Still There

This chapter argues that Woolf develops a theory of photography in her writing that describes how the world emerges within a photographic economy of light, separate from an observing subject. Photography does not reproduce the world; it develops a world through the action of light and independent of an observer. This emergent world, refusing economies of production and control, is suspended in time. The theory of photography embedded in Woolf’s writing draws on the earliest kinds of photographs—cameraless images—that formalize a conception of photography as “light-writing.” Severing the bonds between subjectivity and vision, photography adheres to a notion of objectivity that extirpates the human subject in favor of a vision of the world absent an experiencing self, a world written in terms of exposure, development, and emergence. In Woolf’s writing, the light encloses the world, stilling it, protecting it, and becoming a foil for the absent mother.