| Abstract | In Camera Lucida, a book Barthes described as his "last investigation," as though he envisaged his own unexpected death shortly afterwards, his writing became more personal. He searches for the quintessential image of his mother, which he criticizes photography for not being able to provide him. The photograph of his mother, which he eventually finds, becomes his guide, like Ariadne's thread, for his entire desire to understand the meaning of photography; an investigation that leads him to characterize photographs as wounds that are capable of resurrecting very strong personal traumas. His search for his mother's photograph starts on a November evening, shortly after her death.(14) He sits in her apartment looking through some photographs with very little hope of "finding" her because he understands one of the agonizing features of mourning: no matter how many times he might consult the photographs of his mother, he will not be able to "summon them up as a totality." He only finds fragments of her that he is also able to recall from his memory but which are unable to produce "a living resurrection of the beloved face." Photographs from her distant past make him realize that history separates him from her, as he sees her now in ways he had never witnessed during his lifetime. "Is History not simply that time when we were not born?" asks Barthes, and adds, "I could read my nonexistence in the clothes my mother had worn before I can remember her." "Grandmother's garments" as seen in Kracauer's essay, take on a different meaning for Barthes. Seeing a photograph of his mother from 1913 leads him to remark that "there is a kind of stupefaction in seeing a familiar being dressed differently." Like the peculiar effect the old clothes were shown to have on contemporary spectators, in Kracauer's essay, Barthes too realizes that his mother is "caught in a History" of taste that distracts him from his personal view of her. However, unlike [Siegfried Kracauer], he does not perceive the photograph as a timeless testimony of the way people looked, which made the former describe the clothes as remaining intact on a body that has turned into a mannequin; instead, the clothes only reinforce the materiality of the subject's body as Barthes notes that clothing too is "perishable," making "a second grave for the loved being" who is visible in the photograph. This leads him to conclude that a photograph of a person whose existence preceded our own constitutes the "very tension of history" because its existence relies on our ability to consider, observe and contemplate it, yet, "in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it."(15) History, as the time that existed "before me," is what interests Barthes because it cannot entail any anamnesis.
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