Barthes’s Punctum

Fried brings in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida to talk about his theory of anti-theatricality, and how Barthes’s concept of punctum is similar. He gives a recap of Barthes’s studium and punctum:

studium: the general basis of the subject’s presumed interest for the average viewer; the photographer’s intent

punctum: that which pricks, wounds, or bruises; a particular viewer’s subjectivity in a wat that makes the photograph in question singularly arresting; very personal and based on personal experience

The punctum is different from each person to the next. In Camera Lucida, Barthes brings in the image Nicaragua, by Koen Wessing, to describe the phenomena of the studium and punctum:

“A photograph made me pause. Nothing very extraordinary: the (photographic) banality of a rebellion in Nicaragua: a ruined street, two helmeted soldiers on patrol; behind them, two nuns. Did this photograph please me? Interest me? Intrigue me? Not even. Simply, it existed (for me). I understood at once that its existence (its ‘adventure’) derived from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong to the same world (no need to proceed to the point of contrast): the soldiers and the nuns. I foresaw a structural rule (conforming to my own observation), and I immediately tried to verify it by inspecting other photographs by the same reporter: many of them attracted me because they included this kind of duality which I had just become aware of.”

This duality is the studium and punctum.

Barthes describes the studium as “… What I feel about these photographs derives from an average effect, almost from a certain training… 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… that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.

Barthes describes the punctum as “The second element will break (or puncture) the studium… it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me…”

The studium of Nicaragua is that it is a war time, photojournalism photograph. The punctum is the nuns walking in the background. Barthes argues that the nurses just happened to be walking by when Wessing snapped the photograph, that the scene was not constructed. Thus the studium and punctum exist in a single photograph.

According to Fried’s anaylsis of Barthes’s text, the punctum has many ways of occurring. He brings up Barthes’s example of The Violinist’s Tune, Abony, Hungary, taken by Andre Kertesz in 1921. The punctum in this image, for Barthes, is recognition, from his own travels to Eastern Europe, as the town in the photograph is similar to the ones he had seen. Victor Burgin writes: “It is the private nature of the experience which defines the punctum.”

To further illustrate Barthes’s and Fried’s point, consider this image of the Love Lock Bridge in Paris, France:

Some people are familiar with this place, others might not know anything about it. But some people may look at this bridge, and recognize that light post. They might even recognize their own lock that they have attached to the bridge. That arresting feeling of recognition is a punctum.

Finally, Fried brings up his theory about anti-theatricality.

Fried hones in on a block of text from Camera Lucida, in order to frame his argument about anti-theatricality.

“Some soldiers with nuns behind them served as an example to explain what the punctum was to me… but when Bruce Gilden photographs a nun and some drag queens (New Orleans, 1973), the deliberate contrast produces no effect on me, except perhaps one of irritation. Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful… it does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object.”

Since I could not find the Gilden photograph, I will use photographs by Gray Malin to serve as an example of what Barthes is talking about:

With these images by Gray Malin, from his Antarctica series, there is nothing anti-theatrical about the carefully constructed scenes, the obvious message, and is purely intentional– all of the things that Barthes finds to be irritating.

Fried bases his argument off of this idea from Barthes. Fried goes on to explain:

“That is it; that is all Barthes has to say with respect to the punctum, about the point of view, the activity, of the photographer as distinct from the response of the viewer… it is enough to situate Camera Lucida in relation to the central current or tradition of anti-theatrical critical thought and pictorial practice that I have tried to show… Understood in this context, Barthes’s observation… that the detail that strikes him as a punctum could not do so had it been intended as such by the photographer is an anti-theatrical claim in that it implies a fundamental distinction, which goes back to Diderot, between ‘seeing’ and ‘being shown’.”

The difference is between “seeing” and “being shown”. The punctum does not exist for the photographer, but the viewer. If the photographer put something in the frame on purpose, it is therefore not the punctum; compare this to Diderot’s claim that a viewer of a painting should be treated as if he weren’t there, that “nothing in a painted or staged tableau be felt by the beholder to be there for him.” This is how Fried starts to tie Barthes’s punctum into his own concept of theatricality and anti-theatricality. Theatricality is “being shown” and anti-theatricality is “seeing”.

Another anti-theatrical ideal shared by Barthes and Fried is that of photographs taken when a subject is unaware. Barthes talks about the performance before the camera, how when a subject knows they are being photographed their demeanor changes—this is theatrical. Fried brings up Walker Evans’s subway photographs, which he took using a secret camera peering out through the buttonhole in his jacket, the shutter release cable hidden through his coat sleeve. Sontag says “Their expressions are private ones, not those they would offer to the camera.” They are oblivious to be beheld by not only a viewer, but the camera itself. But, Barthes is a little more difficult, more picky in this regard: “In short, in order for a photograph to be truly anti-theatrical for Barthes it must somehow carry within it an ontological guarantee that it was not intended to be so by the photographer—a requirement that goes well beyond anything to be found in Diderot or for that matter any eighteenth of nineteenth century critic or theorist.” The punctum is that guarantee. So, Evans’s photographs on the subway are theatrical because the photographer intended that the subjects be absorbed, unaware of the camera. Because it was intended that way, it is a performance on behalf of the photographer. We are being shown two people not paying attention, we’re not discovering it ourselves.

When talking about Part Two of Camera Lucida, Friend brings up Proustian Involuntary Memory. This concept is from Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past, when a character eats a madeleine cookie dipped in his tea, which results in a flashback. These involuntary memories happen to all of us, but Fried brought this up because of Barthes’s relationship with the Winter Garden photograph of his mother as a child:

“… standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days… gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance, just as Proust experienced it one day when, leaning over to take off his boots, there suddenly came to him his grandmother’s true face, ‘whose living reality I was experiencing for the first time, in an involuntary and complete memory.’”

“… Only scenes and events that escape the subject’s conscious attention in the present are eligible to be recovered in the future, and thus, according to Proust, to be truly experienced for the first time.”

With all of this in mind, Fried attempts to dissect Barthes’s associations of the photograph’s relationship to the past, specifically how almost every photograph has a punctum inspired by death—death of the people in the photograph, death of the viewer themselves. Barthes’s mother had passed away before Barthes wrote Camera Lucida, so this is a very important point for him. He brings up Alexander Gardner’s portrait of Lewis Payne:

“The photograph is handsome, as is the boy; that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die.”

This sort of punctum occurs in personal photographs all of the time. We all have a photograph of a deceased loved one, and when we look at it, we think many things, all of which can be considered the punctum. Take this personal photograph from my senior year of high school:

Most people look at it and might be wondering what is going on. They may attempt to understand it using visual cues. Whenever I look at it, I see my friend Audrey, the second person on the left of the photograph, and I think about how she died of a drug overdose three years later. She doesn’t know it in this image, but she is going to die.

Along the same lines as death, time is another punctum. “Time, in Barthes’s sense of the term, functions as a punctum for him precisely because the sense of something being past, being historical, cannot be perceived by the photographer or indeed by anyone else in the present. It is a guarantor of anti-theatricality that comes to a photograph, that becomes visible in it, only after the fact, après-coup, in order to deliver the hurt, the prick, the wound, to future viewers that Barthes fears and cherishes.”

I bring up another personal photograph to explain:

This image was taken about 8 years ago. When I look at this image, there is a punctum for me, a realization that it has been 8 years since this moment, that the people in this image have changed considerably, that things will never be again as they once were in this image. Some of these young girls are now mothers; another girl lost her mother, the boy in the image lost his brother to a murder last week. All of these girls graduated high school, some went to college, some joined the military. This image reminds me of the past, and how time moves forward.

I use a personal image to explain, because if I use an image that isn’t personal, there isn’t a prick. For example, this image by Steichen, taken in 1928:

All I gather from this image is the studium: the recognition that the clothing is from the distant past. There is no prick; however I do realize that the women in this photograph have a very good chance of being dead today. This is arguably a punctum, and though it pricks me, it doesn’t prick me with the same intensity as the photo of my deceased friend. The punctum is personal.

The punctum of time is anti-theatrical because it’s not intentional on the behalf of the photographer. We in the present never know what will come in the future, to change things, to wound us. Now it seems that all photographs have this inevitability, but Fried argues that some photos wound more than others. Fried also claims that this is a condition of contemporary photographs, that the punctum develops with the passage of time.

Fried does bring up two conditions of contemporary photography, which he claims undermines Barthes’s theory about the punctum. The first is digitization, the second is how photographs are now made for the “wall”. Fried claims that the artifice of digitization means that any punctum can be a construction, and therefore deem it “theatrical” or no longer a punctum. With his second point, the construction of art photography and it’s nature of “to be seen-ness” chafes against this point by Barthes:

“Photographs… are looked at when one is alone. I am uncomfortable during the private projection of a film, but I need to be alone with the photographs I am looking at.”

I disagree with both of Fried’s points on this matter. Just because an image is digitally constructed does not necessarily mean that the punctum is a constructed element. Take, for example, the work of Maggie Taylor, a contemporary photographer who constructs her images digitally:

Abdullah’s Prayer, Maggie Taylor, 2003

Both Fried and Barthes argue that the punctum has the tendency to be deeply personal– so how can Fried claim that digitization changes things, when the punctum of even a digital image can be found? For example, Maggie Taylor’s image with the dog (Abdullah’s Prayer) in the left side of the background: what if someone looking at the image had owned that breed of dog as a child? That could be a punctum.

The second point, about photographs needed to be viewed alone and a museum or gallery setting undermines that, I completely disagree. Yes, museums are a public space, and even though people may be around, that doesn’t mean the viewing experience of a photograph is any less private. A photograph, especially large photographs like the ones by Jeff Wall, can still be absorptive. Barthes could still have his quiet moment with a photograph in a contemporary space, especially since we expect museums and gallery to be quiet, contemplative spaces.

And this is a common theme with Fried’s argument about Barthes’s punctum: since the punctum is such a personal thing, Fried can and does take the concept of it and explains how it fits into his anti-theatrical theory. It’s not difficult to do, and he does it well.

I learned a lot from this chapter, like how the punctum can be many different things, and how it is deeply personal. I missed that point the first two times I read Barthes’s final work.