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Photographs have become such a natural part of our worldview that we rarely give them a second thought when we see them.
Perhaps we register the content of an advertisement, or our curiosity might be piqued by an image in the newspaper, but most photographs are forgotten the moment we look away. Yet, many people are familiar with the strange experience of coming across a single photograph amidst the flood of images—one that makes us pause.
We take a closer look, noticing its details, and feel something stir inside us. It touches certain memories or emotions, but we cannot pinpoint exactly what it is about the image that affects us so profoundly.
The French semiotician Roland Barthes (1915–1980) often observed this phenomenon in himself. For much of his life, he pondered the nature of photography and why certain images move us so deeply. Contrary to traditional scientific methods, Barthes chose to make himself the subject of his investigation.
He believed that by examining his own reactions to various photographs, he could arrive at a deeper understanding of the medium. The result was an astonishing and personal exploration, culminating in his book Camera Lucida, where Barthes succeeded in uncovering what he called the essence of photography.
Studium and Punctum
Barthes began by identifying two categories of interest in photographs: studium and punctum. Studium encompasses all the aspects of an image that might evoke a surface-level interest but do not deeply affect the viewer. For instance, in a photo from a May Day parade in the old Soviet Union, one might find it intriguing to observe how Soviet citizens dressed.
This satisfies curiosity but lacks deeper resonance. Barthes argued that the studium experience is common in reportage photography. Images from war-torn regions, for example, may shock us with their content, but the interest they provoke remains relatively superficial. Despite their intensity, these images do not leave a lasting emotional impact. “These are images that scream,” Barthes wrote, “but they do not wound.”
In contrast, photographs that evoke what Barthes called the punctum experience have a different effect. Punctum can arise from a small detail within a photograph. The word itself means “prick” or “sting,” and these details do just that: they pierce through to the viewer’s inner self and cause an emotional wound. To understand why something stings, one must look inward.
Barthes recalled a punctum experience he had with a 1926 photograph of an African American family. The image conveyed family bonds, aspirations for social mobility, and other elements that fall under studium. Yet, what created the punctum was a chain worn around the neck of one of the women.
Barthes didn’t initially understand why this detail affected him so strongly. Much later, he realized that the necklace reminded him of a similar one he had stored in a box in the attic—a necklace that belonged to an elderly aunt who had lived a lonely, austere life. This memory was tied to feelings of deep sympathy for her. The chain in the photograph thus worked on him gradually, stirring a painful recollection. For Barthes, punctum resided both in the photographic detail (the necklace) and in his own personal memory.
The power of a photograph lies not in its ability to shock or sting but in its capacity to evoke reflection—to touch a tender point within the viewer.
The Winter Garden Photograph
Even after this discovery, Barthes felt dissatisfied. He sensed that he had not yet fully grasped the true nature of photography. He believed there was another kind of punctum experience, though he didn’t know how to articulate it. That moment of clarity came one November evening, weeks after the death of his mother.
Barthes had lived closely with his mother, and their bond was strong. Overcome by grief, he tried to reconnect with her through the family photo albums. Yet, as he leafed through the pictures, he was profoundly disappointed. With echoes of Proust, he lamented: “These photographs of a person make you remember them less than if you simply thought of them.”
Night after night, Barthes sat under the lamp, scrutinizing the images. Occasionally, he found photographs that captured recognizable traits—a gesture, an expression—but they were only fragments of the person he longed to see again.
Gradually, as he worked his way through the stack of photos, he moved back in time, to when his mother was a young woman, and then further still. Suddenly, he found her in an image.
“The photograph was very old, mounted on cardboard with worn corners, in a faded brown tone. It barely showed two small children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a winter garden with a glass roof. My mother was five years old, her brother seven. She stood facing the photographer, as if he had said, ‘Step forward a little so we can see you.’ “
In the five-year-old girl, Barthes saw his mother—not just a likeness, but her essence. The circle was complete.
Through this photograph, Barthes discovered a deeper punctum, one rooted in the passage of time itself. He realized that a photograph is a frozen moment, a piece of “stopped time.”
“That-Has-Been”
Barthes concluded that a photograph is proof that what it depicts once existed before the lens. He called this quality “that-has-been”. The moment captured in the photograph is forever gone, yet it persists in the image as a fragment of “stopped time.”
In the Winter Garden Photograph, Barthes saw the inevitability of his mother’s death. The photo held a young girl on the brink of a future catastrophe—her eventual passing. Barthes reasoned that every photograph contains this same paradox: it freezes a subject in time, yet the subject will inevitably fade away.
This realization, the understanding of loss, is what “stings.” In photographs that evoke a punctum experience, the viewer enters the unreal realm of the image and feels its pain deeply.
As Barthes wrote, “I madly entered the picture, into the image, to embrace with my arms what is dead, what is going to die… mad with pity.”
