From the Archives: ‘Shall I be Mum?’ Julie Andrews having tea with mother, Barbara, in the family home on the young star’s return from New York, 1 October 1955.

In his classic treatise on photography, La chambre claire / Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes (1980) argues that the elemental power of a photograph, its ‘special genius’, lies in its unique combination of ontology and subjectivity. The mechanical nature of photographic reproduction endows photos with a ‘having-been-there’ quality, a frozen moment of time and space, that sustains both cognitive curiosity and emotional poignancy. Barthes calls the former dimension the studium, the historical and cultural ‘infra-knowledge’ that a photograph provides, its capacity to render richly descriptive details of time and place. The second dimension is more intimate in nature and it is what Barthes calls the punctum, a Latin word meaning wound, sting or cut (the same root for English words like puncture and punctuation). It is the aspect of a photo that affects us emotionally and moves us in ways that can be deeply personal, even idiosyncratic. The punctum, writes Barthes, is the ‘element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me’ (26). 

This 1955 press photo of Julie Andrews and her mother is a compelling evocation of both Barthesian axes of photographic allure: observational studium and affective punctum. In terms of the former, much of the immediate interest of the image comes from the glimpse it provides of celebrity home-life. An example of the popular photographic genre of ‘stars-at-home’, the image trades openly on the voyeuristic lure of peering into the private world of a public figure. In this case, Julie had just returned to England after her triumphant star-making year in The Boy Friend on Broadway, and the image accentuates the interplay between the extraordinariness of her newly-minted international celebrity -- all radiant cosmetic smiles and neatly-tailored tweed suits -- with the disarming ordinariness of the surrounding domestic mise-en-scène. 

Indeed, decades later, the photo is significant for the added historical insight it offers into Julie’s beloved childhood home, the Old Meuse. Between the cottage ware teapot, floral chintz armchair, and Axminster rug, the photo is a veritable compendium of mid-century English suburban style. The rows of neatly-lined leather-bound books, silverware ornaments, and vase of cut flowers in the background add a further touch of aspirational petit-bourgeois respectability. And, zooming in to the plate of sweet biscuits on the tea tray, it looks as if Barbara even broke open a box of Huntley and Palmers Assorted Creams for the occasion! 

But what possibly engages most in the photograph -- and what pushes the image squarely into the affective realm of the punctum, at least for this viewer-- is its weighted staging of mother-daughter relationality. Other than a homecoming, it was Julie’s 20th birthday and the shot fairly pulsates with the poignant ambivalence of generational succession. Hovering behind and above Julie, Barbara recedes into the background, one hand seeming to urge her star daughter forward, while the other appears to hold on to her. Then, as if in a chiaroscuro expressionist film, Barbara’s shadow is projected larger-than-life on to the wall of the Old Meuse. 

Julie has commented widely on the close but complicated relationship she had with her mother. ‘My mother was terribly important to me,’ she writes in her 2008 memoir, ‘and I know how much I yearned for her in my youth, but I don’t think I truly trusted her’ (18). Taken almost 67 years ago, this photo speaks poignantly to those conflicted dynamics, if not to the knotty emotional interplay at the heart of all parent-child relationships.

Sources:

Andrews, Julie (2008) Home: A Memoir of My Early Years. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 

Barthes, Roland (1980) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by R. Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.