civilized ku # 53 ~ What? # 5
Wednesday, August 22, 2007 at 12:32PM 
Bananas, peqaches, raisins and pickles • click to embiggenIt would appear from the 2 comments on yesterday's entry that urban ku # 97 is a picture that, for some, transcends subject matter.
IMO, transcending subject matter is a very far cry from setting aside subject matter. But that idea might be too much of a parse for some, so let's not go there now.
Instead, how about this re: the real/truth in photography;
For spectators (the viewers of the photographs), Barthes explains that there are two elements involved when viewing a photograph. One element is the studium. The studium is a "kind of education (civility, politeness) that allows discovery of the operator." It is the order of liking, not loving. News photographs are often simple banal, unary photos which exemplify studium because "I glance through them, I don't recall them; no detail ever interrupts my reading: I am interested in them (as I am interested in the world), I do not love them."
The second and far more interesting element for the spectator is punctum ... "that accident which pricks, bruises me." It is the unintentional detail that could not not be taken, and that "fills the whole picture." Barthes says there is no rule that can be applied to the existence of studium and punctum within a photo except that "it is a matter of co-presence." These are the photos which take our breath away for some reason that was completely unintended by the photographer (or by the subject, for that matter). It is at the moment when the punctum strikes that the photograph will "annihilate itself as medium to be no longer a sign but the thing itself." And the object will become subject again ... While most photographs offer only the identity of an object, those that project a punctum potentially offer the truth of the subject. They offer "the impossible science of the unique being." ~ all quotes are by Robert Barthes from Camera Lucida
Comments please.
Reader Comments (1)
I've always like Barthes idea of punctum, but I've always thought Barthes most important writing on photography wasn't in Camera Lucida but in Image, Music, Text.
That being that in photographs "humanity encounters for the first time in its history messages without a code". That photography is not the last (improved) term of the great family of images (drawing, painting - even film) but rather a mutation - one that for the first time provides information without having a language of its own.
(Also of possible interest, but which I've never seen referenced is that Bathes seems to have appropriated the concept punctum (without acknowledgement) from Berenice Abbott. She developed a broadly similar idea in here much earlier writings about Atget (of which Barthes was aware) and used the term Punctilio in writing about Atget's work)