Punctum: Lake District Photography Sunday March 19, 2006
I think Roland Barthes’ famous book Camera Lucida is a weak theoretical text, in relation to photography and photographic culture. I’ve read it twice although both times there were sections I could only skim, not because they were clever but difficult, but because they were irritating nonsense. There’s one memorable part, for example, where he expounds on being ‘wounded’, and on being ‘pricked’, as a response to a photograph with a surprisingly poignant or disturbing detail. You wonder, as the saying goes, ‘what was this guy on’? – and he was ‘on’ an intellectual high derived from highly indulgent, only semi-intellectual thinking.
There are however, some great ideas contained within it. At certain points for example, he appears to suggest a duality of criticism, whereby a photograph has two possible levels: the studium and the punctum. The first is the obvious, cultural and possibly stereotypical meaning, and the second is an implicit level that dominates the first, because it’s considerably more powerful. It’s a phenomenological rather than an obvious-cultural factor, and typically a minor detail that is easily overlooked and was not intended by the photographer. For example, there’s apparently a famous photograph of Tony Blair, where there’s a minor flaw in the otherwise impeccable presentation. I forget exactly what it is, but I think it concerns one of his hands – ink stain on one of his fingers, something like that. In conversation, someone once told me about this and how he disagreed with the way the photograph was being analysed as especially meaningful. We didn’t go into details, but I suspect it was being used as an example of punctum: in this case, arguably, supposedly, theoretically-maybe, indicating the wider situation of the decline of Mr Blair’s power and the flaws within New Labour. I don’t like politics, and think it’s a kind of religion in relation to the Marx advice regarding opiate anaesthesia. I find it absurd, that politics is used to order and understand a considerably nuanced, multi-layered and complex situation: individuals, society, and how it all works. Politics lacks psychology, and reduces everything to stereotyped power relations resting on material conditions. It’s a kind of grand narrative, onto which people project hopes, fears and ideals more properly addressed in other ways. In her book Regarding The Pain Of Others, Susan Sontag remarks that if you understand history, you cannot take politics seriously.
Anyway I digress, just to emphasise that my point here is not political. After the Blair photo example, I thought it might be an interesting exercise to survey my own photos for examples of ‘punctum’. Is there a hidden and unintended meaning in any of my images? Is there a secondary layer, cutting through the obvious representation that was my intended project? Reader, I confess: I can’t find any punctum in my photos. There may be examples, but I can’t see any. Sadly, my work appears to lack the ability to ‘prick’ or ‘wound’.
As a photo aesthetic observation, it’s an interesting one: there can be two levels of representation, one of them considerably more memorable than the other. Barthes says, it’s punctum photos that he remembers; the obvious studium photos, he forgets – they are lost in the vast sea of photo-saturated society. It’s therefore the shock value he appreciates, the unexpected information underneath or hidden within a more obvious image. I think of my Lake District photography in particular, as exemplifying a quintessential obvious: there’s no hidden meaning, no subtle layer of critical observation, and if any of those photos have a flaw it subtracts from the picture, not adds to it. Does that make them less interesting, worthwhile or valid? No, of course not. Does that make them forgettable? Of course not, again. By which I mean, if you love mountains, love the Lake District, love photography, and have a pleasurable appreciation of the shapes and colours of nature, then my Lake District photography is hopefully memorable rather than boring. If you are not interested in those subjects, that will not apply. But that’s a general situation, corresponding to people’s hobbies, interests, and pleasures; which is variable, personal, and non-hierarchical in the sense that one person’s pleasure is valid, regardless of what over-arching theories might say about it.
Please accept this invitation to enter your photos in my competition!
— Rod · Aug 22, 11:01 AM · §