"As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for "sentimental" reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think."
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Roland Barthes had his obsessions. This can be said about most artists and I’m no different. In my childhood, I developed an obsession with preserving all of the family records, from fragile documents to archival photographs.
In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, the last book written by Barthes before his death in 1980, the French philosopher and writer wants to understand what photography really is, what its nature is about. Barthes reflects on the sensations that the images bring to him. He examines the connections between photography and other art forms, and even shares the work of other photographers: William Klein, Richard Avedon, Duane Michals, Robert Mapplethorpe, Koen Wessing, Alfred Stieglitz, among others (all male, all white). Barthes also defines the studium—a kind of average, everyday interest that a person feels for a certain image and the basic information it. The punctum—which, in opposition to the studium (both form a duality), refers to the “wound” caused when a photo or, more specifically, a detail in it deeply cuts through us. Images of my family, especially the old ones, from a time when I didn’t yet inhabit this planet, often wound me.
Three of my grandparents died when I was a child and I didn’t get to know my paternal grandmother. However, I did have a third (and very dear) grandmother, Belmira, my paternal grandfather's second wife. Both my father and mother are the youngest among many siblings. My brother and I are therefore the youngest grandchildren on both sides. We didn't have the opportunity to spend many moments with our grandparents—in a house full of people and noise and life. As a child, I spent hours flipping through old photo albums, as if they were wordless books that told me stories. I know, it's romantic, but I indulge myself in this thought. In those old photos, I see people laughing or looking serious, people side by side, holding hands, dancing, hugging each other—I see people alive. I want to know what subjects they were talking about, what music they were listening to. When looking at those old images, I feel a sharp pang of sadness, one that I can't even call saudade (the Portuguese word for a profound homesickness blended with nostalgia and longing); after all, these moments predate me—and I don't know if, at least in this case, you can miss something you haven't experienced.
The truth is that Camera Lucida is not exactly (or entirely) about photography. It is, more than anything, a book about mortality. And although Barthes hints at this from the first pages, it is only in the second half of the book that we come to understand what really motivated his investigation: the death of his mother, Henriette Barthes, in 1977.
One day while he was looking at old photos from a time when Barthes himself did not yet exist, he embarked on a search for his mother, for her true essence in those photographic images. He wanted to rediscover her, find her again. He gets frustrated with most of the pictures because they were “almost her,” but not her entirely. That is, until he found a picture from 1898, when Henriette was just 5 years old. In the image, which Barthes calls “The Winter Garden Photograph,” she appears with her brother, two years her senior. In that girl, Barthes claimed to rediscover his mother's kindness—which, for him, was her deep essence; what she was mostly made of.
My father is the youngest of ten brothers; he is the son of the Grande Sertão. He was born in the Ribeirão da Areia region, near the Urucuia River, in the municipality of Arinos, northwest of Minas Gerais state. The age difference between my father and his oldest brother is 24 years. I don't know how old my grandmother Maria was when she gave birth to my father; I believe she was over 40. When my father was still a baby, my grandmother became ill and died some time later—we don't know exactly when. The story of my father's childhood and adolescence is full of holes that are difficult to fill. He has no memory of his mother. But my father at least knows what his mother's face looked like; he knows this from a single photo.
In the black and white photograph, now yellowed by time, standing (from left to right) are my great-grandmother Eloína (who everybody called Dinha), my great-grandfather José (Zé Loro), and their oldest son: my grandfather Cirilo. Sitting on a bench are my grandmother Maria, two of my grandfather's brothers in their childhood: Herculana (Tia Nana) and Tio Zeca, and my grandfather's stepbrother (there, a teenager), Dé—we don't know why my grandfather’s other brothers aren’t in the photo: Teotônio and my beloved Tio Cesário. The men and boys in the photo wear a simple suit. The women and the girl wear light patterned dresses; Tia Nana has a ribbon in her hair. Nobody smiles. In the background you can see the wattle and daub wall. On the left side of my grandfather and Dé there is a wall that seems to be made of straw. The image was possibly taken in Januária, a city on the left bank of the São Francisco River in Minas Gerais, to where my great-grandparents migrated from Bahia, and where my grandparents and most of my uncles come from. The year is also uncertain. My father believes the image is from the late 1930s. If he's right, my grandparents already had at least two children by that time.
In the image of his mother, I can see traces of my father: the square-shaped forehead, the thin mouth, the broad jaw. It breaks my heart that he couldn't live with her.
Atapucha Waurá also didn’t live with his mother, Akaintsaritsumpalu, who died when he was a baby. Atapucha is one of the leaders of the Wauja people, from the Xingu Indigenous Park, south of the Amazon. We met in October 2016 at the University of Maryland, in the U.S., where my husband was studying. Atapucha was in the region to help save their language and culture. In Washington, D.C., Atapucha and two other Wauja, Kuratu Waurá and Tukupe Waurá (Atapucha’s nephew), participated in Recovering Voices with the Smithsonian Institute, a project that records and protects indigenous languages and cultures in danger of disappearing. But Atapucha was also there on another great mission: to find his mother—more precisely, a photograph of her. Atapucha, about 52 at the time (he wasn't sure about his date of birth), wanted to know the face of Akaintsaritsumpalu. Atapucha claimed that he felt she was somewhere. When my husband and I interviewed him for the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, he said, “Nobody told me they had a picture of my mother. I'm imagining it. Could I not know her face?”
Atapucha's hope rested in the fact that many anthropologists had visited the Xingu since the early 20th century; they took photographs and made many films. Since Atapucha's father, Yawalatumpa, was a great Wauja leader, it was quite likely that someone had taken at least one image of Akaintsaritsumpalu in the 1960s, some time before she passed away. At the Smithsonian, Atapucha saw images recorded in the 1960s by the Brazilian ethnographer Harald Schultz in the Xingu. Kuratu, who is an elder and knew Akaintsaritsumpalu and was the only one in the group who could identify her. In photos kept in an archive in D.C., Kuratu recognized many people—including her father, the great leader Arutatumpa, who had just passed away—but none of them was Atapucha's mother. There was, however, another chance to find her image; there is an important collection by Harald Schultz at the Museum of Archeology and Ethnology (MAE) at the University of São Paulo (USP), in Brazil.
I can't imagine what it's like not to have autonomy over your own images and those of your ancestors. I can't imagine the pain of having to ask someone (no one from your family, your people) to look for your own mother's face, a face you can't remember. My father may only have a single photo of his mother, but the photograph (the object specifically) belongs to our family; it is even in the care of my father. Atapucha, Kuratu, and Tukupe encountered a lot of bureaucracy and obstacles to accessing the Wauja images at MAE—authorizations that could only be given at meetings (with no Wauja among those present) that took place once a month or every two months. Atapucha and Kuratu, however, could not wait for the deliberations of the white people's institution. Since they rarely left the Xingu, the visit to São Paulo and to Harald Schultz's collection at the museum had to take place soon after their return from the United States. After filling out forms, sending many emails and insisting a lot, the visit was scheduled.
And it was at MAE, after seeing many images, that Kuratu finally recognized Akaintsaritsumpalu. In the picture, taken in 1964, she appears alongside other Wauja women during the Yamurikuma, a festival where they dance, sing and compete in fights (as men do at other festivities). And in the photograph, a surprise: Akaintsaritsumpalu carries a baby on her lap, her son Atapucha. After more than five decades, Atapucha finally discovered his mother's face. Tukupe also found an important photo in the museum, the image of his maternal grandmother, Pulutapatumpalu, who died when Tukupe's mother was a child. Until then, in the only image they had of Pulutapatumpalu, it is not possible to see her face (only her hands and legs appear); she is very sick, lying in a hammock, with her husband beside her. The photograph was published in a 1966 issue of the National Geographic magazine. The Wauja have a copy of it, purchased on eBay.
The Wauja's heroes are their ancestors, their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents… These people are the central figures in many of their stories, passed on from one generation to the next. For a people with approximately 600 members, knowing and preserving their history, their language and their records, owning their images and their narratives is also a deep struggle to ensure their own existence, to guarantee that there will be a future for the next generations. In a Brazil of the 2020s (and, unfortunately, who knows, in the years to come), this becomes even more critical. I know the importance of the work of anthropologists, but I question the system that seems to have colonial legacies, that objectifies people like the Wauja, a system in which they depend on emails, forms and committees in museums and universities around the world to approve their access to documents that are, in fact, theirs. After that visit to the Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, in which everyone was very moved, the Wauja were guaranteed unhindered access to the collections. But is it right to congratulate what should have been a practice for many years? I wonder what I would do if in order to get to know the face of my grandmother Maria (or any loved one) I had to go through the same processes that Atapucha, Kuratu and Tukupe had to face.
In addition to Atapucha, Kuratu, and Tukupe, at the University of Maryland we met the anthropologist and researcher Emilienne Ireland and her husband, the professor of Asian-American Studies Phil Tajitsu Nash. Emi and Phil (both Americans) became our great friends and mentors, supporting us through difficult times in the United States. Emi lived with the Wauja in the 1980s; she fluently speaks the Wauja language, which she learned from Atapucha's father, Yawalatumpa. Atapucha and many other Wauja call Emi and Phil their aunt and uncle; they are dear members of the Wauja family. The first time Emi was in the Xingu, she brought them a copy of a book about the expedition that Marechal Rondon, a Brazilian military officer who worked in the creation of the Xingu Indigenous Park, made in the region in 1924. Emi told us that many elders were moved to recognize family members who had already left this world in the images (which they saw for the first time). The people in those photographs had names, stories, entire lives. Since that day in the early 1980s, Emi has worked hard so that the Wauja not only see the images of their ancestors, but also have them in their possession.
I'm superstitious. I like symbolism. Barthes writes: “And if Photography belonged to a world with some residual sensitivity to myth, we should exult over the richness of the symbol: the loved body is immortalized by the mediation of a precious metal, silver (monument and luxury); to which we might add the notion that this metal, like all the metals of Alchemy, is alive.” What a beautiful and desperate thing—and therefore intensely human—to think of photography as a jewel and say that it has this chemical, mystical ingredient which gives life. I try to reflect on whether my obsession with photographs is similar to Barthes's. Maybe not exactly. Barthes wanted to understand what photography is about and, from there, maybe find answers about mortality; I believe, a way to deal with his mother's departure. I, on the other hand, have a simpler goal: I don't need to spend a lot of time analyzing the phenomenological or the language of photography. Through it, I simply want to keep people alive. But I know it's impossible to keep people alive forever—a limitation I also have to face about myself, and my own mortality. Still, images help me in this task more than memories; the photos fill in the gaps (even if only a few of them, even though imperfectly) of what I don't know or don't remember; they offer me some direction.
When I asked about the photo in which my paternal grandparents and great-grandparents are pictured, my parents recalled the story of how the image ended up in our home in a different way than my memory tells me. For me, my father had received the photo from a relative after the death of my grandfather Cirilo, in 1997. In my mind, on one of our trips to Minas Gerais (we went nearly every year, even after my grandfather’s passing), someone—maybe my grandmother Belmira, my grandfather's second wife—had said that my father should have that photo because he was the one who lived the least time with his mother, my grandmother Maria. My mother thinks that it was Grandma Belmira who actually gave him the photo, but she doesn't remember why. My father also believes it was Grandma Belmira, but he says that he asked for the photograph to take it to São Paulo (where we lived) and restore it. For me, we already had the photo when the idea for the restoration came up—not the other way around. I was the one who discovered the photo restoration service at a photo shop downtown in my hometown. The restoration was expensive for us, a working-class family, but I don't remember the price exactly. The year was 1999 or 2000. I remember the day my father and I took the photograph to the shop. I was afraid that something would happen to it, that they would spoil it. After a few days of apprehension, we went to pick up the restored photo and the original. I was disappointed with the result. There hasn't been a real restoration—at least not in the way I imagined it, not in the way I knew they did with paintings, for example. The image was digitized (which was a big deal at the time; we ourselves didn't have a computer, let alone a scanner at home). On the copy, some blemishes were “fixed” (in Photoshop?) and a bit of contrast was added. But the original photography remained as it was, with the same flaws, the little holes, the edges all eaten away by time and exposure—Dé and Tio Zeca's hands have already disappeared; the hands of Tia Nana and my grandmother Maria are only a little bit left. Some of my disappointment has possibly to do with two aspects that torment me. Perhaps I unconsciously hoped that the restoration would “fix” the holes in my family's history—as in a fantasy that the original restored photo could tell everything we don't know about my grandmother Maria and the others—Dé, for example, migrated to the state of Goiás; he came back a few times to visit but my father doesn't know what happened to him. The other point is that the wear and tear on the original image terrifies me immensely, as it reveals to me that that photography and the people in it are not immune to disappearance.
The same day I was investigating how the photo of my paternal family ended up in our house, my mother remembered a very old picture of her parents with two of her siblings, an image that I had never seen. The black and white photo must be from early 1953 because Tio Zezinho, whom my grandmother Angela carries in her arms, is a little baby, and he was born on December 24, 1952. Grandma Angela and Tio Zezinho are on the left side of the image; my grandmother wears a simple light dress that goes halfway down to her shins; she's not wearing glasses (which accompanied her years later), and her hair is parted in the middle, pulled back in a bun. On the right is my grandfather Adeli, wearing a light shirt and dark pants. His left hand holds his right wrist, his head is tilted slightly forward, and his eyes are closed. I joke that my grandfather's haircut looks a lot like that of hipsters today. In their midst, holding the hem of my grandmother's skirt and my grandfather's pants, is Tia Cidinha, then just over 2 years old. Barefoot, wearing a sleeveless print dress, shoulder-length hair and fringe, she looks diagonally to her right. The four are in what looks like a backyard, probably the house they used to live in Saltinho, in the countryside of São Paulo. There are some banana trees and some bushes behind them.
I was shocked that I've never seen this image before. How? It was kept at Tia Cidinha's house, which is at the back of my parents' house. Tia Cidinha has lived with them since 1993, after the death of my grandfather Adeli—my grandmother Angela died in 1988. The image hits me, stings me (as Barthes says in reference to the punctum) for many reasons. My grandparents are still young, in their thirties (close to my current age)—not even my mother was born there; she is from 1954. My maternal family had not yet migrated to the city of São Paulo and then to ABC Paulista (in the metropolitan area of São Paulo). Tia Cidinha is a sweet little girl; it would be more than 15 years before the first symptoms of schizophrenia began to manifest. And Tio Zezinho, a baby... He died in 2020 at 67.
Barthes proposes that the noeme of photography (its conception, general idea) is called “That-has-been” because who or what we see in the image, with no doubt, was “there,” at that place and moment. But at the same time, a photograph also reveals that “who” or “what” is no longer there—a subtle but important distinction that also shows how paradoxical the ephemerality of photography is. That moment captured of my family was over in an instant. But here I am, many decades later, in a present that merges with the future and the past, looking at those images that are (almost) eternal, and that I—nonexistent at that time—can see.
According to Barthes, presence (and I add existence) is never metaphorical in photographs. They show that my loved ones, my ancestors, existed on this planet. The photos, then, may sting me and hurt me as they wish because I don't care; nothing is more powerful than existing. In another of my favorite passages in the book, Barthes writes: “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.” What a beautiful passage. It makes me want to cry.
I don't know with what cameras the photos of my ancestors were captured. The photograph of my paternal family, my father believes, must have been taken during a festivity, possibly in the Januária region. According to my father, it was common for a photographer to show up at community events in the countryside to take pictures of people. The image of my maternal family, according to my mother, may have been taken by a relative who lived in the city and visited them and later gave them the developed photo. Most of my childhood images were captured by an Olympus-Pen 35mm. But towards the second half of the 1990s, the camera started to have issues. The last pictures we took with the Olympus-Pen show my grandfather Cirilo in Minas Gerais, a few months before he passed away. The images are very blurry. Yet they are of immense value to me. It’s much better to have them that way than not to have them at all. We only had the money to buy another camera when I was in my mid-20s. Therefore, there is a big hole in which I have almost no images of myself as a teenager. I have only a few photos taken by professional photographers at ballet recitals, at my elementary school graduation, and a few others captured by my dear Tia Maria Luiza.
I ask my father about his past, about his childhood, but less often than I would have liked. With my mother, I don't need to question so much, because she tells me more things than my father does. Either way, with both, I'm afraid of messing with ghosts and—more than anything—I'm afraid of causing pain. The times I work up the courage, when I find an opening to ask my father something, the answers come with holes. I keep questioning, but carefully, in an effort to step delicately on the lawn, so I don't kill any flowers. But I guess I'm too heavy footed at times, and some of the little flowers get torn apart.
I don't remember how this conversation with my parents started, I just know that I became half brave and started asking questions about my father’s sister, Antonia; I wanted to know more about her. In addition to his mother, my father lost Antonia, the twin of my Aunt Maria, when he was a child. Antonia and Maria were the ones who helped my grandfather, Cirilo, raise my father. It was Antonia, my father said, who cut his hair. “Looking back on it, I think she was the one who really liked to read. I remember that about her,” he told me. I had thought Antonia was gone in her teens, because what I've always heard is that she was gone too young. But for the first time, my father said he was between 8 and 10 years old when she died. Antonia must have been between 21 and 23 years old. As it happened with my grandmother Maria, no one knows for sure what illness took Antonia. Hepatitis, perhaps, because they say she had yellowish skin for a long time. Through a video call on my phone, me in the United States and my father in Brazil, I see him looking down. He pauses and after a while says in a sad tone, "I don't think there are any pictures of her."
There are many powerful photos in Camera Lucida, but Barthes does not show us the most important of them: the Winter Garden Photograph, with his mother in her childhood. Barthes justifies that by saying that, for us, readers, it would just be a simple image, “one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’,” since it would not sting, it would not hurt us. I don't quite agree with Barthes. Certainly the photograph wouldn't sting me as it did him, but I'm sure it would have moved me. But that might not be enough for him. Maybe it wouldn't be enough for me either.
A lot of times in the book, Barthes connects photography to death, saying that photography is proof of something or someone that has ceased to be. That is no lie, I know. I look at those old pictures of my ancestors, the ones with my maternal and paternal avós, with my bisavós and tios-avós and tio and tia and I decide that's not how I want to understand photography. I prefer to think about the people I love—and the photographs they're captured in—in ways that bring out the subversion of their existence. More than something or someone that has ceased to be, photographs confirm life, they show that someone—even if briefly—was here. Photography is stubborn because, even if vainly, even with flaws, it fights against erasure. And existence will always be more powerful than absence.
Contributor’s Notes
Juliana Ravelli (she/ela) is a Brazilian writer and journalist based in Chicago, where she lives with her husband, daughter, and cat. She has an MFA in Creative Writing Nonfiction from Columbia College Chicago. In 2019 she received the Stories Matter Foundation Masters Award, which recognizes graduate students in the Chicago literary scene. In her works, Juliana explores themes of memory, family, identity, working class, and (im)migration. Her writing has appeared in Kweli Journal, Sobotka Magazine, O Estado de S. Paulo, ano ii: ensaio, in the Selo Off Flip collection, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram @ravellijuliana.
