It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories: the ungrateful daughter, the neglected father, children running on the grass, the motherland betrayed, first love. The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. “itsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death.” We have this description of its effect: Kitsch is the categorical denial of shit. Kundera goes to great lengths to qualify the nature of kitsch. One of the characters, Sabina, is an artist who, near the novel’s end, finds her aesthetic sensibilities at war with an oppressive and pervasive kitsch. Here, I draw on Milan Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It occurs to me that there is another way to account for the studium/ punctum delimiters. But in the end, such shots are landscape pornography. I respond with “Wow!” and (since I’m a photographer) “I wish I’d taken that.” As the image below attests, I try to achieve the same effect. posts images of mountains reflected in clear lakes and sunsets that light the sky on fire. Literalism is studium punctum disrupts the unary photograph to produce multivalent readings.Įvery day, my twitter feed is filled with images from the studium. Pornography is studium punctum disrupts the sexual field to produce eroticism. “Ultimately,” he writes, “Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”īarthes offers illustrations. This points us to one of the virtues of a photograph: its subversive quality. It reminds us that the field is contingent. It is the detail which reveals the givenness of the studium. One might think of it as the black dot which disrupts the white page. In these images, no punctum: a certain shock - the literal can traumatize - but no disturbance the photograph can “shout,” not wound.Īccording to Barthes, punctum is the quality which breaks (or punctuates the studium. News photographs are very often unary (the unary photograph is not necessarily tranquil). The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, “unity” of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: “The subject,” says one handbook for amateur photographers, “must be simple, free of useless accessories this is called the Search for Unity.” a photograph which is all studium and no punctum: Barthes later refines his description by writing of the unary photograph i.e. What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training.Īt the risk of oversimplification, studium is what lies in the background it is our assumptions, the visual equivalent of our Sitz im Leben. Thousands of photographs consist of this field, and in these photographs I can, of course, take a kind of general interest, one that is even stirred sometimes, but in regard to them my emotion requires the rational intermediary of an ethical and political culture. He writes: “t has the extension of field” which “always refers to a classical body of information….” He goes on: While far from the last word on photography in this post-structuralist postmodern world of ours, and (as Geoff Dyer cautions in his forward) while far from the last word even in Barthes’ own thinking, nevertheless the studium/ punctum delimiters together form a useful point of departure when examining a contemporary photograph and asking: is this worth my attention?īarthes’ description is opaque and I don’t claim to fully grasp it. In his Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes introduces the notions of studium and punctum to help us think about photographs.
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