punctum

photographs, 2016, sizes vary.

The second element will break (or punctuate) the Stadium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.

A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark, made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me, (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, Reflections of Photography, chapter 10, page 25 / 26, translated by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, USA. © 1980 by Editions du Seuil, Translation © 1981 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Inc. All rights reserved.

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