Communion with the dead

I find "Impressed by Light", an exhibition of early British photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, unexpectedly moving.

Roland Barthes was right to say that photography is a way of communing with the dead. There is the perfection of the likeness: life-likeness. There is also the physical chain of connection. The subject stood before the camera, which produced the negative, which made the print, which I look at now. It feels as though, with only a little supernatural aid, I could reach through the photograph and find the subjects still in there somewhere. Which may be a feeling I sometimes get with a painting, but it is never necessarily true in the way that it is with photography.

Another fascination is the completeness of the image. The photographer can choose the shot, but he must accept whatever it containsâ€”details to which he is indifferent, of which he is unaware, but which may come to dominate the picture for the viewer. For example: dress changes over time, but faces, by and large do not, so after a century we are likely to be much more struck by the clothes of a sitter than by the face. Conversely, because so much of Britain's housing stock goes back to the 18th and 19th centuries, I find it a pleasing shock to see a house looking exactly the same in a photograph taken 150 years ago as it might do today; a tiny, indirect reassurance to the durability, if not of my own life, then of some of the things that make up my experience.