The Beloved Bodies of Friendship Photography

by: Teresa Rizzo , November 19, 2024

In his 1980 book Camera Lucida, French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes attempts to understand the affective qualities of the photograph or those aspects that engage us emotionally. The book combines a theory of photography with a personal discourse on loss and grief. In the first half of the book, Barthes develops a theory of photography by making a distinction between the studium and the punctum. The studium of the photograph is the social and cultural meaning intended by the photographer. Barthes writes, ‘To recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions, to enter into harmony with them, to approve or disapprove them, but always to understand them (1982: 27-28). The punctum on the other hand is something surprising that the photographer never intended and has a wounding effect on the spectator. Barthes describes the punctum as ‘this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’ (1982: 26). It is a specific point in the image that draws the spectator’s attention and pricks at them.

As noted by several scholars, Bathes puts forward more than one concept of the punctum in Camera Lucida,(Oxman 2010: 83, Fried 2005: 560, Fisher 2008: 21). In the second half of the book, Barthes moves away from the notion of the punctum as a specific point in the image and begins to discuss the photograph in terms of love, time passing, and of loss. As he attempts to objectively and scientifically understand the photograph’s qualities, he is continually drawn back to what he describes as a ‘beloved body’ or ‘beloved face.’ This is particularly true when he encounters photographs of his mother, who has passed away. Encountering a loved one in a photograph ruptures logic and order in favour of affection. However, the image of the beloved body is also accompanied by a sense of loss and grief, as the moment captured by the photograph is evidence of what has passed. Barthes talks about photographs as having a lacerating effect because they are imbued with time and loss, particularly of those we love. Photographs possess ‘a quality’ of ‘that has been’ and take us back to a time that can never be again. Barthes writes, ‘The photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, only and for certain what has been’ (1982: 85). The photograph is evidence that the people in it existed at that moment and that one day they will no longer exist. Therefore, the photograph is imbued with death and loss, as the people we see in it are either dead, or one day will be dead.

This essay is part of an ongoing creative and scholarly project I began in 2016 when I decided to photograph long lost female friends as a way of getting to re-know them. I was also using this project to re-find myself as a photographer and a creative practitioner. This essay acts as a meditation on Barthes’ notion of the beloved body of photography as I attempt to understand the confronting experience of placing my friends in front of the camera as a way of rekindling our friendship and my creative impetus. It does this in three movements, ‘Re-knowing’, ‘Capture,’ and ‘Develop.’ Re-knowing explores the connection between image making and friendship in my creative process; Capture examines the confronting experience of putting my friends in front of the camera; Develop analyses the experience of looking closely at the bodies in the photographs and discovering affective connections. My experience as a female photographer bears heavily on this meditation on Barthes’ notion of the beloved body of photography. This is particularly because Barthes seems to express irritation with photographers.

Everything Barthes values about the photograph, its essence and its affective experience, exists outside of the photographer’s intention. Intentionality for Barthes is a form of artifice that disrupts an affective connection. The punctum, he insists, reveals itself against the photographer’s intention. He states,

the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there (Barthes 1982: 47).

As a photographer I am not sure what to do with this idea, as it means that any attempt to capture something that would create a genuine emotional experience is fruitless, and in fact gets in the way of it. As a photographer, I want to explore Barthes’ ideas about the photograph’s lacerating effect and the grief and loss that comes with it from the perspective of the photographer, not the spectator. Specifically, how photographs can pull us back to the moment of taking the photograph, all the while knowing that it can never be again.

Re-knowing

In 2016, I began a photographic project in an effort to return to and recapture a very creative period of my life during which I was constantly making films and taking photographs. It was the 80s and 90s, and I was studying at Murdoch University, known for intersectional thinking and home of feminist and cultural studies.

I was part of a creative milieu in the queer and film communities made up of friends, and friends of friends. I filmed performances with them at Connections nightclub, today the longest-running queer nightclub in the world, Blacklight parties, raves, fashion shows, and art events. Friends performed for my camera, and I performed for theirs. I took my SLR everywhere and it felt like it was part of me. I made a film on gender as performance called On Becoming (1994) and won several awards, including Best Film and Best Documentary at Flickerfest-Short Poppies, 3rd place at the 15th Chicago Lesbian and Gay International Film Festival, and the Best Direction and Producing and Best Documentary awards at the Western Australian Film and Video Festival. My creative practice had been entwined with friendships, creative milieus, and a sense of play. When I look at some of these photos, I still have the sensation of looking through the lens and hearing the shutter clicking.

Barthes writes from the perspective of the spectator—the one looking at the photo: he has very little to say about the photographer—yet there is much in his work that speaks to me as a photographer. The photos that I have taken may be evidence of what Barthes describes as ‘what has been’ and will ‘never be again’ in relation to the people in the photograph. However, when I look at them, I also have a body memory of looking through the lens, of pressing the shutter and freezing that moment. I have a body memory of the atmosphere in the room—the tension and excitement. I have a body memory of being part of a creative milieu. So, when I look at these photographs and see the evidentiary quality of the photograph, the ‘this has been’ and ‘will never be again,’ I feel the loss of that moment twice: once on the level that Barthes describes concerning the people in the photograph. But more so, I feel the loss of that moment; of taking the photograph, and the loss of my creative milieu on my body.

After living away from Perth for 21 years, I moved back. My milieu was gone, dispersed across different cities and countries. I knew almost no one in Perth, and the few friends I had kept in contact with were through a tenuous connection on Facebook. As a way of trying to reconnect with some of these Facebook friends, I contacted them and suggested we experiment with a photographic project as a way of becoming reacquainted. We had worked on creative projects in the past, and they were all still creative practitioners, so they agreed. Returning to Perth I fell back into that mode of being where I equated friendships with creativity, images, and a milieu.

I went on Facebook and contacted Tiffany, a playwright, Tanja a filmmaker and academic, and Nadia a screenwriter and academic. Most of what I knew about them since I’d seen them two decades earlier I learned from Facebook: through their profiles, likes, comments and what others posted on their timelines. All this information was mixed in with what I remembered about them. I used this information to create narratives about them and to stage portraits based on them.

Barthes talks about photography as a journey backwards through time. He writes, ‘I worked back through a life, not my own, but the life of someone I love’ (1982: 71). He is talking about the photograph of his mother, age five, in the Winter Garden. This photograph enables him to trace back his mother’s life over three-quarters of a century. I decided that photography would be my journey backwards, to a time when I was part of a milieu, where the image, performance, staging, and play were an essential part of friendship. I discussed ideas with my friends and set up some photo shoots.

Capture

The second movement explores the process of capture, as I literally capture my friend’s bodies with the camera. Preparing for the shoots I begin by forensically going through their Facebook posts to gather information. Tiffany’s Facebook timeline is a full and ever-expanding collective autobiography. She is a well-known Perth playwright, performer, and arts activist. The first shoot was a disaster. I didn’t have a clear idea for the shoot. We were both too nervous and Tiffany looked uncomfortable in front of the camera. It felt like it had been too long for us to recapture the creative energy we shared at Murdoch University. For the second shoot, we collaborated on ideas and discussed different possibilities. We decided to recreate her character from her one-woman show Diva. Diva is brash and pushes sexual boundaries, but also fragile. The shoot is pure artifice and it seems to work. Tiffany comes alive. The sense of play and collaboration starts to feel like the beginning of a milieu and takes me back to the sensation of capturing that experience.

Tanja and I studied film together and went to Indonesia on a film shoot in 1990. It was a gruelling experience, and brought us together. I had only seen her once since I left Perth, at an academic conference in Sydney. For Tania’s first shoot, I placed a camera in her hand and made her play the filmmaker. It didn’t work. It was too contrived, and too obvious. I revised my ideas and incorporated new knowledge about her for the second shoot. As a way of spending time together, and getting to re-know each other, we went to see a lot of films. Tanja cried at every film. I learned to bring tissues. I broached the idea of capturing her watching films and photographing her crying. She was keen. I set her up in a theatre, played a clip reel of sad scenes I had edited together and waited for her to cry; then I pressed the shutter.

Nadia excitedly talks about her film script on C.Y. O’Connor, the Perth engineer who designed Fremantle Harbour and the Perth to Kalgoorlie pipeline. She tells me about his dramatic suicide. 1902 he shot himself after riding his horse to Robs Beach in Western Australia. We decided to do the shoot at the same beach. I gave Nadia an Akubra hat to wear, just like one O’Conner often wore in photographs. When we arrived the beach was windy, cloudy, and gloomy and the sunken jetty made it look apocalyptic. His ghost seemed to overshadow Nadia, even haunt her and I was worried she was lost in his story. But then as we worked together and tried different ideas, O’Conner started to fade into the background and Nadia became visible.

For several years after taking these photographs, I was unable to look at them: it was too painful. Barthes points out that photography turns subjects into objects. When he sat for a portrait, it made him ‘suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture comparable to certain nightmares’ (Barthes 1982: 13). I may have put my friends through this kind of nightmare. I had held them captive to an image that I had created through Facebook searches, projected it back on them, made them perform it and held them hostage to it.

On reflection, I realise that also I held them captive to something much worse. I was trying to recapture the experience of belonging to a milieu: of having friendships entwined with creativity and performance. I was trying to turn them into a creative milieu through a sheer act of will. This led me to another theorist upon whom I’ve worked on for a long time—and even written a book about: Gilles Deleuze. For Deleuze and Guattari, a milieu is not fixed but an ever-changing set of relations (1987: 21). A milieu does not have a hierarchy and cannot be planned, designed, or imposed. It is a complex and ever-changing assemblage of elements that interact and affect each other. This means it is not something I can impose on people. This was a challenge for me.

Barthes seems to express irritation with the intentionality of photographers. He says, ‘Certain details may “prick” me (1982: 47). He is talking about photographs that grab his attention and affect him. If they do not, he says, ‘it is doubtless because the photographer has put them there intentionally’ (Barthes 1982: 47). For Barthes, the intention of the photographer is relegated to the studium of the photograph. This is what initially draws the spectator’s attention to the photograph because of its cultural, historical, social, and semiotic meanings. But it does not have a long-lasting effect; it is as he puts it ‘in the order of liking, not loving’ (Barthes 1982: 27). As a female photographer, I am not sure what to do with this idea. I am irritated with this proposition as feminist art is so often powerful and affective because it plays with representation and artifice.

Camera Lucida was published in 1980 and first translated into English in 1982, just as a new wave of female artists were experimenting with intentionality, artifice and representation. Mulvey argues that this was a time when ‘A politics of the body led logically to a politics of representation of the body’ (Mulvey 1981: 139). The photographs of Cindy Sherman in America and Tracey Moffatt in Australia intentionally challenge and deconstruct female representation and racial representation through staging techniques. The way Tracy Moffett’s 1989 photograph Something More, deals with issues of race and sexuality through staging, performance, irony, and drama affects me on a bodily level, because it reflects back popular culture’s representation of race and reveals it as a myth. This is not simply an intellectual engagement but a visceral experience as the staging is a means for revealing a shocking truth. Staging and artifice may have been a way of creating new cultural, social, and semiotic meanings, but they are also affective experiences that engage the spectator on the level of the body. Using Barthes’ typology these photographs operate on the level of the studium, yet it is this very aspect that punctures me and creates a wound when I look at them. Staging can be a means of accessing authenticity and emotion.

In the 80s and 90s, I frequently used staging in my creative work as a way of trying to say something new about representation. For my friendship photos, I wanted to return to this impetus. I may have held my friends captive to a semi-fictional image of themselves, but I also allowed them to play with their image and experiment with it. Through a clumsy process of collaboration, we began to share a sort of intentionality that played with the impact of the cultural and social parts of their lives, Tiffany the actor, Tanja the filmmaker and fan, Nadia the historian.

Develop

The third movement focuses on the process of developing the photographs and explores the act of looking closely at the bodies in the photographs. Barthes writes:

I want to outline the love face by thought, to make it into the unique field of an intense observation; I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth (and sometimes, naively, I confide in this task to the laboratory). I believe that by enlarging the detail ‘in series’ (each shot engendering smaller details than at the preceding stage), I will finally reach my mother’s very being’ (1982: 99).

Today rather than developing photographs through photochemical processes we make adjustments on the computer. After the shoots, I upload the photos onto Photoshop. It is a painful process watching them load and waiting to see if any of them resemble my friends. Barthes talks about not recognising himself in photographs. I’m not sure I recognise my friends. I zoom in and fix little things, all the time looking at their faces, trying to understand them. I fix the lighting, make slight changes to the colour, and sharpen certain areas. I hoped that in this creative process, we would become closer friends; then I would thank them with a gift of a ‘friendship portrait.’ Now looking at these photos I’m not sure they would be happy with any of them. I spend days sorting through photographs trying to find ones that reveal something authentic.

I scan across the images looking at details, trying to find a connection. But slowly as I look and relook closer at their faces, I see trust. I am taken back to the moment of the event. Despite the awkwardness, there was also play and joy. Against the staging, there were moments of risk and experimentation. I remember I kept saying ‘don’t smile,’ and despite this sometimes I see their faces smiling at me or pulling silly faces. And in this, I see their love, generosity, and closeness. Looking very closely I experience a kind of becoming with the body in the photograph—an affective connection.

They are no longer objects of photography, but beloved bodies of friendship. Like Barthes, what I encounter is an intractable moment that is not like any other moment, and it takes me back to ‘this place’ and ‘this time.’ This photograph is evidence that ‘this has been.’ But it is not a sad realisation that this moment will never happen again, it is a jubilant moment as the staging and artifice of the photographs reveal something new, something I hadn’t expected, an image of generosity, love and friendship.