Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Photograph

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous story “A Scandal in Bohemia” (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1892) revolves around a missing photograph, that of Irene Adler and the future King of Bohemia, which the latter, finding that it would compromise his forthcoming marriage, strives to retrieve at all costs. In this rewriting of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (1845), the detective traps Irene Adler, the archetype of the femme fatale and the modern woman, into betraying where the photograph is concealed. But when, the next day, Holmes, Watson and the King visit her place, she is gone, ‘the’ photograph has been removed, and instead, she has left ‘a’ photograph, this time a portrait of herself alone: it is meant for the King, but Holmes chooses it as a memento—or fetish—of the one he will always call the woman. John Sutherland’s literary investigation into the story (1999) challenges the King’s statement that the missing photograph is a ‘cabinet’ taken in a photographer’s studio, whereas it should be, he argues, a ‘detective’ photograph taken by a hidden camera. The article in turn challenges Sutherland’s conclusion by drawing on Baudelaire’s views on photography (1859), Barthes’ Camera Lucida and Lacan’s comments on Poe’s story in order to bring out Holmes and Adler’s strange game of scopic and tacit tease-and-dare in what Walter Benjamin calls a ‘visual unconscious’: thus does the metaphor of the detective’s eyes wide shut tend to replace the real camera which once captured the missing photograph now belonging to le temps perdu.