Questions on Barthes

While the reflections on the photograph centered around the power of death, Barthes’ use of beginnings was interesting and worked well when laying out his outline for determining the characteristics of photo that is capable of invocation. I found the one section about the death of his mother to be the most inapproachable. What I found most captivating in relation to last week’s readings was his the way he distinguished between photography and art [comparing it to both painting and theatre]. I liked the imagery he gave of a photograph as a single snapshot of death in a timeline of history; However, I was unsure what he meant by infra knowledge in the sentence “Photography can tell me much better than a painting; it allows me to accede to an infra knowledge.” (30).

When comparing photography to the written word, I found his condemnation of the written word’s inextricability from the symbolic one of the most compelling features of his argument towards the power of the punctum in differentiating an image. I thought that from his discussion of punctum’s power of expansion it could be inferred that the prescence of the punctum makes it easier for the photo to deny itself as a medium of art and approach the power that was aligned with reproducibility in last week’s readings. Another question provoked by his outline of the photograph was whether or not the wound of the photograph as an ‘essence’ has anything to do with indexicality. Since he says the mask is what makes the face into a product of society and history, I was wondering how this might be compared to the concept of aura. I found his argument that a photograph needs to subdue meaning in order for it to be consumed politically instead of aesthetically the most cohesive with the other readings’ arguments regarding the politicization of the photographs. When he says pictures that are habitable invoke a double voyage forward to Utopian time or reverse within oneself, I found it reminiscent of the surrealist concept of invoking the childlike perception of something. When describing how the punctum can sometimes be noticed after the fact it seems to be referring to activation of the unconscious memory [how later the semi consciousness releases what activated the mind in the photograph so that it becomes a conscious thought]. I am interested in how this might relate to the theory of distraction and concentration as posed by Benjamin.