![]() ![]() a photograph which is all studium and no punctum: ![]() Barthes later refines his description by writing of the unary photograph i.e. What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training.Īt the risk of oversimplification, studium is what lies in the background it is our assumptions, the visual equivalent of our Sitz im Leben. Thousands of photographs consist of this field, and in these photographs I can, of course, take a kind of general interest, one that is even stirred sometimes, but in regard to them my emotion requires the rational intermediary of an ethical and political culture. He writes: “t has the extension of field” which “always refers to a classical body of information….” He goes on: While far from the last word on photography in this post-structuralist postmodern world of ours, and (as Geoff Dyer cautions in his forward) while far from the last word even in Barthes’ own thinking, nevertheless the studium/ punctum delimiters together form a useful point of departure when examining a contemporary photograph and asking: is this worth my attention?īarthes’ description is opaque and I don’t claim to fully grasp it. In his Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes introduces the notions of studium and punctum to help us think about photographs. ![]()
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