“Roland Barthes was right, in his book on photography, to say that photographs are essentially involved in death. This creature was living and will be dead, a photograph says, according to Barthes... All writing about photographs, including this writing I am at present engaged in, has something decayed (decadent) and disgusting about it. People have not understood (except Barthes to a certain extent) the horror of these snatched imprints of light and shadow on jelly (Hiroshima gave us a way, a clichéd way quickly, of seeing what it was to leave your shadow etched by brilliance when you were evaporated)... It is partly, too, as primitive peoples believe, that the identity is chipped or sucked away by the black hole in the shutter... I hate photographs (p. 164).
To a reasonable, rational human being this argument and discussion seems irrational when considering Phineas work. After all, Phineas is studying dead men, their lives and existences. Is a biography, a collection of the actions of a man once living, not also like a photograph, in that it says “This creature was living and will be dead”? You cannot write about someone until the moments that you are writing about have passed and many biographies are written posthumously. So, why then is Phineas, who is endeavoring to write about a dead man who wrote about dead men so abhorrent of photographs?
Also, Vera, Phineas’ love interest, has a collection of x-rays that she has arranged and colored displayed as works of art in her room. Phineas found her art lovely and both agreed that the images are not displaying death but life. How is an x-ray different from a photograph? Both use a rather similar method to develop and if considered, one might say that an x-ray is more related to death than a photograph, since, more often than not, x-rays are taken at moments when someone has been injured while photographs are normally taken as someone experiences a moment in life. If looked at this way, an x-ray would be a reminder of the fragility of the human existence.
Yet perhaps Phineas’ perspective can be understood if one thinks about how people look at photographs as compared to biographies and x-rays. When a person loses a loved one, a photograph, which is a personal item that links the viewer with the deceased, can be studied and agonized over. That photograph can be a constant reminder of what you have lost. In my experience, family members will cut out a copy of a persons’ obituary, which can by said to be a miniature biography, and keep it in a book of some sort. But when they turn for a reminder of their lost loved one, they do not turn to the obituary, but to their collection of photographs. The photos act as a link between the current time and memory. An obituary reminds the person of the facts and things of the deceased person’s life, but the photo reminds them of the emotional bond. It is this bond that links photos to death. One takes a picture so that one can look at that picture and remember what was going on at the time. A biography allows the writer to pull back from the emotional side of the equation and look at the facts and things of the person’s life.
Phineas can write biographies and save himself from the horror associated with photographs by ignoring the more human aspects of his subjects life and focusing on the facts and things. As a biographer you cannot know how the person felt and guessing would probably have the unintended consequence of altering the facts and things and tainting them with your guesses.
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