哀悼的政治與美學：安妮．李柏維茲的攝影輓歌

Abstract

This thesis ventures to propose an interpretation of American photographer Annie Leibovitz’s famous yet controversial photographic retrospective, A Photographer’s Life: 1990—2005, as an elegy written in photographs, and aims to examine the politics and aesthetics of mourning as instantiated and problematized in this particular photographic elegy. Following classical elegy scholars’ proposition that an elegy be defined as an art work which emerges from and acts upon an experience of loss by translating it into formalized representation, this thesis analyze the collected photographs in the photographic elegy Leibovitz fabricated in response to the death of her longtime partner, Susan Sontag, unpacking them on both lexical and syntactic levels through the prism of Sontag’s writings on photography, Freud’s concept of mourning and the narrative movement of classical elegy. Chapter one teases out the correlations between the work of mourning and the creation of elegy, by drawing on Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia and elegy scholar Peter Sacks’s interpretation of elegy as a poetic space for the working through of loss. It finds both verbal and non-verbal messages surrounding A Photographer’s Life indicative of Leibovitz’s endeavor to come to terms with her bereavement by giving it organized expression and integrating it into a scheme of knowledge. Chapter two shifts the focus to Leibovitz’s much criticized decision to publish intimate and “inappropriate” photographs of Sontag and underlines how the American viewers’ homophobic anxiety is conveniently displaced onto a moralistic censure of Leibovitz’s violation of her lover’s privacy and public persona. Leibovitz’s appropriation of the conventions of family snapshots and her transgression of “good taste” are thus an implicitly political act of staking a claim to a loving relationship unacknowledged elsewhere, of challenging the norms governing the representation of non-normative domesticity, and of contesting the arbitrary and narrow-minded definition of family. Chapter three takes the recurrent bed motif in the collected photographs for analysis and discerns an overarching narrative from the lovebed, the sickbed, the deathbed to the birthbed. The movement appears to have conformed to the pattern of classical elegy which begins in grief and ambivalent remembrance and moves away to acknowledgement and acceptance of the loss and finally to taking consolation in the regeneration of life and the immortality of art. However, the concluding photographs of death and birth, upon close scrutiny, are more disturbing than reassuring. Printed in melancholic monochrome, the snapshots invariably depict claustrophobic spaces, fragment their human subjects, and suggest not consoling resolution but chaos, incompleteness and unsuccessful withdrawal of cathectic energy from the lost object. These disquieting photographs create a fissure in the seemingly conventional elegiac narrative, shading the closure of classical elegy with modern skepticism on the one hand and coloring the Freudian model of mourning which emphasizes the completion of decathexis and the coherence of the ego with melancholic overtones on the other hand.