Ghost Interpretation

A Fictional Conversation Between Hervé Guibert and Susan Sontag

Photograph by Buku Sarkar

Dear Susan,

Your refusal of interpretation has always unsettled me. To strip the image of its cloak of meaning, you ask us to face it naked. But I wonder — is nakedness ever possible in an image? In a photograph, what we see is never only what is there. A face is already an elegy, a gesture is already a ghost.

I have tried to write about these ghosts — the photograph as something that both promises and betrays memory. But when I look, when I write, I cannot escape the murmur of interpretation; the image drags its shadow behind it.

So I want to ask you, before anything else: when you look at a photograph of someone you loved who is now gone, are you really able to see it without interpretation? Can you look without the ghost stepping forward?

Hervé

Dear Hervé,

Because the questions you ask are compelling, and because our friend Foucault seems to like you, I won’t lose my temper. French men—Michel excluded—in particular seem to delight in provoking me; I’ll be generous, and excuse this behavior as a national trait. Your passion for meaning, though, not so. I thought the French knew better.

Setting aside my argument about interpretation (some years old by now), I’m struck by your sentimental attachment to photographs. Ghosts, elegy, memory, fine. But your contention that “what we see is never only what is there”—if only! When I look at a picture of my mother, do I see my mother’s face, alive and breathing? Does she wince at the weight I’ve gained, command me to zip up her dress? I assure you: no end of looking would satisfy the longing of a woman like my mother. A lifetime staring at her photograph would only leave her wanting.

I’m not telling you I don’t believe in ghosts. My mother lives on, wherever I most want her gone, it seems. In the cracks in my voice, the wrinkles in my face, the tantrums of my still young son. But up against the tyranny of her memory, every photograph seems a cheap souvenir. Even seeing her face cross the screen of the early Hollywood film that so flattered and diminished her, I’m only reminded of the tricks of lens and light. The past is a formidable enemy, but it finds no match in objects. After all, it’s not the objects, but the memories themselves, that withstand time.

Wishing you well,

Susan Sontag

Dear Susan,

You say that no amount of looking could summon your mother back. That the photograph cannot give her voice, her reproach, her impatient hands tugging at a zipper. And I believe you. But still, when you look at her image, do you not feel her absence more pronounced? Like a whirl pressing behind you back? a part of your body that was once strong and warm, now cold and gray. That is the ghost I mean: not the return of the lost one, but the incision of their loss into the present moment.

I have written about how, when I photograph someone, I sometimes feel as if I am already writing their obituary. The lens is never neutral. It records, yes, but it also foretells. Perhaps you distrust sentiment; I cannot. For me, to love an image is to feel its imminent departure, the warning that this face will one day vanish.

You insist on stripping the image bare, refusing interpretation. I cannot. Nakedness itself is another costume. When I stare at a photograph, my eyes clothe it in memory, desire, fear. That is my scandal, perhaps: I cannot keep the dead from returning when I look.

Tell me, Susan — is it really your mother’s face that fails you in the photograph, or is it your refusal to let her ghost disturb you?

Hervé

Dear Hervé,

This obsession with nakedness—forgive me if I start to blush! And yet even you admit, the image is not naked; it’s wearing its new clothes. As soon as we confirm the absence of the photographer’s subject, we are free to witness his work: a new object, which insists on its own identity, invites you into its own world. Unless, of course, this is somewhere you’re afraid to go.

I’m the one who brought up my mother, so I won’t blame you for harping on her. Neither will I blame you for likening a photograph to a death sentence. But the comparison is apt precisely because once we see the photo, we’re no longer seeing the person who sat for it, no matter how much we might love them. We’ve put them behind us, taken a new lover. We’ve found someone else to take up our time and attention.

Does my mother’s image remind me of her absence? Of course. But my memories, my desires, even my fear that she might return... do I owe these to her photograph? I’d just as soon take the credit myself. You’ll have to take my word for it that I attach plenty of sentiment to my memories of my mother. Her picture, though, offers not sentiment so much as sensuality, sensibility, sense. Since you’re so keen on asking me questions, here’s one for you: do you ever, looking at a picture, forget your own feelings for long enough to see and enjoy the simple play of light and shadow on the folds of an ear, or the curve of a neck?

With regard,

Susan

Dear Susan,

You ask if I can forget my feelings long enough to see the simple play of light and shadow. But I think that to look — truly to look — is already to be touched. Light itself is a form of contact; it brushes the skin before it reaches the film. When I photograph, I am not only observing. I am caressing with light, tracing the outline of a cheek, a neck, an ear — the very curve you describe.

You say the photograph is no longer the person, but a new object, an independent lover. Perhaps. But I cannot be so faithless. Each photograph I take, or that survives of those I love, remains charged with the eroticism of what is lost. You see sensuality as distinct from sentiment. For me, they are inseparable; sentiment is the residue of touch.

You wrote in On Photography that “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” I have always felt accused by that line. You make photography sound like conquest; I think of it as infection. The image contaminates me — I carry it inside me long after the subject has gone. The photograph does not liberate me from the body I’ve captured; it binds me to its absence.

As for nakedness — I blush too. Ghost Image was full of undressings, but not of bodies: of veils of memory, of shame, of desire. Nakedness is not the state of being without clothes; it is the moment before you cover yourself. I think that’s what the photograph freezes — that split second of exposure, when one becomes aware of being seen.

You ask if I am afraid to enter the world of the image. I am not afraid, Susan — I live there. It is the only place where my ghosts still speak.

Hervé

Dear Hervé,

You provoke me again, this time not just with your reverence for the image, but by invoking infection, a reality I abhor to see figuratively transformed. I’ll admit, at first you had me up in arms (another metaphor I disdain...), but soon I wondered: could all this provocation be just that? So I read your Ghost Image, and now I find myself—this time in earnest—a bit red in the face.

I already told you my mother appeared in an early moving picture. I’m quite familiar with the figure of the mother who specializes in facial veneer, who leaps into a dance like a kabuki performer the moment one needs her most. Reading about your experience taking your mother’s portrait—your delicate preparations, the disappearance of the mother you knew in private and the emergence of the regal figure primed to face her public—I couldn’t help but remember seeing my mother the same way as a girl, despite the many photographs that fail to call the same memories up for me.

You yourself note that to remain with her image would have been to forget your mother. But your presence in the act of staging and taking the photo itself, and the witness you bore to her metamorphosis, are something else altogether. I do still believe a photograph metes out a kind of death, but sometimes, by taking one, we can also partake in a kind of last rite; we can work back through our troubled pasts with another toward blessing and absolution.

Which brings me back, with just some ambivalence, to nakedness. From your first letter, I took issue with your claim that I insist on a nakedness of images. Every abstraction to me is a kind of clothing; it seemed to me that our disagreement was more about the kind of clothing a picture wears, or provides. Now, though, I see we’ve arrived at an understanding: when we prepare to have our picture taken, we’re dressing for our funeral. We’re dressing for our journey to the beyond.

Sympathy and thanks,

Susan