Carol Mavor

The sea, the sky, the veins of your hands, the earth when photographed from space--blue sometimes seems to overwhelm all the other shades of our world in its all-encompassing presence. The blues of Blue Mythologies include those present in the world's religions, eggs, science, slavery, gender, sex, art, the literary past, and contemporary film. Carol Mavor's engaging and elegiac readings in this beautifully illustrated book take the reader from the blue of a newborn baby's eyes to Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and from the films of Derek Jarman and Krzysztof Kiéslowski to the islands of Venice and Aran. In each example Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture. In an echo of Roland Barthes's essays in Mythologies, blue is unleashed as our most familiar and most paradoxical color. At once historical, sociological, literary, and visual, Blue Mythologies gives us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales, and connotations of those somethings blue.

Reflections on a Colour

Blue Mythologies

Study of nostalgic representations of the maternal, the home, and childhood in the literature and photographs of early-20th-century artists.

Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott

Reading Boyishly

An intimate look into three Victorian photo-settings, Pleasures Taken considers questions of loss and sexuality as they are raised by some of the most compelling and often misrepresented photographs of the era: Lewis Carroll’s photographs of young girls; Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs of Madonnas; and the photographs of Hannah Cullwick, a "maid of all work," who had herself pictured in a range of masquerades, from a blackened chimney sweep to a bare-chested Magdalene. Reading these settings performatively, Carol Mavor shifts the focus toward the subjectivity of these girls and women, and toward herself as a writer. Mavor’s original approach to these photographs emphatically sees sexuality where it has been previously rendered invisible. She insists that the sexuality of the girls in Carroll’s pictures is not only present, but deserves recognition, respect, and scrutiny. Similarly, she sees in Cameron’s photographs of sensual Madonnas surprising visions of motherhood that outstrip both Victorian and contemporary understandings of the maternal as untouchable and inviolate, without sexuality. Finally she shows how Hannah Cullwick, posing in various masquerades for her secret paramour, emerges as a subject with desires rather than simply a victim of her upper-class partner. Even when confronting the darker areas of these photographs, Mavor perseveres in her insistence on the pleasures taken—by the viewer, the photographer, and often by the model herself—in the act of imagining these sexualities. Inspired by Roland Barthes, and drawing on other theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, Mavor creates a text that is at once interdisciplinary, personal, and profoundly pleasurable.

Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs

Pleasures Taken

The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden

Becoming

Rosalind E. Krauss

Jane Gallop

Michael Fried

Shawn Michelle Smith

Gordon Hughes

Jay Prosser

Paola Cortés Rocca

Victor Burgin

Margaret Olin

Roland Barthes's 1980 book Camera Lucidais perhaps the most influential book ever published on photography. The terms studiumand punctum,coined by Barthes for two different ways of responding to photographs, are part of the standard lexicon for discussions of photography; Barthes's understanding of photographic time and the relationship he forges between photography and death have been invoked countless times in photographic discourse; and the current interest in vernacular photographs and the ubiquity of subjective, even novelistic, ways of writing about photography both owe something to Barthes. Photography Degree Zero,the first anthology of writings on Camera Lucida,goes beyond the usual critical orthodoxies to offer a range of perspectives on Barthes's important book. Photography Degree Zero(the title links Barthes's first book, Writing Degree Zero,to his last, Camera Lucida)includes essays written soon after Barthes's book appeared as well as more recent rereadings of it, some previously unpublished. The contributors' approaches range from psychoanalytical (in an essay drawing on the work of Lacan) to Buddhist (in an essay that compares the photographic flash to the mystic's light of revelation); they include a history of Barthes's writings on photography and an account of Camera Lucidaand its reception; two views of the book through the lens of race; and a provocative essay by Michael Fried and two responses to it. The variety of perspectives included in Photography Degree Zero,and the focus on Camera Lucidain the context of photography rather than literature or philosophy, serve to reopen a vital conversation on Barthes's influential work. Contributors: Geoffrey Batchen, Victor Burgin, Eduardo Cadava, Paolo Cortes-Rocca, James Elkins, Michael Fried, Jane Gallop, Gordon Hughes, Margaret Iverson, Rosalind E. Krauss, Carol Mavor, Margaret Olin, Jay Prosser, Shawn Michelle Smith

Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida

Photography Degree Zero

In an exploration of one book and three films, themes including loss, regret, violence, and history are discussed in terms of the feeling of the colors black and blue.

The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans Soleil, and Hiroshima Mon Amour

Black and Blue

In the eighteenth century the members of London's Society of Aurelians were butterfly collectors. The term 'Aurelian' relates to the chrysalis, and the golden colour it can display before the butterfly emerges. As a twenty-first-century Aurelian, Carol Mavor collects fairy tales old and new and awakens them out of their chrysalises: like slumbering Snow Whites in caskets of gold and glass, or Briar Roses in tangles of branches and thorns. In Aurelia, Mavor takes special interest in the fairy tale's gastronomy, including Alice's Wonderland cake marked 'eat me', the sugar of the witch's house in 'Hansel and Gretel' and the more disturbing ingestions of cannibalism, as in the Brothers Grimm's 'The Juniper Tree', where a murdered boy sings through the mouth of a bird: 'My mother she killed me. My father he ate me.' Moving beyond this, Mavor discovers the fairy-tale realm in more surprising places: the tragic candy-land poetry of the 1950s 'genius' child-poet Minou Drouet; the subterranean world of enchantment in the cave paintings of Lascaux; the brown fairies of African American poet Langston Hughes; and Miwa Yanagi's black-and-white, bloody photograph of the Grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood holding one another in the cut-open belly of the wolf, as an allegory of the victims of Hiroshima. Through the lens of the fairy tale Mavor reads the world of literature and art as both magical and political.--Publisher.

Art and Literature Through the Mouth of the Fairy Tale

Aurelia

Carol Mavor

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