Barthes's Blue

Though Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida was the only dedicated book of mourning published in his lifetime, he writes at length on this topic, including in the posthumous Mourning Diary and the Collège de France lecture notes. As opposed to the usually solitary narrator of the “Photo-Maman book,” agitated by stillness and fixated on the absent maternal body, elsewhere, Barthes insists on a public mourning, and works to integrate such a practice into his everyday life and its crucial sociality. From his thinking on the fragment, the plural, dispersal, erasure, and weariness, Barthes finds a mourning with movement that can be practiced in his amateur creative life, consistent with the transparent, weightless qualities of his beloved mother. The colour blue is dispersed in the various sites of Barthes’s mourning: the private domestic space, the published book on photography, the art he observes while out with friends, and in fragments of the mother and father.