Roland barthes photography12/27/2023 They captivate me and cultivate an instinctual urge to ‘work the scene’ and find a studium that fits the punctum that absorbs my attention at that moment. In any case, puncta are like portals that provide access to studia. They may also be very fleeting moments in time, which, to me, connects the concept of punctum to the decisive moment coined by Henri Cartier-Bresson. As I described above, these details could be anything. It’s not uncommon for me to encounter very specific details in my meanderings around the city and fixate on them intensely, with the urge to make a picture being only secondary. Having said all that, I feel the punctum concept to be much more relevant and useful when practicing street photography. Sometimes this is because I feel the scene should not be photographed for moral reasons (perhaps to preserve someone’s dignity and privacy in a difficult moment), but there have also been times when the scene simply did not make sense to me-the reason for the photograph was not clear enough. On occasion I put down the camera without pressing the shutter release, having decided that the photo is not worth taking. Sometimes the answers are simple, but other times they are not. In a sense, a photograph (and perhaps all art) is an answer to various questions that we ask ourselves in the process of its creation. As I bring my camera up to my eye, I ask myself why I am taking this particular photo. Of course, mindfulness is part of the equation as well, which means remaining in the moment, without judgment, accepting what I encounter. So, when I am out shooting in the city, I try to carefully consider why I am taking a particular photo. I can better feel which image has value (at least to me, but potentially to the viewer) if I can understand why I created it (the studium) and how it connects to me emotionally (the punctum). It also helps me in the editing and selection process. By understanding this, I can create images that are sharper and more poignant. Okay, I’ve inundated you with some fluffy ideas, but how is this useful? I find this formulation helps me understand why I shoot what I shoot and how it resonates with me in the moment of shooting. A punctum is just something in a scene that leads to an emotional response that is not directly connected to anything that can be easily explained with logic and language. Puncta can be anything: the way light hits an object, a peculiar geometric coincidence, a subtle expression or hand gesture, a texture or a color. Often, my attention finds them involuntarily and they may or not lead to the creation of a photo. These are the details that create a subconscious hook that naturally attracts me (my eye and mind) to a scene. As a photographer working in a scene, I may at one moment interpret many puncta. It may vary from moment to moment, and it is entirely subjective (whereas the studium is a mix of objective and subjective reality). On the other hand, a punctum may or may not exist in a photograph. It should also be emphasized that the studium encompasses the entire photograph, its context, the process of its creation, in fact everything about it. It is the because- I frame it this way because it tells the story I want to tell. The studium, to me, is the reasoning behind the image. Again, my goal here is not to explain, but to re-construct them into something useful for the practicing photographer. To convert these abstract concepts into practical creative tools, I find it necessary to somewhat modify their meaning, even with the risk of leaving Barthes’ original interpretation entirely. We as photographers merely seek them out, interpret them, and encode them into images (either analog or digital). To me, studia and puncta already exist out in the universe. Wikipedia summarizes the two concepts as such: “ studium denotes the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph, and punctum denotes the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it.” Whereas the book approaches photography from the standpoint of the viewer, I want to explore these concepts from the perspective of the photographer in the moment of actually creating a photograph. The book centers around studium and punctum.
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