Five questions on Punctum

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Five Questions

1) how do i pronounce it.
2) is it possible for a creator to manufacture false punctum
3) is it possible for a creator to erase punctum
4) has this erasing and creating been a strategy in a variety of photography post 1970 (ie Belchers, Levine, Sherman, Bergin, Pierre et Gilles, Waters, Baltz, even Shore...)
5) is this strategy functional, is it working?

thanks

― anthony easton (anthony), Thursday, 20 April 2006 03:53 (twenty years ago)

"false" punctum? is there a series of tests an act must pass before it may be genuinely designated as punctum - and are there acts which only appear to pass these tests but don't?

― Tracey Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:03 (twenty years ago)

for instance, a fork and piece of leftover egg. left there from the breakfast the lovely Emma B ate with me before she had to leave again. when i pass it in the kitchen, i see it and it shocks me, my heart is grabbed. could this be "false"? it's an interesting question that i don't know the answer to. but if it were false, this grabbing, this hole, it wouldn't have anything to do with the "creator" of it - emma, whose hand held the fork, whose mouth ate the egg - and i can't imagine anything she could do to erase it.

― Tracey Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:07 (twenty years ago)

okay, but that is random, right--thats barthes whole point, that punctum is random, that it cannot be created--so what happens if the lovely emma b left the fork, the plate, the egg, for you to find, because she wanted to manipulate yr behaviour in some way, she wanted to get the heartswell, is that punctum

― anthony easton (anthony), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:15 (twenty years ago)

why that little --

anthony i feel like you want a definite definition of what this Thing is, clearly demarcated, and i'm afraid i don't know. does the fact that a subbornly mute signifier that leaps out at us was created specifically for this purpose put it into a category beyond, or less than, "punctum"? i don't know. what are the stakes, though? why would it matter?

― Tracey Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:25 (twenty years ago)

maybe its the aspie in me, im mostly interested in what happens when photgs try to destroy punctum

― anthony easton (anthony), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:27 (twenty years ago)

What about a photograph of a wall, a wall that has been painted white? Punctum or no?

― fields of salmon (fieldsofsalmon), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:33 (twenty years ago)

victor burgin, who did a peice in the mid 70s, where he took 21 photos of horizontal floor boards, and taped them down, on the diagonal, like camaflauge...

punctum or no?

― anthony easton (anthony), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:35 (twenty years ago)

isn't that incredibly subjective though? i haven't seen it so it's hard for me to answer, in any case. if i could "get" the punctum from one sentence i doubt burgin would have bothered making the piece in the first place.

i feel bad that i can't answer better so i'm going to give you this picture of the first day of the 2006 livestock show in ft. worth.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v134/tracerhand/ftworth_livestockshow.jpg

― Tracey Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:38 (twenty years ago)

The punctum in this instance is the one yellow flag.

― fields of salmon (fieldsofsalmon), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:39 (twenty years ago)

or the two american flags in the foreground. tracer i dont want answers, i want conversation...

and i cant find a foto of burgins peice, dammit

― anthony easton (anthony), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:46 (twenty years ago)

1) pünk-t&601;mb
2) yes
3) yes
4) haha i know shit about photography
5) ditto
6) (i also know shit about how to actually pronounce the word)
7) but on the other hand, maybe we can see an analogy in the fake-realness than became real-fakeness of the alterna video style in the mid-late 90s? where i think it was a dead end and didn't really pay off because once fake-real turned into real-fake then retrospectively the fake-real became real-fake too, but with sort of an irritating harmonic frequency of erased fake-real left over. by whcih i mean, i guess, that a strategy that relies on manipulation ages terribly quickly when the viewer catches on.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:48 (twenty years ago)

er, rather, 1) pünk-təmb

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:49 (twenty years ago)

how do we define fake and real, was barthes just remixing pascal (the heart knows what it knows?)

― anthony easton (anthony), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:51 (twenty years ago)

More threads like this please ILX.

― Dan I. (Dan I.), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:55 (twenty years ago)

Does anyone have some links on Bathes or anyone else's essays on this idea? I have to admit I've not heard about it and as I'm quite interested in photohgraphy it sounds very interesting.

I like the cognitive dissonance that'd be suggested by photografed floorboards on a diagonal.

― Trayce (trayce), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:58 (twenty years ago)

Barthes that is - I need a spellchecker.

― Trayce (trayce), Thursday, 20 April 2006 04:58 (twenty years ago)

death to false punctum!

― 25 yr old slacker cokehead (Enrique), Thursday, 20 April 2006 11:23 (twenty years ago)

worrying about "false punctum" is like assuming that drama will fail to move because it's delivered by actors, so can't be "real"

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 20 April 2006 11:32 (twenty years ago)

the punctum in the horses photo is the fact that the arena looks like carpet!

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 20 April 2006 11:34 (twenty years ago)

Have you looked at Geoff Dyer's recent book on photography - The Ongoing Moment - Anthony? It's interesting in terms of recent American photographers and their strategies wrt tradition and novelty.

Derrida's elegy for Barthes is also interesting on the musical co-dependence of punctum and studium.

― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Thursday, 20 April 2006 11:37 (twenty years ago)

i hate geoff dyer >:(

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 20 April 2006 11:39 (twenty years ago)

its on my list jerry, where can i find the derrida essay, why do you hate dyer, what does it mean that we see that photo and see 3 different punctums

― anthony easton (anthony), Thursday, 20 April 2006 21:29 (twenty years ago)

punctum is by RB's defn eye-of-the-beholder -- something necessarily overlooked by the photographer which reads with great pathos and intensity for a viewer

they are often marks of times past

i dislike dyer bcz i. he is a top-downifier who mistakes himself for a radical, and
ii. (related) he aestheticises everything

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 20 April 2006 21:37 (twenty years ago)

top downifier? whats wrong with aesthectizing everything, isnt that what photogging is about

― anthony easton (anthony), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:05 (twenty years ago)

no! punctum is the deflation of aesthetics!

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:08 (twenty years ago)

I'm just waiting until this turns into a discussion of jizz frankly.

― Dan I. (Dan I.), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:12 (twenty years ago)

spunctum

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:13 (twenty years ago)

DO NOT GET PUNCT'UM. DO NOT DEFLATE THE AESTHETICS OF BLOOMP
http://www.filmhobbit.com/moviereviews/movie-images/news/reporters/akob.JPG

― Dan I. (Dan I.), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:16 (twenty years ago)

Anthony I'm deeply sorry about all this

― Dan I. (Dan I.), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:21 (twenty years ago)

wait a minute i got it - the haircuts in "boogie nights" are false punctum!

― Tracey Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:27 (twenty years ago)

but they are carefully scripted by the film's hair researchers!

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:29 (twenty years ago)

hmm

― Tracey Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:31 (twenty years ago)

they still seemed too modern to me though

― Tracey Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:32 (twenty years ago)

if you had implanted false memories or sense responses and something in a photo triggered feelings as a result of THEM, that might (just) be "false punctum" -- but how would you know?

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:34 (twenty years ago)

harrison ford would come along and tell me eventually.

― Tracey Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:36 (twenty years ago)

if you photoshopped ned's face onto that pic of lewis paine on the way to being executed and told someone who didn't know ned that it was lewis paine and they had a spasm of timor mortis that wd be false punctum

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:36 (twenty years ago)

http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/CWPics/91894bv.jpg

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:37 (twenty years ago)

except i think it wd only be "false false punctum" cz yr timor mortis is genuine, even if it's generated by an error or a deception

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:39 (twenty years ago)

OK I guess no one does want to suggest any recommended reading then. Thanks, I guess :/

― Trayce (trayce), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:39 (twenty years ago)

i hate geoff dyer cz he takes no adequate position on the photoshopping of ned's face

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:39 (twenty years ago)

dude

― Tracey Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:40 (twenty years ago)

ok wheee i'm finally done at the office! c u monocled cats on the flippedy flop!

― Tracey Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:40 (twenty years ago)

sorry trayce -- the book the idea comes from = camera lucida by barthes, which is not very long in itself and very readable

i expect any number of things have been written about it

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:42 (twenty years ago)

geoff dyer's book on dh lawrence is really good! tho it's more like a book about his inability to write a book about dh lawrence.

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Thursday, 20 April 2006 22:47 (twenty years ago)

lets do a reading circle!

― anthony easton (anthony), Thursday, 20 April 2006 23:28 (twenty years ago)

Ta Mark :)

― Trayce (trayce), Friday, 21 April 2006 00:50 (twenty years ago)

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