The Impossible Science of the Unique Being

A quote of Roland Barthes, reflecting upon a photograph of his late mother as a child, which he refers to as the "Winter Garden Photograph" per its depiction:

In this little girl's image I saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever,without her having inherited it from anyone; how could this kindness have proceeded from the imperfect parents who had loved her so badly--in short, from a family? Her kindness was specifically out-of-play, it belonged to no system, or at least it was located at the limits of a morality (evangelical, for instance); I could not define it better than by this feature (among others): that during the whole of our life together, she never made a single "observation." This extreme and particular circumstance, so abstract in relation to an image, was nonetheless present in the face revealed in the photograph I had just discovered. "Not a just image, just an image," Godard says. But my grief wanted a just image, an image which would be both justice and accuracy--justesse: just an image, but a just image. Such, for me, was the Winter Garden Photograph.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. Hill and Wang (New York, 1981). 69-70.