Photographs and Melancholia

While reading Freud’s article “Mourning and Melancholia,” I was trying to relate his theories to photography. Roland Barthes said in Camera Lucida that all old photos are reminders that the person in them is always-already dead. They depict the perpetually present-past, and thus always create a strange sensation of loss for something that is partially still there. I was thinking about whether this applies more to Freud’s ideas of mourning or melancholia. Mourning is simply sadness, depression, disconnection, etc. resulting from the death of a loved one or loved object. Melancholia has similar symptoms, but instead of coming from the death of someone, it results from a loss of a different kind. And usually the melancholiac doesn’t even know what it is that they have lost. Plus, with melancholia, there is a marked lowering of self-esteem that comes from the way the mind substitutes the ego for the lost object, and therefore hates itself.

So there are multiple parts to the photo that can be related to either mourning or melancholia- the idea of an inevitable and already-happened death (mourning), but also the fact that you actually haven’t lost anything, and so the feeling of loss may be more unconscious (melancholia). Looking at a photograph, which of these would you feel? It seems to me like it would lean more towards melancholia. When looking at old photos, you understand that the people in the photo have already died, and you will eventually die too. So in a way, you take the realization of universal death and loss and bring it into yourself, make yourself (your ego?) the object that has been lost. You may look at a photo and feel melancholic, but not understand why (assuming that you don’t/didn’t know the person pictured). It is because you are internalizing the loss inherent in every photo and putting yourself in the place of the subjects in the photo that are already gone. This probably happens on the unconscious level, but the underlying theme of mortality is something that is universal, and may explain the longing, aching, or pain associated with old photographs. It is narcissistic to imagine yourself as this already-dead yet immortal object, just as it is narcissistic to replace a lost object with your own ego as occurs in melancholia. It seems to me that because of this aspect of subject-object identification and loss, photographs are inextricably tied up with the ego-centric and somewhat inexplicable melancholia.