Between forever and never : the photograph as a bridge between past and present; memory and it's fiction, 1981-2009

In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes (1980: 64-66), describes the process of looking through his mother's photographs after her death. He weighs up how much of her he recognises in the images he comes across. He evaluates the versions of her that are portrayed and deduces that "none seem to be really 'right':" neither as photographic performances nor as existing recurrences of "the beloved face" that he carries in his psyche. He talks about trying to find her, and achieves only part satisfaction in pinpointing fragments in each image that seem to depict parts of the mother he knows. He concludes that by being partially true, the total representation in each image is false. He suggests that the physical details and direct documentations of his mother's physical self, do not contain the sense of her, as he knows her.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Michaelis School of Fine Art

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Altschuler, Jenny

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Josephy, Svea

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/7802

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/7802