Desire for a Photograph: Baudelaire’s Imagined Portrait of his Mother

In a letter Baudelaire wrote to his mother in 1865, he expresses his wish to have a portrait photograph of her and explains his preferences with respect to such a picture. This desire for a photograph may seem surprising in light of his renowned denunciation of the medium in his “Salon de 1859” essay. In this article, I discuss the letter in the context of Baudelaire’s views on photography and portraiture, and I show that Baudelaire envisioned a different photographic aesthetics—one that invited the work of the imagination. I suggest that this alternative aesthetics is related to the portrait as a genre, and to the mother’s portrait in particular. Discussing Baudelaire’s imagined mother’s portrait in the context of Félix Nadar and Roland Barthes, I propose that it invites us to consider the relation between photography and love, as well as the relation between desire, images, and writing.