Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the author of
Sharon Sliwinski is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and author of
Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the author of
Sharon Sliwinski is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and author of
This chapter provides an extended rumination on Roland Barthes’s Winter Garden Photograph, the famously absent image at the center of Camera Lucida. Entering debates about the existence of the image, it proposes, through a reading of Barthes’s posthumously published Mourning Diary, that the photograph did indeed exist. The chapter suggests that Barthes may have been reticent to reproduce the image because it would tie his mother to her brother, and link them both to their father, Louis-Gustave Binger, a French colonial official in Côte d’Ivoire. By refusing to reproduce the image, and by keeping readers focused on his mother in his emotional writing about the image, Barthes creates a blind spot that hides his family’s colonial past in plain sight.
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