My Mother's Bones: The Photographic Bodies of Camera Lucida and Halving the Bones

Abstract:This essay brings together Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Ruth Ozeki's documentary Halving the Bones in order to situate the conceit of maternal photography within discourses of social and racial reproduction. Although Barthes's theory of photography neglects race, it prepares the ground for a logic of maternal reproduction through photography that is not realized within Camera Lucida. Ozeki extends Barthes's theory of photography-as-mothering to posit film as a medium that meets the needs of a contentious, mixed-race Asian body—both to escape narratives of race as enforced through the photograph, and to ensure the continued visibility of that body.