The Punctum

            Camera Lucida is, obviously, a distinctly personal approach to criticism; it is frustrating to read if you are looking for a semiotics of photography. Barthes relies heavily on his own subjective experience of photography, and even on photos that he refuses to reprint because they will have no meaning for the reader.

            This emphasis on subjectivity is especially salient in light of Barthes’ opposing concepts of the studium and the punctum. Of course, both are complex ideas, and Barthes’ description of them has so much nuance that it’s difficult to summarize. However, even in its most watered-down sense, I found his definition of the punctum somewhat troubling, if attractive. The notion is so specific to each individual photograph, and relies so heavily on individual perception and experience, that it seems useless.  It is impossible to define it in any general sense, and indeed a strict definition would seem to defeat the purpose of the punctum—Barthes writes “what I can name cannot really prick me” (51).  But, then, how can this concept be taken up by those following Barthes? As Dyer notes in the introduction, since the idea of the punctum was so “seductive,” it became “almost a necessity … As the search of a picture’s punctum took on the quality of a critical dragnet—we know it’s in there somewhere!—so this surprising detail lost its capacity to surprise, offered the same kind of unconcealed or overt satisfaction as the studium to which it had originally be opposed.” Apparently, the punctum is not really meant to—or able to—become a part of critical discourse. But, in that case, I am not sure what to do with it otherwise--perhaps it is helpful to think of it as an emotional idea rather than a theoretical one.