Select Publications
Books
Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).
Becoming on AmazonPleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995; second printing, 1997). New British edition (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 1996).
Reading
Boyishly: Roland Barthes, JM Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue. Marcel
Proust and DW Winnicott (in
production, with Duke University Press, 2007).
Reading Boyishly is a critical approach to selected works and related images by four boyish men: J.M. Barrie, Roland Barthes, Marcel Proust and D.W. Winnicott, as well as a “real boy,” the boy photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue. Between the covers of their books, journals and photograph albums, childhood is a place prolonged through an anxiously labeled over-attachment to the mother. Barrie, Barthes and Proust are notably queer in their affairs with Mother. The child-analyst Winnicott reveres Mother in his writing, but seems to go out of his way to disassociate himself with the queerness of his male patients, perhaps an indication of his own effeminophobia. While Lartigue was surely close to his mother (she snapped the famous picture of him in the bathtub--his journals are filled with happy descriptions of running about Paris with “Mami”), his attachment to Mother is certainly without the obsession of Barrie, Proust and Barthes. Nevertheless the maternal looms in Lartigue’s own refusal to never grow up. In sum, the body of Mother wrinkles the smooth childhood sheets of Barrie’s Peter Pan, of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, of Barthes’ Camera Lucida of Winnicott’s Playing and Reality, of Lartigue’s childhood gaze. (In the technical jargon of sewing, as Peter Stallybrass has noted, wrinkles are called “memory.”) Each respective boyish call of “Mama” hails her large: as muse (Proust); or cure (Winnicott); or lover (Barthes); or overrated (Barrie); or as childhood itself (Lartigue). For Barrie, Proust, Winnicott, Lartigue and Barthes, the maternal is a cord (unsevered) to the night-light of boyish reading. To “read boyishly” is to covet the mother’s body as a home both lost and never lost, to desire her as only a son can, as only a body that longs for her, but will never become Mother, can. Nostalgia (from the Greek nostos = return to native land, and algos = suffering or grief) is at the heart of the labor of boyish reading, which suffers in its love affair with the mother. Reading Boyishly is a longish book with some 200 images to be gorgeously produced by Duke Press.
Current Book Projects
Full (a novel) At the heart of the book is a mother’s obsessive passion for her adolescent son who refuses to eat; but pounding at its edges are larger visions of the body at birth and at death, which are descriptively released by a nostalgia for childhood that is as much disease as it is a longing for home that never was, that never is. Through repeated stories of loss and joy, this telling lyric is a vessel of consumption and release.
The book features images that hail, but do not necessarily illustrate the themes of Full: from a nineteenth-century daguerreotype of a full moon to Gordon Matta-Clark’s documentation of a house cut in two (Splitting, 1974) to Josef Sudek’s photograph, Egg on a Plate.
Full is currently under consideration at various presses through Laurie Langlie Literary Agency.
Black and Blue
In Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, he melancholically nourishes the loss of his mother through Boudinet’s photograph of a blue bed and Van der Zee’s photograph of a middle-class black family: simply stated, punctum emerges as black and blue, as affectively bruising. In my earlier work on Barthes, I suggested that Boudinet’s Polaro�d and the Winter Garden Photograph were a couple. They are and that was a nice, blue (queer) story of desire. But the not-so-nice and the more difficult reading is the more ambivalent story of black and blue featured in my latest book project. Although still imbued with my love for Barthes, I now believe that the truest story comes from pairing the “blue” Boudinet with the “black” Van der Zee. As I learned from my, former, beloved teacher James Clifford: “If we are condemned to tell stories we cannot control, may we not, at least, tell stories we believe to be true” (Writing and Culture). True, here, turns out to be black and blue.
Reeling out from this study of Barthes that serves as the book’s introduction are four subsequent chapters, all on film, which embody, not only the metaphors and realities of “black and blue,” but also a theory of migration that travels between the beautiful and the political, a focus on forgetting as necessitating memory and a new indexicality demanded by the post-nuclear age. The four films discussed are: Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936); Alain Resnais’ and Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959); Chris Marker’s La Jet�e (1962); and, Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982). As might (or might not) be expected, Guy Green’s A Patch of Blue (1965), Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975), Derek Jarmen’s Blue (1993), and Krzystof Kieslowski’s Blue (1996) make notable appearances.
Select Reviews
Charles Malone, see A Journal of Visual Culture, Friends of Photography and MIT Press, 1:3 (1995): 57.
Norman E. Schroder and Ronald E. Shields, “Body of Evidence: Period Style, Staging, and Cultural Studies,” Text and Performance Quarterly, 16:2 (1996): 189-95.
P.K. Cline, Choice, 33:5 (January 1996): 831.
Jennifer Green-Lewis, “Landscape, Loss, and Sexuality: Three Recent Books on Victorian Photography,” Victorian Studies, 39:3 (Spring 1996): 391-404.
Rune Gade, trans. Glen Garner, Katalog: Quarterly Magazine for Photography, Museet For Fotokunst, 9:1 (1996): 48.
H. Leon Gatlin, Albion, 29:1 (Spring 1997): 136-7.
“All Her Darling Daughters,” an excerpt of the book featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “End Paper,” September 24, 1999.
Elizabeth Millard, ForeWord, October 1999.
Mark Swartz, New Art Examiner, October 1999.
Lindsay Duguid, The Times Literary Supplement, October 15, 1999
Randall Heath, “Becoming,” Rain Taxi, Volume 4, Number 4, Winter 2000.
Deborah Peifer, “Picture this,” Bay Area Reporter, November 4, 1999.
Richard Schneider, “Special Issue on the Visual Arts,” an excerpt from the book featured in Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, December 1999.
Jennifer Doyle, “Mom’s Queer Camera,” Cultural Studies, Volume 14, Numbers 3/4 July/October 2000.