Framing the Façade: Studium and Punctum in ArchitecturalPhotography

Photography is instrumental in raising awareness of architectural patrimony from the ancient to the modern, urban to remote, grand to vernacular. Aesthetic, social,and spiritual values embody places, and buildings are often the only tangible evidence of history, offering insights into past cultures and events. Nowhere is photography morevital in conservation than when it is used to record sites affected by conflict and disaster, drawing attention to the plight of communities and their cultural heritage in the aftermath of catastrophe.

Barthes’s studium, the photograph’s indexical, unary nature, aids viewers in assessing damage to heritage sites, formulating recovery plans, and building foundations for information sharing, advocacy, and community participation. Studiumexpresses the desire to understand the fundamental meanings of photographs and to explore the correlations between these connotations and the observers’ subjectivities. Conversely, punctum, the poignant detail that attracts and holds the viewers’ gaze, is what spectators add to the photographs and, as Barthes writes, “what is nonetheless already there.” While studium is the reflection of the relationship between the evident symbolic meanings of photographs and provides only one level of reading, punctum establishes relevance between the viewers and the photographed objects and brings a duality of language to photographs. The fusion of studium and punctum allows photographs to communicate intellectually and emotionally to their audience—to report, signify, surprise, and call to action after tragedy.

Jules Andrieu, photographing Paris after the Franco-Prussian war, used urban ruins as metaphors for Europe’s decimated society. More recently, photographs have documented the devastation of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Haiti’s earthquake, and Japan’stsunami and earthquake. In the digital age, images of catastrophic events are globally transmitted spectacles, instantaneous traces of accelerated historicized memory and, for many, the primary medium to experience disaster. Cameras further remove their operators from the reality before the lens, a dynamic that becomes especially distressing in the face of human suffering. Images of the destruction and loss of the built environment of these sites lead the viewers’ imaginations beyond the frame and into the lives of the inhabitants. Far too often, images that chronicle crisis are synecdoche: dramatic pictures of destroyed buildings that fail to convey the true meaning of such atrocities.

Photographs of conflict and disaster sites can be problematic because, while theyrecord damage to civilization’s monumental endeavors, they lack the very sense of humanity that they are trying to represent. How do photographers, heritage professionals, and image archivists resolve this absence? When does architectonic

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photography rise above the status of technical reproduction to construct images that provide emotional rupture and command attention all their own? This presentation explores the disconcerting gap between studium and punctum where disaster-related conservation photographs sometimes reside, and what may be done to elevate architectural images from the level of studium to pierce, prick, and provoke viewers into emergency action.

One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of

Juanqinzhai in the Forbidden City, Beijing. And I realized then,

with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: “I am

looking at an interior that the Emperor Qianlong looked into.”

Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed

to share it, nor even to understand it (life consists of these

little touches of solitude), I forgot about it. My interest in

Photography took a more cultural turn. I decided I liked

Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless

failed to separate it. This question grew insistent. I was

overcome by an “ontological” desire: I wanted to learn at all

costs what Photography was “in itself,” by what essential feature

it was to be distinguished from the community of images. Such a

desire really meant that beyond the evidence provided by

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technology and usage, and despite its tremendous contemporary

expansion, I wasn’t sure that Photography existed, that it had a

“genius” of its own.

***

So Roland Barthes wrote, with slightly different wording and

with another photograph in mind, on the opening page of Camera

Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Published in 1980 as La Chambre claire:

note sur la photographie, and available in English the following year,

the book holds a canonical place in the study of photography.1

Divided into two parts with 48 fragments,2 the book is a

theoretical, if idiosyncratic, examination of the nature of

photography, as well as a personal essay on memory and loss,

centered on the death of Barthes’s mother.3

In the book, Barthes approaches photography in new ways. His

individualistic, even narcissistic, responses to images, making

himself the measure of photographic meaning, shows that the

personal can be a powerful point of departure for critical

analysis. Additionally, his selection and critique of vernacular4

pictures opens the field of photography—from the ordinary to fine

art—for examination. As a photo historian, Camera Lucida was,

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unsurprisingly, one of the first books I read about the medium,

as it is, as Geoffrey Batchen writes, “perhaps the most

influential book yet written about the photographic experience.”5

As the director of the archives at World Monuments Fund, an

international historic preservation organization, I have found

his book helpful in using photographs for aesthetic and

informational purposes. One of my duties is preserving and making

accessible a visual collection depicting more than 600

conservation projects in 90 countries over the past 45 years. I

spend a majority of my time looking at photographs representing

the world’s architectural and cultural heritage.

The wonder induced by otherwise ordinary photographs allows

me to travel through time, space, and culture. For instance, I

can enter the moon gate into the theatre hall of Juanqinzhai,

which translates into “Studio of Exhaustion From Diligent

Service,” one of the many buildings of Emperor Qianlong’s garden

retreat. He used the elaborate, silk-lined studio, completed in

1779, after his retirement. Abandoned in 1924, the site was

closed to the public until a decade ago, when conservation work

began. Through the image, I can access a private paradise of the

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emperor, a room in which the walls seem to have fallen away to

reveal a bright spring day full of fragrant flowers and the

twitter of magpies and cranes in a stately courtyard.

As I review architectural photographs, I am intrigued my

reactions. Images such as this one strike me, while others lie

inert under my gaze. I am an emotive person, the photographers

are talented, and the sites are worth of aid; why, then, this

lack of response? Calls to action are especially critical

regarding visual documentation of built and natural environments

after disaster and conflict. While humanitarian aid is the most

critical need after catastrophe, historic buildings can often be

a factor in restoring communities. Photographs of heritage sites

in danger are a persuasive means for raising support, as well as

helping to assess damage, undertake emergency conservation, and

assist with long-term recovery plans.

For disaster recovery photographs, I expect a response to

visuals—such as this image of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the

Assumption in Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake. The

cathedral suffered a complete roof collapse, destruction of

sections of its interior arcades, and caving in of its bell

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towers. The pale yellow arches stand defiantly above the twisted

metal and broken concrete and against a somber sky. For me, a

photograph of seismic damage represents the horror of the event

and the devastation of a community and points towards the massive

number of deaths and injuries suffered by the Haitian people.

By looking at pictures such as this one, I was overcome with

a Barthesian desire to discover the reasons behind my responses

to photographs. Just as Camera Lucida is driven by a single,

unanswerable question: “what is photography?” I ask, “What is

architectural photography?” I am neither a photographer nor an

architect, so I adopted Barthes’s suggestion that, when looking

at certain photographs, he “wanted to be a primitive, without

culture.”6 I, too, wished to discover what photography is “in

itself.”

My presentation discusses Barthes’s views on photography and

architecture, in Camera Lucida and other works, and explores

photography’s unique features: its replication of reality; its

simultaneous representations of past, present, and future; its

ability for limitless reproduction and remixing; and its mass

proliferation. I investigate the distinctions between Barthes’s

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concepts of studium and punctum, shared and private meaning,

intention and chance. My aim is to explore how architectural

photographs, especially those that are disaster-related, can

pierce, prick, and provoke viewers into action. Beyond framing

the façade, they should compel viewers to do something in the

face of tragedy.

Eschewing technical knowledge for reflection on the human

experience, Barthes wants to discover the essence of photography,

using his own responses to photographs that “animate” him so that

engagement with them becomes an “adventure” in photography.7

Believing that a new kind of image was invented with the medium,

he seeks out the features that set photographs apart from other

visual arts. Camera Lucida, Latin for “light chamber,” takes its

title from a device for looking through a prism at a subject

while drawing it; it is an instrument in which an image can only

be seen in the mind’s eye. The camera lucida may also evoke the

Winter Garden photograph of Barthes’s mother as a child,

discussed at length in the book, but unpublished. It is seen only

by Barthes as he refinds his mother in the literal chambre claire

of the glass conservatory.8 For Barthes, the photograph is the

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camera lucida in reverse; viewers read from the two-dimensional

image the three-dimensional reality that lies in the past.

In Camera Lucida, Barthes turns his attention to viewing

photographs and being photographed, activities that he is

familiar with, while ignoring the role of the photographer. In

other words, he disregards how pictures are produced in favor of

an investigation of their reception. A relationship between the

thing and its indexical trace exists within photographs. They are

“extended, loaded evidence”9 that point to something in the real

world, its “perfect analogon,”10 its “referent.”11 He conjures the

referent through the intermediary of a photograph, which,

according to Barthes, “belongs to that class of laminated objects

whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them

both: the windowpane and the landscape.”12 He learns that

photography allows viewers to enter a history to which no

documents could give them access.

Architecture for Barthes is both “dream and function,

expression of a utopia and instrument of convenience.”13 In his

1979 essay on the Eiffel Tower, Barthes describes the

significance of the monument as an icon and as part of modern

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semiotic mythologies, the objects and experiences that create

meaning in everyday life. The tower fulfils more than one

function—in fact, it was built without any use—because it appeals

to the human imagination; its appearance also coincided in the

moment of an increasingly image-driven culture. The great modern

monument of Paris is the iconic center of a reciprocal system, at

once a receptacle of all gazes in the city and a universal point

of view overlooking Paris. The tower is also a signifier free of

any fixed referent; “This pure—virtually empty—sign—is

ineluctable, because it means everything”14 and, therefore, attracts

meaning like “a lightning rod attracts thunderbolts.” 15 Likewise,

in Empire of Signs (1970), a book about his impressions of Japan,

Barthes interprets the country’s culture as a utopia of

signifiers, but empty ones. Tokyo, occupied by the lacuna of the

royal palace, is like the Eiffel Tower: a vacant center, an

absent presence.

The Winter Garden photograph functions as an empty sign too.

It is a void into which readers can project their own pictures.

In fact, the photograph is so average it cannot be reproduced.

Barthes writes, “For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent

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picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’….

in it, for you, no wound.”16 Banal photographs, by their very

nature, shift the burden of imaginative thought from the artist

to the viewer.17 Thus, even the most commonplace photographs of

architecture and its conservation have the potential for almost

limitless meaning. Oscillating between dream and function,

architectural photography, depicting the empty signs of the

world’s greatest monuments, unlocks intellectual engagement in

unexpected ways.

Barthes distinguishes between three relationships: the

Operator (the photographer), the Spectator (the viewer), and the

Spectrum (the subject). In his 1967 essay, “The Death of the

Author,” he criticizes the myth of the authorial intention as the

source of a work’s meaning, to emphasize instead the role of the

reader and to encourage less didactic relations between authors

and readers, artists and viewers. He shifts emphasis from the

traditional ideas of a singular author to the emergence of

multiple readers as central figures in criticism, and, as Barthes

says, “the birth of the reader must be requited by the death of

the Author,” who is no longer treated as a source and arbiter of

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meaning.18 In another essay, “The Third Meaning” (1977), Barthes

writes, “Our aim is to manage to conceive, to imagine, to live

the plurality of the text, the opening of its ‘significance.’” Of

course, the contribution of meaning from the audience can also be

applied to the “text” of photography.19 By shifting power from

the Operator to the Spectator, the “Death of the Photographer,”

so to speak, allows everyone to develop the capacity for critical

viewing of photographs.

The most influential aspects of Camera Lucida are Barthes’s

terms, studium and punctum, which have entered the photographic

lexicon to describe ways of reacting to photographs. Studium,

from the Latin word for “study,” denotes what the image

communicates, its manifest meaning, which is more or less obvious

to the viewer. Punctum, from the Latin word for “puncture,” is a

feature in the image that conveys significance without invoking

any recognizable symbolic system. The punctum is often a detail

or, in Barthes’s words, a “sting...that accident which pricks me

(but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”20 Studium evokes a range

of cultural and historical concerns from which viewers may draw

information that enables them to connect to a photograph;

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punctum, discovered by the viewer, disturbs this legibility.

Punctum is not the quality of the photograph itself so much as a

product of the viewer’s engagement with it. This is why the

punctum is not the same for every viewer or even for the same

viewer at different times; it cannot be codified or predicted.

The punctum sparks the “adventure” of looking at photographs; its

interaction with studium reveals the essence of photography for

which Barthes is searching.21

Because of its personal nature, the punctum resists

theoretical analysis. Barthes emphasizes the punctum to account

for the importance of subjectivity in the ways that photographic

meaning is created. The punctum is also a paradoxical addendum:

it is, according to Barthes, “what I add to the photograph and

what is nonetheless already there.”22 He continues, “To give examples of

punctum is, in a certain fashion, to give myself up.”23 Thus, the

personal nature of the punctum, is, as James Elkins writes,

“idiosyncratic, unpredictable, or essentially incommunicable,”

but, when historians and critics reveal telling details of

photographs, it is “the exact opposite of what Barthes

intended.”24 Yet writers continue to be drawn to the idea of the

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punctum, whether they use it as Barthes proposes or refer to it

as a means to universalize their critiques of photographs.

The frequent misuse of the term points to something else at

work in the connotations of photographs. The punctum may not be

universal, but it is possible that something beyond the studium

can resonate for many viewers who share the same religious,

national, or cultural backgrounds.

An example is this image from Terezin Fortress, a site with

two independent histories that require it to be preserved. A vast

military complex in the Czech Republic, Terezin was constructed

between 1780 and 1790; over 90 percent of its original fabric

remains intact. Terezin was given a new role in the 1940s, when

it was used as a Jewish ghetto and deportation base by the Nazis,

and, as a result, it is one of the most visited memorial sites in

Central Europe today. During the past few decades, efforts have

been made to conserve the site, but a disastrous flood in 2002

destabilized much of the structure and caused water damage and

biodegradation.

For many, this image may lack punctum by representing a

landscape in an uninterrupted way. Many conservation photographs

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document preservation issues, but nothing, to quote Barthes,

“rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and

pierces me.”25 In my opinion, the small Star of David, reflected

in the muddy water of the flooded cemetery, and dwarfed by the

cross, is the punctum. Due to its religious symbolism and the

site’s role in the Holocaust, the punctum is likely to resonate

with Jewish viewers, in a similar way that a damaged church may

affect Christians or a destroyed mosque may move Muslims. While

this example may be over simplified, it points to the fact that

while punctums are unique to each viewer, a possibility exists

that viewers can also share same punctum.

Another important facet of Barthes’s work is the connection

between photography and death and time in general. Like Idris

Khan’s 2004 photograph, Every page…From Roland Barthes’ “Camera Lucida,”

the book resonates with death and mourning. Its white pages, when

photographed and layered on each other, become a blackened,

decaying palimpsest. Lines of text blur with only the occasional

word deciphered. The book’s famous images are hazy phantoms, with

only one picture—a portrait of Mondrian by André Kertész—rising

from beyond the grave. The specter of death in the book is

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unavoidable because Barthes was writing it as he mourned the

death of his mother, Henriette, who died in October 1977, whom he

lived with and nursed while she was dying. Even more so, Camera

Lucida is the final book by Barthes to be published in his

lifetime, acting as his “last word” on photography. The

association of photography with death, bookended by two actual

deaths, colors all subsequent conversations about Camera Lucida.

The book was written at a turning point in photography, when

traditional practices began transitioning into digital

technologies. Michael Fried warns that digitization “would

thoroughly transform the ontology of the photograph” and would

threaten “to dissolve the ‘adherence’ of the referent” in

pictures.26 Photography’s demise was predicted as digital images

displaced analog’s fundamental properties and undermined its

truth values as tangible imprints of reality. Images of

catastrophic events are now globally transmitted spectacles,

instantaneous traces of accelerated historicized memory and, for

many, the primary medium to experience disaster. The book can be

read as a eulogy for analog photography. Barthes states, “It has

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already disappeared….I am, I don’t know why, one of its last

witnesses…and this book is its archaic trace.”27

Photography’s relationship to time, and its capture of

fleeting moments, is tied to the desire to overcome death (be it

photography’s, Barthes’s mother’s, Barthes, or our own). Barthes

finds that while photographs reanimate the past, they also remind

viewers of loss; they act as “a pseudo-presence and a token of

absence,” to quote Susan Sontag.28 The punctum resides in its

ability to represent not an object itself, but its past

existence, what Barthes calls “that-has-been.”29 Barthes notes

that historical photographs have a “defeat of Time in them: that

is dead and that is going to die.”30 For example, with Alexander

Gardner’s 1865 photograph of Lewis Payne awaiting his execution

for an assassination attempt, Barthes finds that Payne is dead

yet still awaiting death. Thus, photographs articulate time, an

anterior future tense—that-has-been and this-will-be—as images conjure

the past, present, and future concurrently.

For Barthes, cameras are “clocks for seeing,”31 and

photographs provide a “fugitive testimony”32 to history, offering

proof that something existed in space and time. Photographs

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capture moments and contribute to how the past and present are

imagined and configured into narratives. Barthes explicitly

chooses not to write a history of photography, but instead to

look at how photography both produces and reproduces our

conception of history, the “conjunction between the here-now and

the there-then.” 33 History, as Barthes understands it, is itself a

product of the nineteenth century, a construction of selected

moments strung into sequence. He writes, “A paradox: the same

century invented History and Photography.”34

Bearing indexical traces of the world, photography

intervenes between architecture and time, and history. Cameras

record and preserve the past through its physical vestiges:

monuments, sites, and statues. Of the many views during a flow of

countless events, only a limited number of photographs of a

building enter into a circulation of architectural visuals. As

Barthes notes, “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has

occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what

could never be repeated existentially.”35 Often monuments are

photographed during milestones, such as when they are first

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built, after they have been damaged, or before they are torn

down.

Reflecting on his encounter with one of Auguste Salzmann’s

photographs of Jerusalem taken in 1854, Barthes recalls his

experience with temporality. Salzmann’s trip to Jerusalem was

supported by the French Ministry of Public Instruction to confirm

controversial dating of temples and monuments by bringing back

visual documentation of architectural styles in the Holy Land.36

Salzmann’s photograph of a road to Bethlehem is, to quote

Barthes, “nothing but stony ground, olive trees.” 37 Yet this

picture is the basis for a highly effective experience that leads

Barthes to question how the photograph influences the

understanding of lived and historical time. Photographs are

markers of the past and present or what Barthes terms the three

tenses of photography; the present of the viewer looking at the

photograph, the time when the photograph was taken, and the

historic past of the subject pictured. As Barthes explains,

Salzmann’s photograph simultaneously represents 1854 and the time

of Christ. The buildings, temples, and cities Salzmann depicted

were open and accessible,38 ready to be occupied by viewers who

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metaphorically travel and inhabit the landscape, as they study

the images before them.

Salzmann’s trip of recording the built and natural

environment was one of many taken in photography’s initial

decades.39 Photography’s ability to pause time was recognized

from the beginning, as buildings allowed for the long exposures

required by early emulsions aiding nineteenth century

photographic missions. In Britain, photographers initially chose

their subjects, whereas in France, the government founded the

Mission Héliographique in 1851 to survey indigenous monuments,

vernacular and secular architecture, and architectural ruins as a

prelude to the repair of endangered monuments. As the first

example of state patronage of photography, the Mission advanced

the medium, bringing architects and photographers together and

stimulating debate about the best means of photographing the

built environment. Just as the industrial revolution was

destroying ancient buildings, an industrialized process allowed a

visual inventory of France to be recorded for posterity.

Coinciding with the expansion of western political and cultural

power, photographic surveys contributed to the ideals of the

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post-revolutionary nation and the history and landscapes of home

and away.

Later, after the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune,

photographers focused on the architectural ruins of Paris left in

the wake of these conflicts. Rather than photographing the dead,

they represented destruction and loss through ruined buildings.

Then, as in now, buildings are substituted for people after

tragedy, representing loss of life when literal death is too

horrible to bear.

Sontag observed that photographs, like ancient monuments,

become more desirable through the passage of time: both acquire

an aged look and a detachment from the everyday that enhances

their aesthetic value. She writes, “the art that photography does

resemble is architecture, whose works are subject to the same

inexorable promotion through the passage of time; many buildings,

and not only the Parthenon, probably look better as ruins.”40

Photography is not a mechanical act, but one in which

interpretive choices are exercised. Contemporary photographers,

like those with the Mission Héliographique, balance recording the

damaged site with making an aesthetically pleasing image. Hence,

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the cliché of the beautiful ruin, such as this one of a

contemplative monk at the 12th century Banteay Chhmar Temple in

Cambodia. For me, the image is attractive, especially the

contrast of the orange robe against the stones of the temple. But

it is studium: nothing reaches out to me to point to the chaos of

Cambodia’s civil war in the 1970s or looting in the aftermath of

the Khmer Rouge period. The presence of the monk seems

calculated, and I become aware of the work of the photographer.

For Barthes, the experience of the punctum depends upon the

intentionality of the photographer; if there is visual intention,

there is no punctum. In his 1979 essay, “Shock-Photos,” Barthes

writes about why photographs designed to get a viewer response

are unsuccessful; they can shock or “shout,” but they cannot

disturb or “wound.”41 He notes that observing terror from a safe

distance, “from inside our freedom,” is not as powerful as

experiencing it firsthand.42 He outlines how the photographer

leaves viewers “dispossessed of our judgment: someone has

shuddered for us, reflected for us, judged for us; the

photographer has left us nothing.”43 Barthes writes that the only

way viewers may gain some feeling is to respond, not to the

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photographer’s focus, but to the punctum within the photograph.

Images, constructed from their onset to get a response, often

have no effect, because the photographer has been too conscious

of how viewers will react to his work.

For Barthes, photographs depicting people are more likely to

have punctum, which we can ascertain by his selection of images

by well-known portraitists: Stieglitz, Sander, Kertész, Klein,

Avedon, and Mapplethorpe.44 Barthes expresses his dislike for

photographs without people: “Oh, if there were only a look, a

subject’s look, if only someone in the photographs were looking

at me!”45 He wishes to be stared at “straight in the eye,” like Lewis

Payne glaring at the viewer as he awaits his execution.46 Yet,

Barthes also insists, about the Salzmann image, “At the limit,

there is no need to represent a body in order for me to

experience this vertigo of time defeated.”47 The use of people in

architectural photography is intended not so much to comment on

the architecture or show scale as to convey something about the

nature of the photograph itself. The photograph, with its

verisimilitude, should transmit the experience of being in a

foreign locale with directness and immediacy.

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Barthes’s bodily responses to photographs act as a measure

of photographic knowledge; he describes what a photograph looks

like, but also how it feels. Photography has a capacity to touch

him across time and space: “a sort of umbilical cord links the

body of the photographed thing to my gaze.”48 He writes, “The

photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real

body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch

me….a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been

photographed.”49 The punctum is often body-based—Warhol’s nails, a

boy’s bad teeth in Little Italy, the feel of a dirt road that a

violinist plays on in which Barthes writes, “I recognize, with my

whole body, the straggling villages I passed through on my long-

ago travels in Hungary and Rumania.”50

This sense of physically being in a place can be applied to

Charles Clifford’s Alhambra, from 1854, the only architectural

photograph reproduced in Camera Lucida. He writes, “An old house,

a shadowy porch, tiles, a crumbling Arab decoration, a man

sitting against a wall, a deserted street, a Mediterranean tree…

this old photograph…touches me: it is quite simply there that I

should like to live.”51 He continues, “For me, photographs of

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landscape (urban or country) must be habitable, not visitable.”52

For Barthes, the house invokes feelings of having been there or

of going there. Since, he says, Freud has said that the “maternal

body” is the only place one can claim with absolute certainty to

have been, then he sees that the appeal of the landscape is in

the way it awakens the “mother” in him, his sense of home. He

says, “Such then would be the essence of the landscape (chosen by

desire).”53 Perhaps the arch in this picture can speak

architecturally through the photograph because it is a cross-

cultural symbol of home, an embracing shelter and partial

enclosure, and a gateway. It is also perhaps a womb or the dark

chamber of the camera obscura.

And home is where I leave you, with a recent picture of

Alhambra after conservation work, following our short journey

together through time and space. Our shared heritage plays an

important role in shaping the world we live in, and we are

enriched by what survives from long ago. At the heart of every

conservation project is a heritage site that holds significance

for the local community and a larger audience of visitors,

scholars, and the general public interested in history and world

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culture. Photographs, and the unique testimonial of the that-has-

been, underscores the profound impact of disasters on cultural

sites and the important role heritage preservation plays in the

recovery of affected communities. Architectural photography

visualizes the message that culture, represented in natural and

built sites, is a basic need.

In his writing, Barthes displays his fascination with the

potency of the photographic image, contributing to the ubiquity

of the word punctum, a fixation with indexicality, the attention

now being paid to ordinary photographs, and the popularity of

subjective modes of writing about them. Through the prism of

Camera Lucida, I have attempted to discover the essence of

architectural photography. The possibility of meaning-making and

the punctum resides in many factors: architecture’s empty signs;

active viewing by the Spectator; lack of intentionality by the

photographer; the possibility of shared punctum; the past,

present, and future depicted in images; and a sense of humanity

(whether people are portrayed or not). In order to penetrate the

collective consciousness, architectural photographs need their

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own authority, reflecting the fugitive nature of real experience

and the magnitude of our monumental patrimony.

27

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated byRichard Howard.

New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

------. “The Eiffel Tower.” In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, edited by

Neil Leach, 164-72. London: Routledge, 1997.

------. “The Photographic Message,” in Image Music Text, edited by Stephen Heath, 15-31.

Glasgow: Fontana, 1977.

------. “The Rhetoric of the Image.” In Image Music Text, edited by Stephen Heath, 32-51.

Glasgow: Fontana, 1977.

------. The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986.

------. “Shock-Photos.” In The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, Translated by Richard

Howard, 71-3. New York: Hill and Wang, 1979.

------. “The Third Meaning.” In Image Music Text, edited by Stephen Heath, 52-68. Glasgow:

Fontana, 1977.

Batchen, Geoffrey. “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite andthe Bourgeois Imagination.”

28

In Image and Imagination, edited by Martha Langford, 63-74. Montreal: Mc-Gill-Queen’s University Press and Le Mois de laPhoto, 2005.

------. “Palinode: An Introduction to Photography Degree Zero.” In Photography

Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, edited by Geoffrey Batchen, 3-30. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

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1 Many books have been published about Barthes’s discussion of photographic images,most notably: Jean-Michel Rabaté, Writing the Image after Roland Barthes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997);Nancy M. Shawcross, Roland Barthes on Photography: The Critical Tradition in Perspective (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997); Diana Knight, ed., Critical Essays on Roland Barthes (New York: G. K. Hall, 2000); and Geoffrey Batchen, ed., Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 2 Some have suggested a numerological aspect to Camera Lucida’s organization: 48 chapters, 24 illustrations, and 12 bibliographic items add up to 84, the age of Barthes’s mother when she died. See Jay Prosser, “Roland Barthes’s Loss.” Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 24. 3 Camera Lucida is structurally and conceptually related to his other late works, The Pleasure of the Text (1973), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), and A Lover’s Discourse (1977), in their fragmented and personalized style and in blurring distinctions between criticism and poetic, semi-fictional texts. Like Camera Lucida, they also invite readers to induce something from the text that exceeds the intentions of theauthor. 4 Vernacular photography denotes a set a practices that include portraiture, photojournalism, street photography, and snapshots.5 Geoffrey Batchen, “Palinode: An Introduction to Photography Degree Zero.” In Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. ed. Geoffrey Batchen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 3.6 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York:Hill and Wang, 1981), 7. 7 Ibid., 19.8 Some critics doubt that the photograph is real. See Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identity,” In Photography Degree Zero: Reflectionson Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. ed. Geoffrey Batchen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 81.9 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 115.10 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image Music Text, ed. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977), 17.11 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5.12 Ibid., 6.13 Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997), 166.14 Ibid., 165. 15 Ibid., 166.16 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 73.17 Geoffrey Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,” in Image and Imagination, ed. Martha Langford (Montreal: Mc-Gill-Queen’sUniversity Press and Le Mois de la Photo, 2005), 268. 18 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 55. 19 Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in Image Music Text, ed. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977): 66.20 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 27.21 Ibid., 23.22 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 55.

23 Ibid., 43. 24 James Elkins, “Critical Response: What Do We Want Photography to Be? A Response to Michael Fried,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2005): 938. 25 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26.26 Michael Fried, “Barthes’s Punctum.” In Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. ed. Geoffrey Batchen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 152.27 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 94.28 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 16.29 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96. 30 Ibid.31 Ibid., 15. 32 Ibid., 93. 33 Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image Music Text, ed. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977), 44.34 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 93.35 Ibid., 4.36 Keri A. Berg, “The Imperalist Lens: Du Camp, Salzmann and Early French Photography,” Early Popular Visual Culture 6 (April 2008): 4. 37 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 97.38 Given that the Second Empire was a period of increased French colonial expansion, Abigail Solomon-Godeau writes that “showing so much of the world to be empty was unconsciously assimilated to the justifications for an expanding empire.”See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions andPractices. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 159.39 Few contemporary buildings were photographed, most notably the Crystal Palace inLondon and the New Louvre in Paris.40 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 79-80.41 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 41.42 Roland Barthes, “Shock-Photos,” in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 71. 43 Ibid.44 In Camera Lucida, only two photographs are absent of people: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s The Dinner Table (1823) and Daniel Boudinet’s Polaroid (1979). The tension in both photographs exists because of a sense of a human presence. Polaroid, the most recent image depicted in the text, is the only color one; it is printed on glossy paper and framed by a line, yet Barthes never refers to it.45 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 111.46 Ibid.47 Ibid., 96-7.48 Ibid., 81.49 Ibid.50 Ibid., 45.51 Ibid., 38.52 Ibid.53 Ibid., 40.