Capturing ephemerality is an elusive pursuit and one of photography's original intentions. Seemingly, time stands still in an image, yet, truth be told, nothing in our human or natural world is permanent. Presence, absence, longing and remembrance are temporarily suspended in an image. The Shape of A Life asks us to visually capture impermanence, a fleeting sense of knowing that belies words. It is felt.
French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote a book-size essay, Camera Lucida, seeking to articulate what imbues a photograph with the essence of a life. Following the death of his mother he went in search of a childhood image of her which he felt held her spirit and reflected his heartfelt feelings for her. Titled the Winter Garden, the actual photograph was not revealed in the book, though it was used as a springboard to explore the bounds of photography. Barthes coined the latin word for puncture, punctum, to describe the expansive silent power of a photograph to stir a viewer.
Photographer Odette England queried photographers for their visual representation of the Winter Garden image on the 40th anniversary of the publication of Camera Lucida. She asked visual storytellers to reimage, pay homage or create a reflection of this elusive photograph. Two hundred photographers responded, and their stunning responses form, Keeper of the Hearth: Picturing Roland Barthes’ Unseen Photograph. The images and text in this captivating book are testament to the shape shifting of an image as the viewer, time and context are all moving components in the making and reading of a photograph.
The images selected as part of this exhibition include those that hint at movement, a whisper of a breeze, fleeting sunlight, a bent head, an empty chair, each has suspended a fleeting moment of action that holds a human touch. Similar to how our memories reorder each time we conjure them up, so too do the elements that we use to see. We see anew at each pass because we change, our world and who and what we love about it changes, so in turn, the meaning inherent in an image and our response or reading of it changes too.
J. Sybylla Smith, October 2026
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