Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, describes the two affects of a photograph as either studium or punctum.
In the studium lies the boring, the meaningless, the dull—it is the thousands of images we see everyday, the meaningless scrolling we injest. It is the unconscious repetition of the world as we find it, lulling us into a distracted haze.
In the punctum however, soemthing happens. Something punctures and pierces the everyday—the somnolent fog—and we awake, and become interested, if only for a moment. The punctum enlivens, it is the libido answering a call.
The interesting thing is that the punctum, by its own definition, cannot be universal. Not every photograph answers the calling of everyone. We look but do not see. A photograph by Sebastião Salgado might be overlooked as readily as a photograph of what I had to eat this morning, or of my grandmother at her 90th birthday. There is something ineffable in the punctum which resists definition.
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