references to photography
References to Photography
Leonardo da Vinci, La Gioconda (1503-5)
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)
Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Wedding (1434)
Edouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass (1863)
—. Olympia (1863)
—. The Execution of Emperor Maximillian (1868)
—. The Bar at the Folies Bergère (1882)
—. The Fifer (1866)
—. The Balcony (1868-9)
—. The Greenhouse (1879)
René Magritte, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1927)
—. Perspective II: Manet’s Balcony (1950)
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980):
I did not know a French word which might account for this kind of human interest, but I believe this word exists in Latin: it is studium, which doesn’t mean, at least not immediately, “study,” but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity. It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.
The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. 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; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many 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.)