Page - 23 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Katy Beinart | Khlebosolny/Bread and Salt 23 Jacobson is aware that the photograph refers to a precise moment in time, a moment that Heshel Melamed had recorded as a marker of a change in his life, a record of departure. Roland Barthes writes of the photograph as a ‘certificate of presence’.20 Although he strains at first to ‘find’ his mother in the collection of photographs he has of her after her death, Bar- thes finally discovers her presence in one particular photograph, of her as a little girl aged five in the ‘Winter Garden’ of the house in which she was born: “These same photographs, which phenomenology would call ‘ordinary’ objects, were merely analogical, provoking only her identity, not her truth; but the Winter Garden Photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me, utopically, the impossible science of the unique being.”21 Barthes terms this photograph a punctum, or a wounding.22 He felt that this wounding hit him directly with his mother’s presence as he gazed at this particular photograph. Barthes discusses how photographs are direct referents to the real, unlike other systems of representation.23 This is made certain in part through the pose (the photograph as evidence of a moment when the pose took place, ‘something has posed in front of the tiny hole and has remained there forever’24) but in larger part through the recording of light and the chemistry of the photograph: “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here, the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the pho- tographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”25 Hirsch, writing about Barthes in the context of family photography, argues that he “in- tensifies the indexical relationship when he speaks of the photograph as a physical, material emanation of a past reality; its speech act is constative: it authenticates the reality of the past and provides a material connection to it”.26 If, as she says, reference for Barthes is not content but presence, what is indexed through the photograph is the presence of a moment in time. The photo Rebecca and I have of Anne contains a recording of light at a precise moment in time: the light in a studio in Hamburg, at a moment in her life on the cusp of adulthood, emigration and change. The image of Anne acts as a referent not just to her own departure for a new life, for it also holds within it a point in our family story, a decision to leave for England (we don’t know why), which becomes crucial to her identity and much later to our own. We also do not know who the photographs were taken for. 20 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 87. 21 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 71. 22 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 27. 23 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 76. 24 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 78. 25 Barthes, Camera Lucida, pp. 80-81. 26 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 6.