This photograph was taken in 1895 in the studios of Charles Spence in Dunbar, Scotland. It is a carte-de-visite (calling card) and shows a woman holding a photograph. It was common at this time to be photographed with a photograph of a deceased or missing loved one. The person in the photograph in her hands maybe her husband, but on closer inspection the figure’s stance indicates it is a child.
Geoffrey Batchen talks about such a mourning card in Dreams of ordinary life:
‘Cartes-de-visite are often about their reception, as if to underline the psychological or emotional experience that their viewing entails. Many pictures show people holding open photograph albums or simply feature people looking at another carte. It is a reminder that cartes were scaled to be viewed in the hand rather than on a wall; they were meant to be touched as well as seen… She poses for the camera to make visible an otherwise abstract experience, the pang of longing, the act of remembrance, the stretching of the imagination. It is as though she wants to draw our attention, not just to the particular image she holds, but to the comforting solidarity of photography’s contiguous memorial function. In touching her photograph she recalls that it too was touched, by that umbilical cord of light that once caressed her loved one and then this image in her hand. In touching it now, she returns the photographic experience to the realm of the body and to the intimacy of reverie’.
The reference to the umbilical cord comes from Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida:
‘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...a sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze’.
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