Race and reproduction in Camera Lucida

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him. Through this articulation, Barthes becomes, in his own imagination, themother of all photographs. What is one to make of this? Returning, as Barthes himself so often does, to the VanDerZee portrait, it isilluminating to reconsider the punctum in light of these thoughts on reproduc-tion. Revisiting Barthes’s ruminations on this photograph, one finds that it isreally only one woman, Estelle Osterhout, the woman who stands, and the detailsof her attire, that trigger the punctum for Barthes. Her low belt, her strappedpumps, and finally her pearl necklace, spark Barthes’s mournful response to thephotograph. He describes this woman as ‘the “solacing Mammy”’ (43), and thus,once again, his punctum response is informed by a specific studium training;the African American woman becomes ‘Mammy’ only through the lens of aracialized and gendered class system. Subsuming the woman of colour underthe white fantasy of the ‘Mammy’, Barthes symbolically harnesses her procrea-tive energies to raising a white brood, effacing her own potentially reproductiverole as mother. 12 The necklace Osterhout wears recalls for Barthes that other necklace, the‘slender ribbon of braided gold’, which belonged to his aunt.VanDerZee’s auntreminds Barthes of his own aunt, whom he describes, once again, as follows:‘This sister of my father never married, lived with her mother as an old maid,and I had always been saddened whenever I thought of her dreary life’ (53).(Remarkably, Estelle Osterhout never married either. 13 ) Deeming his aunt an‘old maid’, Barthes would seem to denigrate her for failing in her procreativerole. And yet, this aunt’s ‘dreary life’, mirrors quite closely Barthes’s own. ForBarthes himself ‘never married’ and lived his entire adult life with his mother(Olin 2002: 112). Indeed, Barthes’s pity for his aunt may mask an anxiety abouthis own family position. In a brief discussion of the photograph’s capacity tocapture a ‘genetic feature’, Barthes declares: ‘In a certain photograph, I have myfather’s sister’s “look”’ (1981: 103). 14 Ultimately, the punctum in VanDerZee’s photograph is activated by Barthes’snervous identification with his own aunt. Through a signifying slippage,VanDerZee’s aunt recalls Barthes’s aunt, who finally recalls Barthes himself.What Barthes sees in this image, in the woman who stands behind and to theside of her relatives, slightly in the shadows, is an image of his own aunt, andultimately of himself – an image of the one who stands to the side of the familynarrative. Barthes is never really the mother of all photographs, but always theaunt. 15 Barthes’s anxieties about race and reproduction thus merge in his response tothe VanDerZee photograph.They also intersect elsewhere in his text, notably inhis references to Francis Galton, the nineteenth-century founder of eugenics.Galton defined eugenics both as a science of race and a programme of controlledbreeding, and he utilized photographs to construct the physical signs of familiallineage and race (Galton 1884, 1892, 1907). In Barthes’s discussion of familyphotographs, he evokes the eugenicist idea of biological inheritance in hisdiscussion of ‘the stock’ made manifest in the faces of family members caught