Examples of 'Punctum'

I would be remiss if I were not to mention that "punctum," apart from being a coined word with a conscientious and earnest definition, is also a signifier. As such, it's actually one of the biggest clichés in photography writing. It's trotted out ad nauseam by generalist writers when they turn their attention to photography, as code for "I'm a serious intellectual and we're not just kidding around here, I'm smart and educated and I know my way around ideas and you should pay attention to what I say" or implications to that effect. Despite that "other life" of the word, I still stand by what I said the other day: "To my mind, punctum is the most important thing about photography overall and the most important thing of all things to understand."

A photojournalist friend, talking about how discouraging it is to wade around online looking at random photographs, called most modern photography "camera-pointing." He knows that's dismissive and denigrating, even though he's not that kind of guy. The term implies that the photographers have demanded virtually nothing from their subjects or themselves. Ansel Adams said, "there’s nothing worse than a clear, sharp image of a fuzzy concept," an idea he might have gotten from Jean-Luc Godard (Adams laughed when he said it, indicating it might have picked it up because it amused him). That very thing is epidemic in our current culture. Punctum is what separates random camera-pointing (which, confusingly, is pointless!) from photographs that work: that register, that draw us in, that land, that have staying power. Any photograph can have punctum, not just intentional art and expressive photographs. Actually, come to think, those often don't have it, though not for lack of trying.

I'm going somewhere with this, so hang in there.

I often rove about through the endless thickets of the internet simply looking at whatever pictures I stumble across. For instance, the other day I wrote the initial post about COVID-19 and mentioned the number of deaths from the Civil War. After looking into the matter I could have written an entire post on the various estimates, who came up with them, and when, and how; but it also led me down various rabbit holes relating to the Civil War. One was that I happened to recall a Civil War book I read in sixth or seventh grade called Across Five Aprils. The Civil War began in April 1861 when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, inflaming passions in the North. It ended in April of 1865 when the aristocratic General Lee surrendered to U.S. Grant at a small place called Appomattox Court House—that was the name of the village—in the home of Wilmer McLean. Hence the five Aprils. Ironically, the first battle of the Civil War, called First Bull Run, took place largely on Wilmer McLean's farm in Manassas, Virginia, and he fled to Appomattox to get away from the war and keep his family safe; and then the war formally ended in his parlor. Here's a photograph of the McLean house where the surrender took place, with the members of the McLean household on the steps.

Does that picture have a punctum? I don't think so. Not as a photograph per se. It's fascination comes from its significance, the association of the subject with the momentous event that took place there. Remove the significance, and it might be a nondescript carte de visite you'd flip past in the old photos bin at an antiques-slash-junk shop, pausing only momentarily.

Anyway, Across Five Aprils was the first book written by an author named Irene Hunt. It's still in print, and might still be read in grade schools for all I know. She was exactly of my grandparents' generation, and wrote only eight books, starting when she was 61 years old, which might explain why pictures of her are scarce. Then I remembered that I also read her second book, a semi-autobiographical novel about a young girl who wanted to be a writer. I was disappointed that her second book wasn't also about the Civil War. It came back to me that that book featured a character called "Uncle Haskell," a charming but dissolute alcoholic uncle who was supposedly writing a "magnum opus" that nobody ever saw. (An instance of that pesky myth of the Great American Novel again.) It was the first time I ever looked up magnum opus. The discovery the main character makes as she grows up is that Uncle Haskell turns out to actually know and care quite a bit about writing, and he becomes a mentor to the book's young protagonist. I admit that even as a young teenager I had an uncomfortable sensation of foreshadowing when it came to Uncle Haskell, a feeling like "that'll be me one day." Up a Road Slowly was too obviously a book for girls for my young self, so I didn't follow Ms. Hunt any further into her career. Perhaps I was also avoiding further contact with my shadow future, in the person of the ne'er-do-well Uncle Haskell.

Anyway, image searches on "Irene Hunt" and similar terms are how I ran across both these photographs:

This is not the Irene Hunt, but rather, just an Irene Hunt. She shows up on the search page, but not on a linked site; I couldn't find out anything more about the picture.

It's a hand-colored B&W photograph that looks like it dates from the 1930s or '40s. It shows a confident young woman with unruly hair. She seems beautiful to me, and looks to be at or near the peak of her sexuality; she has a hint of a sly or louche look in her expression, and her blouse or dress, modest enough, hints of dishabille. She might be younger than she appears—in those days people dressed and acted like adults starting very young, whereas people do the opposite today. The plain background suggests it might have been a backdrop for a production-line portrait such as a school picture. Is it a senior portrait? Possibly, but to me it looks more intentional than that, more skilled on both sides of the camera. Who is she looking at? Not the lens. Impossible to know, but it might have been a boyfriend, or a new interest. Or a new husband. The punctum I would say is her not-quite-right hair. Was she having a bad hair day, or trying to be fashionable and not quite pulling it off? Or it could simply have been a bad angle. I went back and forth on it. It's hard to see, but there appears to be a bow in her hair directly above her left eye, so I settled on "trying to be fashionable." She's wearing lipstick; I can imagine she might have gotten a bit dolled up to have her picture taken, and perhaps was getting some unaccustomed attention because of it, and that accounts for her expression.

Of course punctum is personal, and you might or might not like this photograph. I have affection for it, especially considering how close it is to being lost. (I would imagine the number of photographs lost every day run into the millions.)

If I'm right about the date, she's probably gone now, even if she lived a long life. (Irene Hunt the author, by the way, lived to be 98, and made it into the 2000s.) I'm always flummoxed by the presence of sexual attraction in people, or in characters in novels, who are not present in the world. Willa Cather's My Antonia was enigmatic for me in that sense. I think we like characters who are becoming rather than who were and are now known to be done and gone. Although Marilyn Monroe and James Dean would seem to belie that. Even the Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot of Le Morte D'Arthur spend most of their long epic in the promise of their unfolding futures.

In any event, we're seeing but one moment in that young woman's day, one slice out of a busy young life full of the things healthy young lives are full of. She herself was probably much more mindful of the flow of the rest of her life than merely of the instant of the exposure. But the latter is all we're left with. No matter who she was, she's a mystery now.

This one might be a harder sell. It was an illustration in a critical article about Across Five Aprils, but not otherwise identified or discussed. It's clearly old, but how old is not obvious. It appears yellowed, is torn along the bottom edge, and shows foxing in the light sky area. It has a tear along the bottom border area. It shows three individuals, all probably Black and all probably male. They appear to be cutting wheat, although I'm no expert. I first read it as three boys, although that might not be true; the person with the scythe might be a grown man, and the individual bending over could be a man or a boy. It appears to be a snapshot, not carefully made. Whoever made it took no care to get the horizon straight. Like many historical photographs, it probably documents a passing moment in several lives that have run their entire courses now. It has a certain bucolic or pastoral charm, a certain nostalgia, although that's only good from a distance—it might well have been a hot day and the people were probably working hard at a job that was very familiar to them and that had little variety and less appeal.

It set me off on a sort of reverie about how utterly anonymous most of our lives really are. It's no wonder that we like to imagine God as a being that sees every sparrow fall—it's reassuring in a way to believe that the actions and activities of our lives are not lost the minute they happen, or the moment they fall out of the conscious memories of those who witnessed them. Familiar jobs and unremarkable work take up a lot of our lives, and are perhaps the least likely thing even we ourselves remember. The thought that struck me about this is that these people don't give any sign that they knew their picture was being taken. A brief moment of their lives was commemorated for posterity, and they had no idea. Or so it seems. The punctum for me in this photograph is the unstudied poses their bodies take as they work, economical from repetition and familiarity. All three are "in drawing," as art historians might say, as graceful as if they were drawn by Jean Francois Millet, of the Barbazon school, who occupied himself on a different continent with scenes not dissimilar to this one.

These are just two of many. I felt we should discuss at least a few pictures when talking about a theoretical term. These just happened to pull me in this week. My life's been a slow-flowing river of images, passing like the minutes and the hours pass. As long as they give me something to think about, I don't mind.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

[A different] Mike: "Your observations about the photo of the field workers and generally about anonymous lives reminded me of a quotation attributed to Gandi: 'What you do will not matter, but it is very important that you do it.'"

Benjamin Marks: "Consider in that photo of the mowers that they are on a hill. I say this because the tree and edge of the house in the background are almost parallel with the edge of the frame. The image is off by one or one-and-a-half degrees counter-clockwise. But if the picture were corrected for that, the horizon would be even more 'tilted' than it is. Hence, I conclude that it the workers are on a road that is traveling uphill to the right of the frame. This is a quibble though.... Great post! P.S. I am personally punctum-less, in the sense that my brain won't hold onto the concept. Every time I read the term, it is like encountering it for the first time. Even as I write this, I can feel the concept slipping out of focus and receding from my working vocabulary. Whups! There it goes...."

David Aiken (partial comment): "Re 'I think we like characters who are becoming rather than who were and are now known to be done and gone.' In my retirement I’ve discovered a respect for novels that I’ll call 'coming of age' stories. That description is usually applied to tales about people making the transition to adulthood, the process of leaving school and starting work and/of finding a partner but I’ve come to realise that the reason I respond to these stories is that they’re archetypal tales of the issues we all face at various times of our lives. There’s a sense in which every major transition in our life is a coming of age experience and novels about people facing major shifts or changes in their life, whatever their age, are just as much a 'coming of age' story as novels about the transition to adulthood."

Mike replies: The lit-crit term is Bildungsroman (pluralize by adding an "e") because it sounds more impressive in German,  :-)  and the Wikipedia article includes a useful list of titles, from Jane Eyre and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Outsiders to The Kite Runner and Washington Black.

JOHN B GILLOOLY: "As a commercial photographer who is very interested in the world of photography as art, I do find the cliché use of the word in question to be true and guilty as charged. I am critical of, and fascinated by, the use of this overly intellectualized description of art, including photography.

"But the word punctum, and what it tries to describe in photography, is obviously valid. I tend to get to that 'thing' as I ask myself questions about a given image—either my own while editing (mostly) or others while viewing. Is there anything special about this image? Is there something unique about it that gives it an edge? That 'unique edge' is that quality that separates a great photograph from a set of 'good' images. Could be any of its elements—composition, color, gesture, light, etc. But a great photograph must have something that sets it apart."

Comments

[Albert Smith]

"...and might still be read in grade schools for all I know."

Not here in Florida. Didn't you hear, there was no civil war or slavery? At least according to the Florida legislature.

[xf mj]

I’m now giggling that it seems now that even the very notion of “punctum” in photography, that is, what typically can be “the punctum” of a photograph, is a subjectively defined concept too. For me, every Eggleston photo that I like is a perfect example of it. “Why does that red ceiling and light fixture strike me so?” “Why is the back of that women’s head, her hairdo, so striking?” “What is it about that toy trike when seen in the full frame?”

I can talk around the reasons why… “the gritty and yet pristine bloodiness of it” “the symmetry” “the story of the trike user’s day or absence that day” etc. but it may exactly be the fact that talking about them isn’t enough. You just wanna point at it and say, “I mean just *look* at that ceiling/hairdo/toy.” Photographs are visual and being struck by something in a photograph can seem odd when you try and describe just why. You feel dumbly visceral.

And then, yeah, I understand that Eggleston’s photography isn’t for everyone. “Is it just me?” You almost feel silly for being struck by the whatever, in many cases. So my reactions themselves are personal.

At least that’s what the concept is for me, and how such photos work for me.

[John Krumm]

When I look at my older photos, the ones on film that I have kept because I like them, they all seem to have punctum to me. But that's because they are so personal, and I know the story. Like this rather mundane shot of my wife and daughter. I can see something of my wife and daughter that I still see in them now, 25 years later.

And then there are some that just stand out to me because of the overall look, like this snap of a friend that my daughter took with her film camera...

[Paul]

Posts like this are why I come here.
Bravo.

[Calvin amari]

Don’t sell the McLean House photo short. Look again. It has some obvious elements of an interesting accidental modernism. Notice the seven distinct sections of angled fencing at ground level, contrasted with the prominent and even verticals of the porch level, contrasted with the elongated lozenge shapes of the second floor railing, all behind the foreground of evenly spaced trees in receding perspective….

[JH]

Then there is this photo which I think is one of the outstanding portraits of all times:
https://www.peterfetterman.com/artists/153-arnold-newman/works/33754-arnold-newman-igor-stravinsky-new-york-city-1946/

[Gary]

I agree with Paul. So good. Forget keyboards, car repairs and diets, and please give us more of these posts. You have a discerning eye and a deep apprehension of photography, as well as a lucid way of writing. I want to read more like this. Nothing else on the internet, as far as I know, gives us the satisfaction of reading considered and informed thinking about photography.

[Bob Johnston]

Contemporary art photography, to my eyes at least, often has a total lack of punctum. It has to be accompanied by a long and rambling artists statement full of impenetrable art speak to try and make up for it. There, that's my rant for today.

[David Aiken]

“I think we like characters who are becoming rather than who were and are now known to be done and gone.”

In my retirement I’ve discovered a respect for novels that I’ll call “coming of age” stories. That description is usually applied to tales about people making the transition to adulthood, the process of leaving school and starting work and/of finding a partner but I’ve come to realise that the reason I respond to these stories is that they’re archetypal tales of the issues we all face at various times of our lives. There’s a sense in which every major transition in our life is a coming of age experience and novels about people facing major shifts in changes in their life, whatever there age, are just as much a “coming of age” story as novels about the transition to adulthood.

I think we like characters who are becoming their stories reassure us that it’s a normal human experience, that we do survive the becoming and actually become, at least for a while until we come to our next transition. Becoming may be the quintessential human experience and that is probably the reason why characters who are becoming are so fascinating to us, the fact that they eventually become is reassuring to us.

[Dave Millier]

Personally, I'm not much of a fan of over analysing images. You write beautifully and you think clearly but it still feels to me to be an entirely subjective position. Your writing skill attempts to give your internal feeling some sense of objective reality, of logical justification. But you can't get away from the fact that it is just subjective. Yesterday I had a 1 to 1 advisory session with a Royal Photographic Society FRPS assessor as initial preparation for thinking about my future ARPS programme. One of the things we discussed was my LRPS panel and a selection of other sample photos I sent her. I found it interesting because she kept trying to draw me into saying things about my photos. What do they mean to you? What attracted you to the subject? Why did you shoot it in that way? What do you think the picture will mean to other people. And I felt I had no way to answer those questions and that they were actually irrelevant intellectualising of something quite simple: I shot those pictures because there was something about the subject, the light, the viewpoint, the composition, line, curve, pattern, tones, hues whatever that induced a little frisson of excitement in me, a passing moment of recognition. This is an image! There was no more to it than that, and as the things about the scene that induced that feeling of excitement were entirely personal and inexplicable and likely not shared by a single other person, no attempt at a rational post hoc interpretation is either necessary or appropriate. Yet we insist on attempts at post hoc interpretation of works of art all the time. Sometimes it is better to just say, "here's a picture, that's all it is, there is nothing deeper or special or meaningful about it, either it appeals to you or it doesn't. No need to make stuff up about it"

[What's wrong with subjectivity? Personal subjectivity is part of the definition of the punctum. There's nothing wrong with it. I also agree with your assessor in thinking it's right to encourage you to think about the questions she asks. Because a lot of times (not with you, I don't know about you), the answers to her questions might be, "the colors are pretty; I never thought about what the subject actually is"; and "I'm striving to pander to others' tastes," and "because I thought it looks like the approved pictures I see in museums and books and it conforms to the technical rules we discuss on the forums I frequent," etc. There are many trivial and wrongheaded reasons for taking pictures. She might also know things about the culture you're stepping into that she recognizes you don't know yet, and she's simply encouraging you to be ready to meet the demands you might encounter.

It's worthwhile to think about those questions and I suspect you actually have, because you're pretty eloquent for a guy who doesn't want to talk about pictures; and, rejecting ideas is just as valid in art as accepting them. You're developing your personal approach to your work and your philosophy about it, which is what she's encouraging. Even if you end up at a place where you say, "I consider every aspect of work to be personal and subjective, and I prefer to not say anything about it or try to define it but to leave it all unsaid," that's still a valid position. If it is arrived at thoughtfully.

All I'm doing in this post is giving my personal (yes, completely subjective) reactions to a couple of pictures. I don't need or even (necessarily) want anybody to agree with me. But that's okay, because that's how we encounter aesthetic experiences.

The above is just off the top of my head. Forgive me if this is too coarse a read on your comment or if I'm being too inarticulate. --Mike]

[hans muus]

@Paul : quite !

[Mskad]

I think you meant “carte postale” (postcard) rather than “carte de visite” (business card).

[No, I meant the type of photograph:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_de_visite

--Mike]

[John Camp]

Writing about music [or photography] is like dancing about architecture.

(An earlier version, going back to 1918, according to Wiki: "Talking about music is like singing about economics.")

[Herman Krieger]

I believe a photo should have a 'point' to it, and that the content and composition should be taken as normal attributes.

[Jeff1000]

I become disillusioned with my photography. It seems that no one "gets" my pictures, or anyone's pictures, really, mostly. Someone looks at a photograph for three seconds and dismisses it. Sure, if it's a landscape, they see the mountains, the lake, the trees, the clouds; but to me, the landscape has only little to do with mountains, lakes, trees, or clouds. A photograph is about the inner landscape of the photographer. Can't you see that the clouds are thoughts? Can't you see that the tallest mountain represents a sort of Nirvanna? Can't you see that the swirling storm is my swirling inner storm? Can't you see that the sun bursting through the clouds is transcendence?

As the photographer, the punctum seems obvious to me, though not precisely exactly visible except as natural objects. The objects in a photograph are just metaphors for the actual meaning, where the punctum is revealed. If I thought I was merely photographing mountains, trees, lakes, or clouds I wouldn't even bother. The photographer is always the main element of a photograph, the meaning behind the superficial meaning.

I apologize if this only makes sense to me, or it actually makes no sense at all.

[Sharon]

I would not assign punctum to either of these photos. They seem less piercing or wounding and more sentimental. I once saw a large print exhibit of pulitzer prize winning photos including the one of a starving child with a buzzard in the background and the one of an electrocuted lineman hanging upside down on the pole. The exhibit could have been titled Punctum.

[Dave_lumb]

Some photos 'work' and some don't. Trying to explain why they work (and giving it a fancy sounding name) might be intellectually interesting, but it doesn't help anyone take others that also work.

It's like inspiration, you can't force it. The trick is to recognise it when it turns up and grab it with both hands.

But it won't turn up if you don't point your camera at something.

[I think I would respectfully disagree with "but it doesn't help anyone take others that also work"—because so much of the work of photographing is editing. After you work a subject and have a hundred pictures from that motif or idea, you still have to decide which one is the one. —Mike]

[Moose]

Jeff1000, I wonder of you are more negative than necessary, or useful.

I have had the pleasure of watching as people leaf through my photo books. Some are silent, some engage with me about the pictures. Things that I find particularly interesting in this process are that people often have involuntary physical responses to some photos, often, I think, unaware that they have done so.

I dislike the word punctum, but,s as much talked about here, there is a reaction to pictures that bypasses thought, logic, etc.

The other, related thing is that different people react to different pictures. I recognized three general categories, some attracted attention from everyone, as evinced in physical and/or vocal expression and kept attention for some time.

Then there are the vast middle ground, where some appeal to some people, not others, others appeal to other people.

Then there are, in my experience, the very few that just get flipped by with hardly a glance by almost everyone.

Then again, I had one I had tagged as a full loser, and hoped not to repeat. Visiting a physically distant friend, she instantly broke into tears when she turned to this page.

You say "It seems that no one "gets" my pictures, or anyone's pictures, really, mostly."

In what sort of situation are you experiencing this? I find that people's reaction with photos may have a lot to do with circumstances and interaction with others there.

Late for lunch, worried about what others may think of my taste/reaction, worry about not having the socially or culturally correct understanding of the work, and so on, may easily and often distract or detract from any true reaction.

I've found that people tend to pay attention to physical photographs more than those on a screen. A stack of prints is better. And a book is much better. How much of that is the physicality of handling, ability to move, angle, etc, the simple fact that many people are primarily kinesthetic,
a cultural belief that books are important, or what else, I don't know.

I personally don't think the intellectual meanings you attach to your photos are what attracts, or doesn't, others to them. The attraction comes first, as has been said here, then is followed by the ideas that hope to explain the attraction.

Y'all got some stuff out on the web?

[Brad Dow]

I can't say I'm sure what John means to say in quoting the old saw about dancing and architecture, but the expression is generally meant as a put down, as if writing about architecture [or photography] were a pointless waste of time. I object. In my opinion, it’s no more pointless than writing about love or family or hopes or dreams or history or politics or anything else. It's not easy to do well and meaningfully, but it's hardly pointless.

[Jeff1000]

Hello Moose! Thanks for your sharing your experience.

I have a dozen landscapes on Flickr:

https://flic.kr/ps/42Pjuy

[Chris Y]

Don't know about punctum, but I loves me some louche dishabille!

[David Comdico]

A note on the term punctum. Before musical notation was invented, plainsong used a system called "neumes" which were graphical marks used as a tool to remember the shape of a musical piece (see neumonic). One of these marks was called a "punctum" or point and was represented as a dot. This dot evolved into our present-day musical note.

There are two possible Greek roots to neume, one for breathe and the other for sign both of which are applicable. It is interesting that Barthes used a term from musical tradition and also one that inferred intimacy and (pre-modern) semiotics.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I don't use the term "punctum" myself, mostly because I haven't paid close enough attention to it to convince myself that I have a fairly stable understanding of what I think it means, and then that I also am not sure the other uses out there are particularly consistent with each other (or, if I had one, with my own idea of the word).

But, having spent the weekend shooting a few thousand shots, and sorting more than twice that many (had another photographer covering the science fiction convention also), I feel more than ever that only a very occasional documentary photo has even a small spark of interest, even if many of the others are useful documentation. I don't declare that this first sign of sparkle is the edge of punctum slipping in, since I'm not convinced I know what people mean at all specifically with that word.

But it might be. Or at least, it's what I look for to assign a rating one step above "minimally technically competent and shows something" (which is 2 stars in my scheme, so the first sign of sparkle gets to 3; 4 stars is rare, and 5 is for the good portfolio shots).

"Spark[le]" is nice because it's imprecise. Now, taking on trying to characterize this quality (or that quality; they may not be the same) usefully is a worthwhile endeavor, but it looks a lot like work, so I use less-precise terms.