘entirely devoted to Benjamin’s and Barthes’s theories of photography’ (p. 1). This is not a mere mapping of the ways in which Benjamin influenced Barthes; it is also a study of how ‘reading Benjamin with Barthes sheds new retrospective light on Benjamin’s texts and allows for recognition of hitherto unnoticed or underappreciated aspects of both’ (p. 12).
Yacavone begins with an overview of Barthes’s debt. Although his oeuvre harbours few explicit references to Benjamin, Yacavone establishes persuasively that his ‘theories of photography were developed with at least some knowledge of Benjamin’s work’ (p. 25), even if that familiarity ‘was clearly limited in both scope and depth’ (p. 26).
Part I of the book addresses Benjamin. Chapter 1 considers the central concept of ‘photographic singularity’ by tracing the development of Benjamin’s understanding of photography between the late 1920s and the middle of the following decade. Portraiture was one of the photographic forms which caught Benjamin’s eye, and Chapter 2 singles out an image of Franz Kafka as a child that fascinated him. The setting of this picture establishes a connection with Barthes, for Kafka is shown in a winter garden, which is where Barthes’s mother is found in the enigmatic photograph around which La Chambre claire unfolds. The portrait of Kafka, Yacavone concludes, has a special place in Benjamin’s work, where it ‘is both the particular object of, and the example for, a redemption through writing’ (p. 93) and ‘a dialectical response to Benjamin’s generally negative assessment of the medium’ (p. 94).
Benjamin and Barthes are also connected through Proust, and Chapter 3 examines this link by exploring how, for Benjamin, modernity alters experience and memory in wounding ways. Photography, as a modern form and agent, lies therefore on the side of impoverishment. But there is, Yacavone reveals, another story – one informed by Proust – for ‘Benjamin’s complex engagement with the Kafka portrait in various writings works against a process of “disintegration”’ (p. 117). Instead of forgetting, there is remembrance.
Part II opens with an overview of Barthes’s engagement with photography and the shift from Mythologies to La Chambre claire via ‘Le Troisième Sens’. Chapter 5 dwells further in La Chambre claire by considering the Journal de deuil to correct the belief that Barthes’s winter garden image never existed. Yacavone then enlists Benjamin to consider Barthes’s discussion of the magical, alchemical, immortalizing qualities of photography and the encounter with ‘the irreducible singularity of the other’ (p. 181). The final chapter returns to Proust by tracing the echoes of À la recherche du temps perdu in La Chambre claire, especially in the debt of the punctum to mémoire involontaire.
Contemporary photography differs extensively from the analogue medium analysed by Barthes and Benjamin, but Yacavone concludes with a convincing insistence that ‘their views are not only still relevant but provide important guidance for any rounded consideration of digital photography’ because their approach ‘counters any reductive technological determinism that seeks to equate the concrete experience of the photographic image with the actual or presumed facts of its creation in any simplistic, non-dialectical fashion’ (p. 221). In the ongoing engagement with Benjamin and Barthes, Kathrin Yacavone stands as a reliable guide.