Postpartum: Unlearning Conception and Photography
The astonishment which I had at first experienced on this discovery soon gave place to delight and rapture. After so much time spent in painful labour, to arrive at once at the summit of my desires was the most gratifying consummation of my toils. But this discovery was so great and overwhelming that all the steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated, and I beheld only the result.
YOUR BEATING, BREATHING, BODY. Warm, rhythmic, quietly pulsating. Downy back, golden when the sun strikes, fuzzy like a peach to the touch. How quickly a ‘newborn’ accumulates material possessions, in your case; clamp, nappy, ankle band. I stroke your vellus hair. Every consideration is given to the fibres that come into contact with your body. How can it be I so quickly forget the trauma and pain of you leaving me? That cord between us, did I see it? How could I miss it? Postpartum; a new passion presents itself, demands itself. I photograph to try and make sense of it all at a later date.
In Fandom as Methodology, Catherine Grant writes about desire, identification and adoration. She oscillates between the high and low, permitting the reader to admit to their affections. She allows us to confess to ‘the emotional intensity for our love objects’ [2]. What would it mean to bring fandom into a conversation with the maternal? Can maternal care be a methodology? And what about neglect? I turn to other female thinkers and their self-described moments of conceptual maternal realisation. Griselda Pollock brings us to Ettinger’s Matrixial Gaze [3]; Susan Bright invites us to think with maternal ambivalence [4]. New concepts and theorisations, but always the same pain.
My breasts harden. You relieve them. Below I sting, the muscles remember. Fuck, it is sore. Blood, milk, water, more water, please. You are a tonic.
I consider the erasure of women in early photography; their hands and thinking that shaped the medium in its formative period. From unknown ‘assistants’ to unnamed sitters, we know that women were witness to the ‘invention’ of photography and that they participated in it too. Or we ought to know.
Photography was conceived on a honeymoon. In October 1833, 15 years after Mary Shelley’s waking dream on Lake Geneva, William Henry Fox Talbot found himself on nearby shores, on Lake Como. His pursuit of photography was driven by gendered anxiety: born of frustration at his “talentless” drawings of Lake Como, and, above all, the superiority of the women in his company, principal among them, his wife, Constance. His drawing instrument — the camera lucida — offered no help. It was in this moment that Talbot had the idea to stabilise his images through a chemical process known as fixing.
If you live in the UK, the invention of photography is associated with Talbot. In the Rest of The World, it the work of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. True, they discovered a method for fixing within two weeks of one another. But what so often goes without mention is that their work rested on the knowledge of chemical experimentations carried out by many before them. Consider the boundary-crossing Elizabeth Fulhame. In 1790s Edinburgh, she traversed the distinction between ‘handcraft’ and ‘science’. At home, experimenting with fabrics, silks, light and chemistry, Fulhame made breakthroughs that predate those of Daguerre and Talbot by half a century. Her chemical experiments were recorded in her 1794 publication An Essay on Combustion with a view to a new art of Dyeing and Painting. In the foreword, Fulhame engages with the position and marginalisation of women in the sciences. She foresaw her silencing and reflected on her own positionality as an intruder.
“It may appear presuming to some that I should engage in pursuits of this nature, […] and censure is perhaps inevitable; for some are so ignorant that they grow sullen and silent and are chilled with horror at the sight of any thing that bears the semblance of learning, in whatever shape it may appear; and should the spectre appear in the shape of woman, the pangs which they suffer are truly dismal.”
How right she was. Her experiments, conducted at home, would form the bedrock of the ‘invention’ of photography announced by Talbot and Daguerre. The fact that she made her extraordinary intervention, in her own name, before the invention of photography as we know it, is remarkable. But to have also written about her own silencing in this way reads like a form of double consciousness, as if she is somehow aware of the erasure to come.
Your arrival was immediate, precipitous — not offering a moment for the removal of outdoor clothing — presenting like some messy, sloppy ball, travelling with gravitational force, straight into the arms of medical care. Fast responding, hard-working NHS staff eased you into this world, their experienced hands catching you with such confidence. I was relieved to let you fall into their towelled safety net.
Why are we talking about firsts? Talbot’s ‘Calotype’ process was unquestionably revolutionary. This was the first negative/positive process that rendered the reproduction of the photograph a possibility, but the very notion of the solitary figure – so often male – presents an obstacle. Pushing beyond the idea of Talbot as ‘originator’, Silverman instead invites us to consider photography as authorless and ‘untranscendable’. [6] Batchen redraws the familiar tale of photography’s invention, by considering a series of ‘firsts’ who can lay claim to discipline’s earliest ‘proto-photographers’. In doing so, he repositions our gaze towards the desire for photography, and leads us away from the narrow preoccupation with individual greats. [7] More recently, Azouly lays out the imperial and colonial dimensions of early photography, and teaches us to unlearn. [8]
Finally, sleeping.
I look out your umbilical stump, it has been self-consciously hidden away for some time now. It is undeniably hideous and grotesque in form. Yet, it gives me comfort. An origin object, once rich with cord blood and stem cells, is now essentially a dried vein being kept in my jewellery box in the name of memory. I question if this is an object Roland Barthes and Carol Mavor might call the neautre? It is neither masculine nor feminine. Neither dead nor alive. Neither active nor passive. I recall a poignant scene in Frankenstein where the monster is observing the cottagers and decides to fetch and restore the wood supply for a blind man and his children. Their store is always ‘replenished by an invisible hand’. [9]
See Ma’s hands?...she died soon after labour
In Fulhame’s treatise on photography, a small but significant detail is typed on the title page: ‘Printed for the author, by J. Cooper, Bow Street, Covent Garden, and Sold by J. Johnson...’. This was the same Joseph Johnson, who published Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman two years earlier. Perhaps some origin stories need to be told. I rock back and forth through the tedium and wonder of it all.
1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1999), p. 42.
2. Catherine Grant ‘More Than a Schoolgirl Crush’, in Fandom as Methodology, edited by Catherine Grant and Kate Random Love (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2019)
3. School of Arts and Humanities Research Platform event with Griselda Pollock and Maria Walsh, Royal College of Art, 20 April 2021
4. https://www.1000wordsmag.com/susan-bright/, date accessed April 30 2021
5. Elizabeth Fulhame, An Essay on Combustion with a view to a new art of Dyeing [sic] and Painting (London: Joseph Johnson, 1794)
6. Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy: Or The History of Photography, Part 1 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2015), p.11.
7. Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass, 1999)
8. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019)
9. Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus p. 87.
