Finding the Punctum

One of my favorite photographs is William Klein's "Mayday, Moscow" from 1959, which I first came across in Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. Like Barthes, I am drawn to the studium of the photograph. For non-Barthes readers, studium is general interest in a photo, perhaps as a historical document. "Studium is of the order of liking, not of loving.... To recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer's intentions, to enter into harmony with them, to approve or disprove of them, but always to understand them..." (26-7). As Barthes notes, the photograph gives the modern, non-Russian viewer details of Russian dress in the 1950s. The kerchief, the cap, the jacket, all draw the curious eye. This may be why I like the photo, but it is not why I love it.

I find my eyes taking multiple paths through this picture. Sometimes I start in the upper right where I follow the man’s gaze to the man on the left, whom the first man certainly cannot see, though in the two-dimensional world of the photograph they are touching. I then look at the bearded man in the back and my eye roller-coasters down to the hat, the old woman, and then the boy, following the path of their heads, picking up speed as I go. Once I reach the bottom, my eyes slowly climb up to the man in the hat who is looking off to the right of the photograph. I follow his gaze, looking back up the path that I recently careened down. Then I find that I am looking back and forth, back and forth, from one man’s profile to the other, only stopping when I self-consciously notice the man in the upper left who has been staring at me all along. How embarrassing. When I look back at the photo, I am much more polite, giving each face the attention it deserves, while not staring so long as to make the figures uncomfortable. I linger on the old woman. Her face is bright, and the longer I look at her the brighter she seems. A glowing light in a sea of dark (even more so in the printed photo on page 29 of Camera Lucida than in the photo above). Is that why the two men are looking back at her? Like moths to a flame? When I squint my eyes, I see triangles and circles of black, rectangles and squares of grey, all surrounding the oval of light. When I reopen my eyes fully, I suddenly notice the incredible balance, bordering on symmetry, of the photograph. Two men, on either side of the picture, each look back and toward the other side. Both men have another man’s face to the left and back. Then, a gently curved line of heads runs down the middle. And it is only now, after noticing all of these things, that I finally wonder just what these people are doing. Why are they in this particular arrangement? Although it is possible that Klein has posed them, it feels much more like an incredible stroke of luck.

But as easy as it is for me to describe my fascination for this photo, it was difficult to pick out the punctum - what Barthes describes as something in the photo which wounds the viewer. I could see all the parts of the photo that I truly like, but it was too easy to describe why I like them. And like Barthes, I realize that "what I can name cannot really prick me" (51). Barthes explains that he often doesn't realize what the punctum is while he is viewing the photo; sometimes it comes to him in a realization later. I gave myself time away from the photo, hoping that the wound would show itself. Finally, glancing back at the photograph today, I realized it: My punctum is the boy's ear. I spent far less time studying the boy than I did the other subjects, however without him the photograph has merely interesting composition and not the ability to wound. Perhaps it is because the ear stands in for the eyes I cannot see, or maybe it is because the boy resembles my younger brother who also has protruding ears, or maybe it is that the ear blends into the woman's arm, causing the ear to look grotesquely large. Whatever the reason, I have found the punctum - the photograph's ability to wound and delight me.