![]() The studium speaks of the interest which we show in a photograph, the desire to study and understand what the meanings are in a photograph, to explore the relationship between the meanings and our own subjectivities. The studium refers to the range of meanings available and obvious to everyone it is unary and coded, the former term implying that the image is a unified and self-contained whole whose meaning can be taken in at a glance (without effort, or ‘thinking’) while the latter implies that the pictorial space is ordered in a universal, comprehensible way. In his personal-subjective-examination of multiple photographs, Barthes proceeded to note a duality that was characteristic of certain photographs: a ‘co-presence of two discontinuous elements’-what he terms, the stadium and the punctum. (This is comparable to Lacan’s version of the Real.) Furthermore, the subject that is photographed is rendered object, dispossessed of itself, thus becoming, ‘Death in person.’ (14) (*note that it is customary to say that a camera ‘ shoots’ a picture.) ![]() In order to distinguish what exactly sets photography apart from all other forms of representation, Barthes begins by noting a symptom of its ‘disorder’ (that which renders it ‘unclassifiable’ according to already-established standards): ‘the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially’ (4) its essence is the event, ‘that which is never transcended for the sake of something else.’ In other words, the photograph is never distinguished from its referent-that which it represents it simply is what it is (illustrated by the fact that one says ‘this is me’ when showing someone a photographic image of oneself, opposed to ‘this is a picture of me.’) When we look at a photograph, it is not the actual photo that we see, for the photograph itself is rendered invisible thus the photograph is unclassifiable, for it resists language, as it is without signs or marks-it simply is. ![]() The essential nature-or eidos- of this subjective experience of photography is defined by an irreducible singularity of the photographic image, as an index indicating, ‘ that-has-been.’ Barthes says that he wants, ‘a History of Looking’ (12), and in doing so, he attempts to account for the fundamental roles of emotion and subjectivity in the experience of and accounting for Photography. His efforts aim to fashion an altogether customized framework-one that is distinct from already-determined accounts of images and representation-in which one can ‘classify’ photography, so as to get at its essence, or noeme. The erotic photograph, on the contrary (and this is its very condition), does not make the sexual organs into a central object it may very well not show them at all it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me.The overall project of Barthe’s Camera Lucida is to determine a new mode of observation and, ultimately, a new consciousness by way of Photography. Pornography ordinarily represents the sexual organs, making them into a motionless object (a fetish), flattered like an idol that does not leave its niche for me, there is no punctum in the pornographic image at most it amuses me (and even then, boredom follows quickly). The presence (the dynamics) of this blind field is, I believe, what distinguishes the erotic photograph from the pornographic photograph. A proof a contrario: Mapplethorpe shifts his close-ups of genitalia from the pornographic to the erotic by photographing the fabric of underwear at very close range: the photograph is no longer unary, since I am interested in the texture of the material. Like a shop window which shows only one illuminated piece of jewelry, it is completely constituted by the presentation of only one thing: sex: no secondary, untimely object ever manages to half conceal, delay, or distract. ![]() It is always a naive photograph, without intention and without calculation. Nothing more homogeneous than a pornographic photograph. “Another unary photograph is the pornographic photograph (I am not saying the erotic photograph: the erotic is a pornographic that has been disturbed, fissured).
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