It is the advent of photography that divides the history of the world. It is not until photography that the "past could be as certain as the present, what we see on paper is as certain as what we touch." (88) Barthes studies photography for this and several other reasons, and he sets out to identify photography "in itself." He is intrigued by the idea that one can speak of a photo, but not of the photo, because a photo is contingent, and must be discussed in the context of its content. A photograph is "invisible. It is not it that we see." The critical element of a photograph, for Barthes, is the testament it offers that "this has been," that the subject existed in this specific moment in time. But following Barthes' logic, the photo also assures that by freezing a subject in time, the subject immediately exists in the past ("it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred." 77) and will at some point invariably be dead.
Thus, all photo subjects are essentially already dead. It is a "flat death," an impending death in every photographic subject. Photographers go to great lengths, he points out, to make us look life-like and active when taking our pictures. They are trying to keep the photo from becoming Death. Why? Because to look into the photographed eyes of a person who will inevitably die is to invoke one's own sense of mortality. We find ourselves calculating the dates to determine how old this person might be today. And we find ourselves wondering, "Why am I alive here and now?" Photos that signify too much, that don a mask of sorts and aim at generalities are too disturbing. "Society, it seems, mistrusts pure meaning: It wants meaning, but at the same time it wants this meaning to be surrounded by a noise which will make it less acute." If the photo is too intense, we will "consume it aesthetically, not politically." (36)
As a referent (photographic subject), if we are aware that we are being photographed we cannot help but contrive a pose. We are trying to assure that the image captured in the photo coincides with our "self." We want the photo capture (for example) our "delicate moral texture." Barthes later describes this a our "air." (110) It is the pose of the subject that founds the nature of photography because without this real thing placed before the lens there would be no photo. One cannot deny that "the thing has been there." (76) In posing, however, we become "neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object." The photograph becomes public and it instantly becomes the past. It offers us no control over what the spectator will later see in our photo and thus we are pure object. Our slippage into object becomes a "micro version of death." (14) We are protected as objects from conveying too much meaning.? Photography is, according to Barthes, co-natural with its referent. As opposed to language, which refers to an "optionally real thing," photography refers to a necessarily real thing. We internalize neither Art nor Communication with a photograph, but a Reference. (77) So photography creates us as double, it is the "advent of myself as other."
For spectators (the viewers of the photographs), Barthes explains that there are two elements involved when viewing a photograph. One element is the studium. The studium is a "kind of education (civility, politeness) that allows discovery of the operator." (28) It is the order of liking, not loving. News photographs are often simple banal, unary photos which exemplify studium because "I glance through them, I don't recall them; no detail ever interrupts my reading: I am interested in them (as I am interested in the world), I do not love them."
The second and far more interesting element for the spectator is punctum. There are two kinds of punctum. The first is that which is "that accident which pricks, bruises me." (26) It is the unintentional detail that could not not be taken, and that "fills the whole picture." (45) Barthes says there is no rule that can be applied to the existence of studium and punctum within a photo except that "it is a matter of co-presence." (42) These are the photos which take our breath away for some reason that was completely unintended by the photographer (or by the subject, for that matter). It is at the moment when the punctum strikes that the photograph will "annihilate itself as medium to be no longer a sign but the thing itself." And the object will become subject again.
"MsoNormal" Sometimes, the punctum reveals itself after the fact, as a function of memory. (53) It is a testament to the pensiveness of a photograph, comprising the part of the photo that is it at its strongest when one is not looking at the photograph. This pensiveness is the strength of a photograph. The pensiveness is, again, a political element of photography. While most photographs offer only the identity of an object, those that project a punctum potentially offer the truth of the subject. They offer "the impossible science of the unique being."
The second kind of punctum is that of Time. It is most vividly legible in historical photographs. "There is always a defeat of Time in them: that is dead and that is going to die." (96) Barthes says that because photographs invoke our future death, they challenge us "outside any generality." Thus the reading of a photograph is ultimately always a "private reading," read "as the private appearance of its referent." (98) We live in a society in which this private is now consumed regularly in the public. However, the private is "the inalienable site where my image is free, as it is the condition of an interiority which I believe is identified with my truth." (98) Barthes says that our "private life" is "that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object. It is my political right to be a subject which I must protect." (15) The punctum of Time leads to "photographic ecstasy, "a strictly revulsive movement which reverses the course of the thing."
The punctum of time, the existence of the dead with the photographed object, forces the photograph into an unreality, a hallucination of sorts: "on the one hand, it is not there, on the other, it has indeed been." (115) It is the paradox that the object must have existed, and yet at the same time, it cannot be there now. The photograph is "false on the level of perception, true on the level of time." When Barthes is struck by a punctum, he "passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die." It is, he says, madness. Society wants to tame this madness by making photography an art (Barthes says that no art is mad) or by taming it through generalizing, banalizing it "until it is no longer confronted by any image in relation to which it can mark itself." (118) When the image is stripped of its personal, private reading, the potential for madness is gone. When the image is meant to be viewed when flipping through a magazine, it is inert. Society consumes images now instead of beliefs, in order to keep them from reaching madness.
