Because I rediscovered it reading the Guardian. It well worth a read and the book as well...Roland Barthes on Photography.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/26/roland-barthes-camera-lucida-rereading
Thanks so much, Sandrine! You may yet take over Ken's job of providing brilliant references!
I'm taken with this,
"What, then, was Barthes looking for when he looked at photographs? In the first half of the book, he elaborates a distinction between two planes of the image. The first, which he calls the studium, is the manifest subject, meaning and context of the photograph: everything that belongs to history, culture, even to art. "The studium is a kind of education," he writes. It's here that we learn, say, about Moscow in a William Klein street photograph from 1959, or about the comportment of a well-dressed African-American family in a 1926 picture by James Van Der Zee. But it's the second category that really skewers Barthes's sensibility. He calls it the punctum: that aspect (often a detail) of a photograph that holds our gaze without condescending to mere meaning or beauty. In the same Van Der Zee photograph, the punctum is one woman's strapped pumps, though it later shifts, as the image "works" on the author, to her gold necklace. This is one of a few curious moments in the book where Barthes blatantly misreads the image at hand; the woman is actually wearing a string of pearls. But his point survives: he has been indelibly touched by the poignant detail."
I'd call
- The Studium: what the picture is of, the objective subject backed up by all the information one knows of it.
- The Punctum:: The points that successively seduce us to linger
Having said that, in Roland Barthes' seemingly depressed state, it get's summed up as a prelude to extinction. Here I feel some truth. One major function of art in our society might be to defeat loss of everything we see when we walk way and then to defy death itself.
Asher
