"
And here the essential question first appeared: did I recognize her?
According to these photographs, sometimes I recognized a region of her
face, a certain relation of nose and forehead, the movement of her
arms, her hands. I never recognized her except in fragments, which is
to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her
altogether. It was not she, and yet it was no one else. I would have
recognized her among thousands of other women, yet I did not ‘find’
her. I recognized her differentially, not essentially. Photography
thereby compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the
essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true,
and therefore totally false. To say, confronted with a certain
photograph, ‘that’s almost the way she was!’ was more distressing than
to say, confronted with another, ‘That’s not the way she was at all.’
The almost: love’s dreadful regime, but also the dream’s disappointing
status- which is why I hate dreams. For I often dream about her (I
dream only about her), but it is never quite my mother: sometimes, in
the dream, there is something playful or casual- which she never was;
or again I know it is she, but I do not see her features (but do we
see, in dreams, or do we know?): I dream about her, I do not dream
her. And confronted with the photograph, as in the dream, it is the
same effort, the same Sisyphean labor: to reascend, straining toward
the essence, to climb back down without having seen it, and to begin
all over again.
Yet in these photographs of my mother there was always a place set
apart, reserved and preserved: the brightness of her eyes. For the
moment it was a quite physical luminosity, the photographic trace of a
color, the blue-green of her pupils. But this light was already a kind
of mediation which led me toward an essential identity, the genius of
the beloved face. And then, however imperfect, each of these
photographs manifested the very feeling she must have experienced each
time she ‘let’ herself be photographed: my mother ‘lent’ herself to
the photograph, fearing that refusal would turn to ‘attitude’; she
triumphed over this ordeal of placing herself in front of the lens (an
inevitable action) with discretion (but without a touch of the tense
theatricalism of humility or sulkiness); for she was always able to
replace a mortal value with a higher one- a civil value. She did not
struggle with her image, as I do with mine: she did not suppose
herself.
"
