Stilling the Subject

This chapter considers how photography emerges as an incomplete, iterative form of portraiture against an elusive subject. It looks specifically at Marcel Proust’s definition of modernist portraiture in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu as an incomplete, serial form. The narrator turns repeatedly to photographic tropes of portraiture to try to capture an image of Albertine, the woman he loves. She remains unseeable, her opacity constructed both by still photography and by her suspected lesbianism. The chapter traces lesbian sexuality’s resistance in a number of figures and photographs alongside Proust’s novel, incorporating readings of Alfred Stieglitz’s portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe and concluding with modernism’s most inscrutable female figure, Greta Garbo. The point conveyed is not that photography fails to get at its subject (although this is Proust’s complaint), but that photography makes the subject’s inscrutability and opacity visible as such.