Carol Mavor

Encircling Black and Blue

Abstract “Encircling Black and Blue” is Peggy Phelans poetic response to Carol Mavors recent book, Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour (Duke University Press, 2012). In the spirit of Roland Barthes, Phelans neither-nor piece (which is neither criticism, nor poetry—neither oral, nor written) is a “writing aloud” prose poem. Literally extending her memories and passions into Black and Blue, Phelans writing is one with Mavors. An afterword has been provided by the books designer, Amy Ruth Buchanan.

Love-Love, Ni-Ni: Roland Barthes and Bernard Faucon, A Butterfly Effect

This essay knits together the philosophy of Roland Barthes (1915–1980) and the photographs of Bernard Faucon (b.1950), the latter famous for gathering manikin-boys, dressing them with care, then staging their birthdays, snowman building, first communions, picnics and more, often with a dash of boyish pyromania, at times coupling the unreal boys with real boys. (The word “manikin” is from the Dutch mannekijn, meaning little man.) Together, Roland Barthes and Bernard Faucon are lit with ephebophilia (ephebe=early manhood+philia=love): an adolescent love for the “little man”, who is neither child, nor adult. In a 1978 essay on Faucon, Barthes claims the ruse of the photograph as matched by the trick of the manikin: both are apparently real and not real; both are infinitely reproducible; both are immobile. Such doubling is tidy for Faucon (whose manikins savour postwar hygiene) and for Barthes (whose texts often bank on the cleanliness of structuralism). In a handwritten note scrawled out to Faucon, Barthes said it best: “Your photos are marvellous; for me, it’s ontological, if you’ll allow this loaded word. The photo [in your work] is in the limits of its own being: that is the fascination.”

Alicious Objects: Believing in six impossible things before breakfast; or reading Alice nostologically

While Lewis Carroll’s stories of Alice, as well as his photography, have long been understood, and rightly so, as an attachment to childhood, especially girlhood, what happens when we read Alice geriatrically? This essay reads Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, not as a nostalgic yearning for childhood, but as a yearning for agedness. “Alicious Objects” makes good a word that has not yet made it into our current vocabulary: nostology. Nostology is another word for gerontology, but with the ring of nostalgia. At the heart of this investigation is Carroll’s old and forgetful White Queen, whom he based on a character, seemingly plagued with Alzheimer’s, from Wilkie Collins’ 1862 novel No Name. Through the lens of the elder, it turns out that Carroll is less about childhood than we may have previously understood. Using Carroll’s nonsense writing as a springboard, “Alicious Objects” playfully engages with a range of images: including photographs of the real Alice (Alice Liddell) as well as works by such contemporary artists as Ann Hamiltion, Sally Mann, Olivier Richon and Rosemarie Trockel. This is an effort to undo ageism, to see nostology as forward thinking, to make growing old, and even loving the old, less shameful.

“Summer Was Inside the Marble”: Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour

Abstract “Summer Was Inside the Marble” acknowledges that the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima demands a new post-nuclear indexicality, in order to embrace the unimaginable: representing the immaterial. With an emphasis on Resnais and Durass 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour, this essay reads photographys early prints (Talbot and Atkins) alongside the “photographs left on stone,” shadows of bodies left behind from the terrible radiation that devoured them on the spot. At hand are issues of memory, seeingness, forgetting, devastating beauty, and the unrepresentability of both love and the possible annihilation of the world.