[26Apr21] All occurrences of punctum in Barthes' Camera Lucida (and some of studium and some other sections that catch the eye).
In my early teenage, or perhaps a little before (so, more than 50 years ago), I was given an expensive Bible, printed on the thinnest paper, so I would have no reason not to carry it around with me, with
everything that Jesus said printed in red.
I think it is in my library still, I might post a page (now done: I was going to show the Sermon on the Mount but both pages were entirely red - this is the page before). The plan is to colour all the
punctums
and studiums
(perhaps pale red and blue) highlight what I see as
the important bits in standard yellow,
and maybe
colour-coding other words or phrases if the need arises.
green
I found another chapter-by-chapter precis by Danah Hashem here and check against that for things I might have missed.
Barthes recalls seeing a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother and thinking "I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor". This later leads to a desire for a better understanding of Photography.
2,3 The Photograph Unclassifiable, Emotion as Departure
He notes the limitations of classification,
"Photography evades us. The various distributions we impose upon it are in fact either empirical ( Professionals / Amateurs), or rhetorical (Landscapes / Objects / Portraits / Nudes), or else aesthetic ( Realism / Pictorial ism) , in any case external to the object, without relation to its essence"
p.4
A photograph "reproduces to infinity [what] has occurred only once"
"A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished
from its referent (from what it represents) … [in] short, the referent adheres."
p.8
Rejecting extant analysis of the medium, Barthes starts with a number of photographs of his choosing.
4 OPERATOR, SPECTRUM and SPECTATOR
"So I make myself the measure of photographic knowledge'. What does my body know of Photography? I observed that a photograph can be the oject of three practices ( or of three emotions, or of three intentions) : to, to undergo, to look. The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs - in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives … And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation co 'spectacle' and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead."
B. notes that "I am not a photographer, not even an
amateur photographer" and so can only write as Spectator and Spectrum.
5 He Who Is Photographed
When photographed, B. Is aware of “posing”, "I transform myself in advance into an image".
And "I want you to know that I am posing" … "the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity".
The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four 'image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am ( or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture ( comparable to certain nightmares) . In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph ( the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter
p.13
6 The SPECTATOR: Chaos of Tastes
As Spectator, most photographs B. sees are chosen by the editors (etc.) of magazines, books - the filter of culture"
some "provoked tiny jubilations, as if they referred to a stilled center, an erotic or lacerating value buried in myself (however harmless the subject may have appeared); and that others, on the contrary, were so indifferent to me that by dint of seeing them multiply, like some weed, I felt a kind of aversion toward them, even of irritation: there are moments when I detest Photographs: what have I to do with Atget's old tree trunks, with Pierre Boucher's nudes, with Germaine Krull's double exposures (to cite only the old names)? Further: I realized that I have never liked all the pictures by any one photographer: the only thing by Stieglitz that delights me (but to ecstasy) is his most famous image ( "The Horse-Car Terminal," New York, 1893); a certain picture by Mapplethorpe led me to think I had found "my" photographer; but I hadn't-I don't like all of Mapplethorpe. Hence I could not accede to that notion which is so convenient when we want to talk history, culture, aesthetics - that notion known as an artist's style."
p.16
Barthes states that he will investigate why some photographs interest him. He agrees with Sartre that newspaper photographs rarely do
In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation. The photograph itself is in no way animated (I do not believe in "lifelike" photographs), but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure.
p.20
8 A Casual Phenomenology
Barthes examines his motivation and methods. He wants to explain photography or, rather, its effect and effectiveness) and do so by means of a rational analysis but fears that photography's power to affect often relies on sentiment.
Looking at the Wessing photograph on p.22, Barthes notes the 2 soldiers and 2 nuns, "two discontinuous elements" and that there is a comparable "heterogeneous … duality" in several Wessing images he finds, including that on p.24 below.
Barthes finds the repeated discontinuities interesting in that he has identified what caught his attention in the images - that seems to please him, but the photographs themselves he dismisses as "(photographic) banality … Interest me? Intrigue me? Not even. Simply, it existed (for me)."
This is where the extensive quotations on S+P begin.
What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training. I did not know a French word which might account for this kind of human interest, but I believe this word exists in Latin: it is studium, which doesn't mean, at least not immediately, "study," but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without any special acuity. It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.
The second element will break ( or punctuate) the studium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of 1t like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole — and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).
Having thus distinguished two themes in Photography ( for in general the photographs I liked were constructed in the manner of a classical sonata), I could occupy myself with one after the other.
pp.26-27
The Nicaragua examples established that some photographs generate a general interest from Barthes - he later calls this a "docile interest" (Ch.19) and Batchen (2011, p.12) a "polite interest". But Barthes needs to distinguish this from the profound personal effect that some photographs have and thus the terms studium and punctum are coined.
11 Studium
I see that Barthes uses the phrase polite interest for studium.
Many photographs are, alas, inert under my gaze. But even among those which have some existence in my eyes, most provoke only a general and, so to speak, polite interest: they have no punctum in them: they please me without pricking me: they are invested with no more than studium. The studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste: I like / I don't like. The studium is of the order of liking, not of loving; it mobilizes a half desire, a demi-volition; it is the same sort of vague, slippery, irresponsible interest one takes in the people, the entertainments, the books, the clothes one finds "all right."
To recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the
photographer's intentions, to enter into harmony with them, to approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand them, to argue them within myself, for culture ( from which the studium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and consumers.
pp.27-28
B. states that [t]o recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer's intentions. The owner of the online copy has written and doubly underlined, "I don't agree". I think the anonymous inscriber is right - there is no reason to suppose that the viewer's interest is what the photographer intended - it may be and it may not. All we do know is that the interest is mild rather than intense.
12 To Inform
I take issue with Chapter 12 too: if we doubt Barthes assertion from Ch.11 that "[t]o recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer's intentions", then it follows that we must question whether a photograph necessarily "immediately yields up those 'details' which constitute the very raw materials of ethnological knowledge".
The whole point of Camera Lucida, in my view, is the assertion that viewers take different things from photographs because the input is filtered through heads full of differing experiences, attitudes and moods, so interpretations differ, sometimes markedly so if the punctum is triggered. The example used in this chapter is a 1959 Klein image of Moscow citizens and B. seems to suggest that we will all take the same information from it, that is, we will all interpret it in the same way.
Not so.
B. even hints at his own fallacy, giving an example of interest in particular photographs if they coincide with a personal fetish.
B. thinks back the the origins of photography, how it co-existed with painting but, in his view is more closely related to theatre because of theatre's relationship to Death ("and perhaps I am the only one who sees it", he writes) and his morbid interpretation of photography.
I find this chapter mystifying.
14 To Surprise
In Barthes' view many photographers rely on some form of surprise in their work. This is as its most natural when photographing someone unawares. He identifies five less natural and less satisfactory types:
(i) the rare, he gives examples from what were once called "freak shows".
(ii) the ability of the camera to freeze motion, revealing an unkown aspect of movement (one naturally thinks of Muybridge).
(iii) effects such as Harold D. Edgerton's milkdrop.
(iv) image manipulations, double exposures, distressing negatives etc.
(v) chance juxtapositions.
B. is rarely impressed by any of these contrivances.
15 To Signify
Portraits. This chapter is illustrated with Avedon's 1963 portrait of William Casby who was born a slave (1857-1970 according to Wikipedia). B. writes, "the essence of slavery is here laid bare", but that is only true if the viewer is aware of those details. The second illustration is Sander's Notary, "suffused with self-importance and stiffness", but B. opened the chapter by suggesting that portraits present masks to the viewer — only in advertising "the meaning must be clear and distinct" otherwise, "the object speaks, it induces us, vaguely, to think".
A docile interest and a studium reaction indicates a unary photograph - a single, uncomplicated theme and no punctum trigger.
Having thus reviewed the docile interests which
certain photographs awaken in me, I deduced that the studium, insofar as it is not traversed, lashed, striped by a detail (punctum) which attracts or distresses me, engenders a very widespread type of photograph (the most widespread in the world), which we might call the
unary photograph.
In generative grammar,
a transformation is
unary
if, through it, a single series is
generated by the base: such are the passive, negative, interrogative,
and emphatic transformations. The Photograph is unary when it emphatically transforms "reality" without doubling it, without making it vacillate (emphasis is a power of cohesion): no duality, no indirection, no
disturbance. The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, "unity" of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: "The subject," says one handbook for amateur photographers,
"must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity."
News photographs are very often unary ( the unary
photograph is not necessarily tranquil). In these images,
no punctum: a certain shock - the literal can traumatize - but no disturbance; the photograph can "shout," not wound. These journalistic photographs are received ( all at once), perceived. I glance through them, I don't recall them; no detail (in some corner) ever interrupts my reading: I am interested in them (as I am interested in the world) , I do not love them.
Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the erotic is a pornographic that has been disturbed, fissured). Nothing more homogeneous than a pornographic photograph. It is always a naïve photograph, without intention and without calculation. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex: no secondary, untimely object ever manages to half conceal, delay, or distract ... A proof a contrario: Mapplethorpe shifts his dose-ups of genitalia from the pornographic to the erotic by photographing the fabric of underwear at very close range: the photograph is no longer unary, since I am interested in the texture of the material.
pp.40-41
18 Co-presence of the STUDIUM and the PUNCTUM
B. might examine an ostensibly unitary photograph for a punctum-triggering detail.
In this habitually unary space, occasionally
( but alas all too rarely) a "detail" attracts me.
I feel that its mere presence changes my reading,
that I am looking at a new photograph, marked in my
eyes with a higher value. This "detail" is the punctum.
It is not possible to posit a rule of connection between
the studium and the punctum ( when it happens to be
there). It is a matter of a co-presence, that is all one can
say: the nuns "happened to be there," passing in the background,
when Wessing photographed the Nicaraguan soldiers;
from the viewpoint of reality ( which is perhaps that
of the Operator), a whole causality explains the presence
of the "detail": the Church implanted in these Latin American
countries, the nuns allowed to circulate as
nurses, etc.; but from my Spectator's viewpoint, the detail
is offered by chance and for nothing; the scene is in no
way "composed" according to a creative logic; the photograph
is doubtless dual, but this duality is the motor of no
"development," as happens in classical discourse. In order
to perceive the punctum, no analysis would be of any
use to me (but perhaps memory would sometimes, as we shall see): it suffices that the image be large enough, that I do not have to study it ( this would be of no help at all), that, given right there on the page, I should receive it right here in my
pp.42-43
19 PUNCTUM: Partial Feature
And so, at last some detail on punctum. But by now we all know that it is an aspect of a photograph which has a particular and unusual resonance for the viewer. It is often a detail, such as the belt in Van de Zee or the bad teeth in Klein (both below).
Very often the punctum is a "detail," i.e., a partial object. Hence, to give examples of punctum is, in a certain fashion, to give myself up.
Here is a family of American blacks, photographed in 1926 by James Van der Zee. The studium is clear: I am sympathetically interested, as a docile cultural subject, in what the photograph has to say, for it speaks (it is a "good" photograph): it utters respectability, family life, conformism, Sunday best, an effort of social advancement in order to assume the White Man's attributes (an effort touching by reason of its naïvete) . The spectacle interests me but does not prick me. What does, strange to say, is the belt worn low by the sister ( or daughter )-the "solacing Mammy"-whose arms are crossed behind her back like a schoolgirl, and above all her strapped pumps ( Mary Janes - why does this dated fashion touch me? I mean: to what date does it refer me?).
This particular punctum arouses great sympathy in me, almost a kind of tenderness. Yet the punctum shows no preference for morality or good taste: the punctum can be ill-bred.
…
Kertesz, in 1926, took young Tzara's portrait (with a monocle); but what I notice, by that additional vision which is in a sense the gift, the grace of the punctum, is Tzara's hand resting on the door frame: a large hand whose nails are anything but clean.
However lightning-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic. There is a photograph by Kertesz (1921) which shows a blind gypsy violinist being led by a boy; now what I see, by means of this "thinking eye" which makes me add something to the photograph, is the dirt road; its texture gives me the certainty of being in Central Europe; I perceive the referent (here, the photograph really transcends itself: is this not the sole proof of its art? To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself? I recognise, with my whole body, the straggling villages I passed through on my long-ago travels in Hungary and Rumania.
There is another (less Proustian) expansion of the punctum: when, paradoxically, while remaining a "detail," it fills the whole picture. Duane Michals has photographed Andy Warhol: a provocative portrait, since Warhol hides his face behind both hands. I have no desire to comment intellectually on this game of hide-and-seek ( which belongs to the studium); since for me, Warhol hides nothing; he offers his hands to read, quite openly; and the punctum is not the gesture but the slightly repellent substance of those spatulate nails, at once soft and hard-edged.
pp.43, 45
B.'s punctum will not be activated if he thinks that a detail is something the photographer is trying to draw his attention to.
Certain details may "prick" me. If they do not, it is doubtless because the photographer has put them there intentionally. In William Klein's "Shmohiera, Fighter Painter" ( 1961), the character's monstrous head has nothing to say to me because I can see so clearly that it is an artifice of the camera angle. Some soldiers with nuns behind them served as an example to explain what the punctum was for me ( here, quite elementary) ; but when Bruce Gilden photographs a nun and some drag queens together (New Orleans, 1973), the deliberate ( not to say, rhetorical) contrast produces no effect on me, except perhaps one of irritation.
p.
Sometimes a "docile photograph [with a] simple studium" can manifest a punctum event through a detail that resonates with an individual viewer.
A strange thing: the virtuous gesture which seizes upon "docile" photographs ( those invested by a simple studium) is an idle gesture ( to leaf through, to glance quickly and desultorily, to linger, then to hurry on); on the contrary, the reading of the punctum ( of the pricked photograph, so to speak) is at once brief and active. A trick of vocabulary: we say "to develop a photograph"; but what the chemical reaction develops is undevelopable, an essence (of a wound), what cannot be transformed but only repeated under the instances of insistence ( of the insistence gaze).
p.49
Satori is "is a Japanese Buddhist term for awakening, 'comprehension; understanding'" (Wikipedia, 2021).
Sometimes the punctum detail does not strike the viewer until later.
The studium is ultimately always coded, the punctum is not (I trust I am not using these words abusively). Nadar, in his time (1882), photographed Savorgnan de Brazza between two young blacks dressed as French sailors; one of the two boys, oddly, has rested his hand on Brazza's thigh; this incongruous gesture is bound to arrest my gaze, to constitute a punctum. And yet it is not one, for I immediately code the posture, whether I want to or not, as "aberrant" (for me, the punctum is the other boy's crossed arms). What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
…
Nothing surprising, then, if sometimes, despite its clarity, the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum. Reading Van der Zee's photograph, I thought I had discerned what moved me: the strapped pumps of the black woman in her Sunday best; but this photograph has worked within me, and later on I realized that the real punctum was the necklace she was wearing; for ( no doubt) it was this same necklace ( a slender ribbon of braided gold) which I had seen worn by someone in my own family, and which, once she died, remained shut up in a family box of old jewellery ( this sister of my father never married, lived with her mother as an old maid, and I had always been saddened whenever I thought of her dreary life). I had just realized that however immediate and incisive it was, the punctum could accommodate a certain latency ( but never any scrutiny).
… Ultimately - or at the limit - in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. "The necessary condition for an image is sight," Janouch told Kafka;· and Kafka smiled and replied: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes." The photograph must be silent ( there are blustering photographs, and I don't like them): this is not a question of discretion, but of music. Absolute subjectivity is achieved only in a state, an effort, of silence ( shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence). The photograph touches me if I withdraw it from its usual blah-blah: "Technique," "Reality," "Reportage," "Art," etc.: to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.
pp. 51, 53, 55
The photographer has included something in the frame, perhaps inadvertantly and the punctum "is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there". The punctum, then is a reaction that the viewer brings to a photograph in response to a detail therein. B. says that the detail might be minor and unintended, but I take the view that these might not be the case, however the particular viewer's reaction would likely be unexpected by the photographer.
Last thing about the punctum: whether or not
it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.
…
Now, confronting millions of photographs, including those which have a good studium, I sense no blind field: everything which happens within the frame dies absolutely once this frame is passed beyond. When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies. Yet once there is a punctum, a blind field is created ( i.e. divined) : on account of her necklace, the black woman in her Sunday best has had, for me, a whole life external to her portrait; Robert Wilson, endowed with an unlocatable punctum, is someone I want to meet.
…
Here is Queen Victoria photographed in 1863 by George W. Wilson; she is on horseback, her skirt suitably draping the entire animal ( this is the historical interest, the studium) ; but beside her, attracting my eyes, a kilted groom holds the horse's bridle: this is the punctum; for even if I do not know just what the social status of this Scotsman may be (servant? equerry?), I can see his function clearly: to supervise the horse's behavior: what if the horse suddenly began to rear? What would happen to the queen's skirt, i.e. to her majesty? The punctum fantastically "brings out" the Victorian nature (what else can one call it?) of the photograph, it endows this photograph with a blind field.
The presence ( the dynamics) of this blind field is, I believe, what distinguishes the erotic photograph from the pornographic photograph. Pornography ordinarily represents the sexual organs, making them into a motionless object (a fetish), flattered like an idol that does not leave its niche; for me, there is no punctum in the pornographic image; at most it amuses me ( and even then, boredom follows quickly). The erotic photograph, on the contrary ( and this is its very condition) , does not make the sexual organs into a central object; it may very well not show them at all; it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me. The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond - as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see: not only toward "the rest" of the nakedness, not only toward the fantasy of a praxis, but toward the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together.
pp. 55, 57, 59
B. concludes Part One by saying that he has come to understand his reaction to photographs, but not yet to understand the nature (or eidos) of photography.
"A palinode or palinody is an ode in which the writer retracts a view or sentiment expressed in an earlier poem" (Wikipedia, 2020).
quote
cite
PART TWO
25 "One evening . . ."
B. is writing not long after his mother died and he is sorting through her papers. Regarding photographs of her early life - while they summon aspects of her, they do not satisfy him.
26 History as Separation
His mother is depicted as her never knew her so he recognises characteristics but no whole. There is reassurance in the appearance of some objects he associates with his mother and which are still with him appearing in photographs with his mother. He relates (my word) more easily to photographs in which they both appear.
27 To Recognize
He asks the "essential question … [do] I recognise her?" and answers, "I never recognized her except in fragments". This notion of partial recognition is repeated over Ch. 25-27.
28 The Winter Garden Photograph
B. was in his late mother's flat, sorting through her photographs, seeming in reverse order, "gradually moving back in time with her" and he found the famed Winter Garden Photograph, showing his mother and her brother, ages 5 and 7 and "at last rediscovered my mother". He sees in that image the character he knew as his mother and compares its truth, to Nadar's photograph of his own mother, below. He mentions some other realisations in other media and states, "[f]or once, photography gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance".
Despite its title, this chapter is mostly about remembering his mother's final days, but under the influence of the photograph of her as a child, he can again think about her life as a whole.
There's a read-across to Wordsworth's "the child is father of the man" (My Heart Leaps Up, 1802) here, "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".
30 Ariadne
B. elects to re-examine Photography in the light of his experience with this photograph, this time, but now, "not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death." [The classical Greek Ariadne reference is to the slaying of the Minataur, "I knew that at the center of [Photography's] Labyrinth I would find nothing but this sole picture".
31 The Family, the Mother
B. dislikes societal concepts surrounding the family and the religious connatations of the Mother. These stances will inform his analysis of Photography.
Part Two thus far has been laying the groundwork for his analysis which he now picks up again.
32 "THAT-HAS-BEEN"
B. states that in Part One he took two approaches looking at general reaction (the voice of banality) and his personal reaction (the voice of singularity) to Photographs.
Photography differs from other art forms in that with Photography the referent is real - it is the object in front of the lens. In other art forms it is more or less the creation of the artist. B. refers to this as "the noeme of Photography", its "very essence", "that-has-been" - a phrase which is used seven times in the text (Chs. 32 (twice), 34, 38, 39, 41 and 46). He asserts the truth of Photography, perhaps too strongly, although the direct link between the object and the image, is real, however selective the photographer and whatever processing has been applied.
33 The Pose
I might put this differently: what founds the
nature of Photography is the pose. The physical
duration of this pose is of little consequence;
even in the interval of a millionth of a second
(Edgerton's drop of milk) there has still been a pose, for
the pose is not, here, the attitude of the target or even a
technique of the Operator, but the term of an "intention"
of reading: looking at a photograph, I inevitably include
in my scrutiny the thought of that instant, however brief,
in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front
of the eye. I project the present photograph's immobility
upon the past shot, and it is this arrest which constitutes
the pose. This explains why the Photograph's noeme deteriorates
when this Photograph is animated and becomes
cinema: in the Photograph, something ha,s posed in front
of the tiny hole and has remained there forever ( that is
my feeling); but in cinema, something has passed in front
of this same tiny hole: the pose is swept away and denied
by the continuous series of images: it is a different
phenomenology, and therefore a different art which begins
here, though derived from the first one.
p.78
I think that's a great paragraph, althought I don't interpret pose in the same way as B., it is a vital element of photography. Just seeing the heading of this chapter last night, without reading the text, I wrote,
Photography comprises poses and gazes.
At first sight that seems to cover all the transactions, object, photographer, channel, viewer.
blog 28Jun21
I started to explain my ideas here, but this is not the place. I'll set up a page.
34 The Luminous Rays, Color
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who
am here, the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.
pp.80-81
That is a tad mystical but I have always believed something rather like it. I have heard it said throughout my life that primitive tribes (perhaps in Borneo, perhaps Amazonian) fear(ed) that taking their photograph takes part of their soul (or whatever spiritual Duracell they believe in): this sort of notion from Barthes is not unrelated to that and I agree with it - there is a link generated by the photograph that cannot be replicated in any other art form because of the direct "chain of evidence" from object via the process of photography to the viewer (obviously film resides in the same ballpark, but Barthes dismisses film later on).
This all happens, of course, in the head (and other relevant reactive and sensory organs) of the viewer. The photograph, as Avedon has told us, "don't go below the surface" (Carroll, 2018, p.80). The viewer provides the depth so long as the photograph's object activates their punctum.
This brings to mind Chloe Dewe Matthews' project Shot at Dawn, encountered in C&N. The images were of the sites of WW1 executions for "cowardice" — at first glance unprepossessing locations, but when understood, the bullet-holes still in the brickwork 100 years later become haunting. This series can trigger the punctum even without a visible human presence, in fact the inevitable absence of a damaged person coldly killed so long ago deepens the emotion.
B. does not like colour photographs, regarding colour as "a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph". Had he lived longer, he would probably have acclimatised.
The chapter ends, "the Winter Garden Photograph, however pale, is for me the treasury of rays which emanated from my
mother as a child, from her hair, her skin, her dress, her gaze, on that day" and that, as we have all come to realise, is what is driving all this. Barthes is mourning his mother and is taking comfort in an early photograph that recreates her essence and the experience is so important to him that he is turning it into a book.
35 Amazement
The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph). The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished ( by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed. Now, this is a strictly scandalous effect.p.82
If Barthes means by that paragraph that the Winter Garden Photograph provides additional information about his mother's life because he (obviously) did not know her when she was a child, then all well and good, but to my mind, a large proportion of photography and the uses to which viewers put photography is precisely about "call[ing] up the past" and the distinction he makes is spurious.
The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears noton the object but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.
pp. 88-89
B. takes three pages to reach this important conclusion, starting from "The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been."
B. compares his reaction to the Winter Garden Photograph to religious icons venerated and kissed by worshipers in Greek Orthodoxy.
Again he mentions other art forms, particularly cinema where movement suggests the future, not the past.
38 Flat Death
B. is rather obsessed with death and it is, in his view, the principal concern of Photography. His morosity is understandable as it is a photograph that has brought home to him the death and the life of his recently deceased mother †. It has also triggered thoughts of his own mortality, "The only "thought" I can have is that at the end of this first death, my own death is inscribed; between the two, nothing more than waiting" (p. 93). And, of course, B. died not long after finishing Lucida, whereupon, "once I am gone,
no one will any longer be able to testify to [his parents' relationship]: nothing will remain but an indifferent Nature".
† Dyer (2021) states,
Having agreed to write a short piece for Les Cahiers, Barthes's reflections on photography (photography against film') grew into a book written - according to his biographer Louis-Jean Calvet - 'at one go, or almost, during the period between 15 April and 3 June 1979'. His mother had died in October 1977 and the book became bound up with his grief over her death.
Dyer, 2021 p.294
Barthes died on 26th March 1980. "He [had] suffered severe chest injuries Feb. 25 when he was struck by a car on a Paris street, and had been on a respirator in the hospital's intensive care unit since them" (Smith, 1980).
39 Time as PUNCTUM
At the time (at the beginning of this book: already far away) when I was inquiring into my attachment to certain photographs, I thought I could distinguish a field of cultural interest ( the studium) from that unexpected flash which sometimes crosses this field and which I called the punctum. I now know that there exists another punctum ( another "stigmatum") than the "detail." This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme ("that-has-been"), its pure representation. In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W. H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake.
pp. 94, 96
So we have the universe of photographs and a spectrum of each viewer's variable interest, ranging from indifference to polite interest, studium and occasionally and intense, visceral interest that might not relate to the photographer's intention, punctum.
Barthes thinks he has found a second sort of punctum, an over-arching punctum that responds to Time and Death. I think there's just a single punctum, but in Barthes' case, at that time, it was initially triggered by the Winter Garden Photograph and memories and imaginings of his mother that developed into contemplation of his own mortality that he projected onto others, not believing that they would not share his growing obsession with death.
More on death. There are two types of photograph, Barthes' own, which have a profound effect upon him, and all the others to which he is more-or-less indefferent. In most fields of artistic endeavour the amateur is poorly regarded but in photography the amateur comes closer to its essense, the noeme (see Ch.32).
At first sight, a surprising nod towards the vernacular for the elitist aesthete Barthes, but this is because the snap of his mum is more important to him than any number of journalistic or documentary images. B. is running the risk of becoming tiresome with his sentimentality, but as with his negative reaction to colour photographs (see Ch.34), had he lived longer, this phase would likely have faded as his grief subsided.
41 To Scrutinize
If a photograph interested Barthes, he would spend time with it and examine it in detail. He did this with the Winter Garden Photograph, of course (let's call it the WGF from now on) , and developed a relationship with the image but ultimately realised it could not teach him anything about his mother that he did not already know.
42 Resemblance
B. considers various classic portraits of celebrities and whether they are a "likeness", but what he is comparing the image to is his conception of their character or their work, "Offenbach, because I know that his music has something (reputedly) witty about it" (p.102). He stated in Ch.7, "I do not believe in "lifelike" photographs".
Portraits of Barthes himself look like each other but not as he sees himself; in the case of the WGF,
Likeness leaves me unsatisfied and somehow skeptical ( certainly this is the sad disappointment I experience looking at the ordinary photographs of my mother whereas the only one which has given me the splendor of her truth is precisely a lost, remote photograph, one which does not look "like" her, the photograph of a child I never knew)
p.103
B. suggests that a portrait can sometimes reveal something that is not visible when seeing someone in the flesh rambles at length about family resemblances, e.g. "In a certain photograph, I have my father's sister's 'look'".
A photograph is flat and representational, evidential, unlike other media which are impressionistic (see Ch.32). "I have the leisure to observe
the photograph with intensity; but also, however long I extend this observation, it teaches me nothing" (pp.106-7), but in the previous chapter he stated, "the Photograph sometimes makes appear
what we never see in a real face" (p. 103).
45 The "Air"
B. goes some way towards clearing up the confusion — a photograph of an inanimate object is drily observational but a photograph of a person, especially "a beloved person?" (p. 107) is another matter. It can give you a sense (my word) of the person and B. states that,
I was leafing through the photographs of my mother according to an initiatic path which led me to that cry, the end of all language: "There she is!": first of all a few unworthy pictures which gave me only her crudest identity, her legal status; then certain more numerous photographs in which I could read her "individual expression" ( analogous photographs, "likenesses"); finally the Winter Garden Photograph, in which I do much more than recognize her (clumsy word): in which I discover her: a sudden awakening, outside of "likeness," a satori in which words fail the rare, perhaps unique evidence of the "So, yes, so much and no more
p.110
The Avedon photograph of Philip Randolph does allow B. to draw various conclusion about him - he interprets his appearance.
One point that B. seems to have missed is that a photograph of an inanimate object that the viewer cannot see and does not have access to, while it may be purely representational, can be revelatory to that particular viewer.
46 The Look
B. is unmoved by photo-journalism, however horific the story being reported on, unless, it seems, there is a live face looking directly at him (a gaze unknown in cinema, "in film, no one
ever looks at me: it is forbidden-by the Fiction". p.111).
The noeme of Photography is simple, banal;
no depth: "that has been." I know our critics:
What! a whole book ( even a short one) to
discover something I know at first glance?
p.115
He states that a photograph evidences the existance and state of its object, then goes on to give some examples of images that have had a special meaning for him — for once, not his mother.
I then realized that there was a sort of link ( or knot) between Photography, madness, and something whose name I did not know. I began by calling it: the pangs of love. Was I not, in fact, in love with the Fellini automaton? Is one not in love with certain photographs? (Looking at some photographs of the Proustian world, I fall in love with Julia Bartet, with the Due de Guiche ... ) Yet it was not quite that. It was a broader current than a lover's sentiment. In the love stirred by Photography (by certain photographs) , another music is heard, its name oddly old-fashioned: Pity. I collected in a last thought the images which had "pricked" me (since this is the action of the punctum) , like that of the black woman with the gold necklace and the strapped pumps.
p.116
He is making two points here: 1. photographs have a unique ability to capture and preserve a past reality; 2. they also have the ability to trigger in a particular viewer a particular and intense reaction to an element or feature. He sees that reaction as a form of madness.
48 The Photograph Tamed
Society is concerned to tame the Photograph,
to temper the madness which keeps threatening
to explode in the face of whoever looks at it. To do this, it possesses two means.
p.117
The first is to turn photography into an art and thus suppress its potential to induce punctum madness, to dilute and pollute its essence.
The second is to commercialise it, "to generalize,
to gregarize, banalize it until it is no longer confronted
by any image in relation to which it can mark
itself, assert its special character, its scandal, its madness" (p.118).
I imagine Barthes would think that that the present state of affairs with trillions of selfies and other social media trivia competing for a moment's attention has pretty much achieved that.
Conclusion
iAs I stated in Chapter 39 "we have the universe of photographs and a spectrum of each viewer's variable interest in each photograph ranging from indifference to polite interest (often a sympathetic understanding of the photographer's intention) B. calls studium and occasionally an intense, visceral interest that probably does not relate to the photographer's intention, punctum.
ii Barthes thinks he has found a second sort of punctum, an over-arching punctum that responds to Time and Death. I think there's just a single punctum, but in Barthes' case, at that time, it was initially triggered by the Winter Garden Photograph and memories and imaginings of his mother that developed into contemplation of his own mortality that he projected onto others, not believing that they would not share his growing obsession with death."
iii Barthes views the human experience as a series of overlapping generational lifetimes that can be both commemorated and extended by photographs. They freeze a moment (sometimes an important moment) but can also be extrapolated (or, perhaps, extruded) to extend the perception of the boundaries of lifetimes, and of that moment, both forward and backward. The process is also, to Barthes, a continual reminder of inevitable death
iv Photography has a unique ability to capture and preserve a past reality and also to trigger in a particular viewer a particular and intense reaction to an element or feature. B. regarded that reaction as a form of madness.
This precious and unique abilty to represent a banal reality which neverthess can occasionally induce a powerful individual reaction is threatened by a taming the medium through artictic pretence or over-exposure.
References
Barthes, R. (1980) Camera Lucida. London: Random House.
