Visual dust. On Time, Memory, and Photography in Proust

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

Notes

1 Daguerre, in his presentation of the daguerreotype process to the French Academy of Sciences, claimed that his new invention gave nature “the power to reproduce herself” (qtd Krauss 61).

2 Discussing plate XIII Fox Talbot writes: “It frequently happens moreover—and this is one of the charms of photography—that the operator himself discovers on examination, perhaps long afterwards, that he has depicted many things he had no notion of at the time.”

3 All page numbers refer to published translations which are referenced in the works cited.

4 Beaumont Newhall writes that Nicéphore Nièpce “conceived the idea of fixing the image of the camera obscura” (15). This was what both Nièpce and Daguerre were seeking when photographic processes were invented. Proust repeatedly uses the expression fixer in connection with sensory and memory impressions.

5 The expression “cliché souvenir” (where “cliché” is to be understood in the photographic sense) was used by Hervey de Saint-Denis (1822–1892) for whom, writes J. Allan Hobson, memory “was like a mirror covered with collodion” (36).

6 Great art carries a “griffe de …[l’]authenticité [mark of the real]” (2272) where griffe suggests both something like a signature (“mark of the personality of someone in their oeuvres,” says the Robert dictionary, my translation), but also a scratch or wound.

7 A broader argument would also link Proust, through photography, to the Surrealist notion of the interior model (as opposed to the referential one of realism). Speaking of producing images of his hallucinations in his collages, Max Ernst writes of “gently reproducing only that which saw itself in me” (qtd Literary Polemics 130).