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Geoffrey Batchen

complete with servants, ornate furnishings, statuettes, framed photographs, apiano and four figures gathered after dinner for music and conversation. Thescene focuses on a man and woman sitting in the foreground, she gazing up athim with an open album in her lap as he concentrates on a carte-de-visite in hishand that has been taken from it. 24 The carte is the social tissue that connectsthem, an excuse for flirtation, argument, narrative, recollection and invention.In other words, cartes were not just objects; they were also excuses for flights offancy and expressions of sentiment.Sentiment is an aspect of the carte-de-visite experience that tends to beoverlooked. Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida , on the other hand, opens with hisown sentimental response to a photographic image that may well have beentaken by Disdéri. ‘One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photographof Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then,with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: “I am looking at eyesthat looked at the Emperor”’ (Barthes 1981: 3). It is a reminder that this amaze-ment can be induced by even the most ordinary and predictable of photo-graphs, precisely because of the distinctively physical nature of photography’sindexical connection to its subject. ‘The photograph is literally an emanationof the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations whichultimately touch me, who am here [ … ] a sort of umbilical cord links thebody of the photographed thing to my gaze’ (80–81). Barthes’ emotive accountof the photographic experience is in accord with that offered by Americanphilosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. An index is, Peirce says, ‘in dynamical(including spatial) connection both with the individual object, on the onehand, and with the senses of memory of the person for whom it serves as asign, on the other [ … ]. Psychologically, the action of indices depends uponassociation by contiguity’ (Peirce 1985: 8, 13).Cartes-de-visite are often about their own reception, as if to underline thepsychological or emotional experience that their viewing entails. Many picturesshow people holding open photograph albums or simply feature people lookingat another carte. It is a reminder that cartes were scaled to be viewed in the handrather than on a wall; they were meant to be touched as well as seen. In a cabinetcard from the 1880s, a woman taken by a Canadian photographer named Reeveslooks straight out at us, one hand against her cheek and the other clutching acarte-de-visite portrait of a man. She doesn’t seem to see us staring back, as ifshe is looking only inwards, eyes open but mind elsewhere, recalling her missinglover. 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 imageshe holds, but to the comforting solidity of photography’s contiguous memorialfunction. In touching her photograph she recalls that it too was touched, by thatumbilical cord of light that once caressed her loved one and then this image inher hand. In touching it now, she returns the photographic experience to therealm of the body and to the intimacy of reverie.