Then I read the extended extract from Barthes late work on photography, Camera Lucida, and I did sense a shift of perception, and my approach to studying images, (which I suppose could be described as part early Barthes with a dash of Panofsky, Gombrich and Berger) suddenly seemed open to question. Equally, the ekphrastic poetry I had written over the past twenty years I began to re-evaluate - more positively I suppose as being worthwhile pieces of analysis rather than mere personal musings. I was excited. I don't do insomnia, but last night I woke at 4am thinking about the Studium and Punctum. Funnily enough every time I thought about the concept of 'punctum', it occurred in my head as punkdom. Whether this was some sort of unconscious acknowledgement of Barthes iconoclastic approach I am uncertain, it was milldy amusing anyway.
I read the extracts just days after having been to the Groeningemuseum in Bruges and the Klee show at the Tate Modern, so, after months of not seeing any paintings I came across Barthes having just had my pictorial imagination seriously stimulated and this I believe helps account for my strong reaction to Camera Lucida.
The thrust of the book, covers many things, it does focus in particular though on speculating why certain details of pictures provoke an unusually strong response in the observer who is 'wounded' by a detail and their mind takes off in unexpected directions - they become 'animated'. The focus on the internal experience of the spectator, the effects of still images on the 'affective consciousness', this runs counter to everything I've learned formally concerning the study of pictures.
My first forays into Art History centred on the fairly informal reading I had to do for A Level Art. For Mr. Fawcett, the art teacher at the grammar school I went to it would appear that Modernism never happened and his contextual lessons stopped dead at Cezanne. The books in the art room shelves were archaic too, but it did mean I became familiar with the thinking of some earlier Art Historians such as Berenson, who acknowledged the 'inner realm' of the spectator in his discussion of such things as 'tactile value' in painting. The other early influence was the BBC series 'Civilisation.' I realise now of course that Kenneth Clark was a highly conservative commentator, but he did introduce me to the forms of categorisation by period, style and genre that underpin much of Art History as a discipline to this day , Through the work of Panofsky and Gombrich, encountered at University these notions were broadened and deepened, by taking into account patronage, function and context into account, as well introducing me to iconography, which may be thought of as a precursor of semiotics. What all of these approaches do is suppress any serious consideration of 'personal response' as a valid area for reflection and promote an objective evaluation of the image in relation to other images - by discussions about style, genre and technique, or attempts to place the work within historical or political context.
What was also significant for me personally is the spirit in which enquiry was fostered. Subject boundaries were sacrosanct and any notion of interdisciplinary approaches regarded as suspect. I have a magpie mind and was prone to falling foul of unspoken niceties of academic decorum. Viewed from the comfort zone of late middle age then these adolescent faux pas seem amusing, but at the time were felt as hurtful. I remember one such incident in a seminar run by the lecturer in Modern Art, Dr. Causley. In a discussion of the sculpture of Giaocometti I put forward an idea that I had come across in the writing of R D Lang - in 'Sanity Madness and the Family' perhaps, that people suffering from schizophrenia sometimes saw the human figure as strangely elongated and the sculptor's work may be inteprated as a vision of the world as in some way 'mad'. Dr. Causley looked at me witheringly and said, "I once had tea with Alberto, and he seemed perfectly well to me". No wonder this gauche, awkward working class kid felt out of place, looking back it seems a miracle that I put up with the place so long, no wonder I dropped out at the start of year three.
In terms of academic content the two Open University modules on The Renaissance and Modern Art I studied a few years later still had been developed in a world as yet untouched by post modernism, but at least with open learning I did not have to put up with the stultifying effects and bourgeois tendencies of red-brick academia in the 1970's - which was more like 'Lucky Jim' than 'Small World'. It was when I qualified as a teacher and was sent off to be 'developed' as a lecturer in Communication Studies A Level at Edge Hill College that I was introduced to Saussure, Derrida and Barthes and sallied forth to preach the gospel of semiotics to the unsuspecting youth of Skelmersdale. Revolutionary though these ideas are, they do still retain a focus on the cultural object and how signs become mythologised revealing previously hidden hierarchies relating to class, power and gender. To put it in terms of the Camera Lucida, structuralism and semiotics exist in the realm of the studium and in this they have something in common with the more traditional methods of pictorial analysis that I was introduced to as an undergraduate. Why I found Barthes writing in Camera Lucida so liberating is that in developing the notion of 'punctum', Bathes 'legitimises' speculation on how images act upon the spectator in terms of emotional response, in some way rather than being radical, it's old fashioned, a new take on some of the speculation found in in Berenson on the workings of the tactile imagination.
Barthes approach is significant to me as a writer. I've always written poetry, from spotty teenage to balding middle age, and much more regularly in the past ten years Some of the work that has been best received has been about pictures - paintings and photographs - ekphrastic verse. I have never felt this to be simply the articulation of a personal response, a kind of art appreciation in verse, I have sensed that in using the sonnet as the primary medium for my ekphrastic musings, that I was undertaking some sort of analysis, but quite what kind of analysis and its relation to my formal education in Art History I have always been somewhat hazy about. Camera Lucida has both helped and challenged me here. It has helped because I can see how the structure of the sonnet allows you to switch subtly from studium mode to punctum. This has to do with the sonnet's size and structure.
At fourteen lines the sonnet is a short form taking less than a minute to read or the first time. So in some ways it has the pictorial quality of being apprehended quickly , though not quite so instantaneously as a photograph. has is rectlinear shaped is like a picture, it is an objet d'art as well as a text. Sometimes when I am writing, particularly re-drafting I feel that I'm whittling like a wood-sculptor or shaping like a potter molding a lump of clay on the wheel. Equally, however sonnets are also rhetorical devices, taking in the Shakespearean the of form an octet and sestet separated by the 'volta' and concluded with a pithy, pointed couplet. Such a tendency towards order, code and argument lies within the realm of the studium. whereas the shape, the capacity to inhabit the readers mind as an iconic entity edges towards Barthes notion of the punctum:
The effect is certain but unlocateable, it does not find its sign, its name; it is sharp and yet lands in a vague zone of myself. (Camera Lucida section 22)
The duality of the sonnet form, it's banality as Barthes would say, combined with a pithiness that comes from miniaturism and condensed expression, its capacity for and tradition of indulging in uncalled for rhetorical flourishes make it an ideal analytical tool to reflect on pictures. It is possible to move from a consideration of the banalities of the studium into reflection on the nature punctum within a small vivid space. Barthes insists that the punctum cannot be named "what I can name cannot prick me' and goes on to assert in section 21 that the 'pricked photograph...is at once brief and active' For Barthes this 'activity' seems incapable of articulation in words. I am not so sure, I think a consideration of this in relation to ekphrastic poetry would provoke an interesting debate.
Barthes talks of the relationship between studium and punctum as follows:
Henceforth I would have to cosent to combine two voices: the voice of banality (to say what everyone sees and knows) and the voice of singularity (to replenish such banality with all the élan of an emotion which belonged only to myself).”
Reading Camera Lucida has enabled me to realise why I was drawn to the sonnet to write about pictures, for it allows within, as Wordsworth put it, 'its narrow cell' free reign to the voice of banality and the voice of singularity. So in the example below there is much 'blustering' in the first sonnet concerning the studium - 'the salon', Ingres, and so on, until the writer happen upon the punctum - Olympia's 'sloe-black gaze'. Then something quite extraordinary happens. Barthes, talking about Robert Mapplethorpe's self portrait writes 'it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me.' Something similar occurs in these sonnets. It takes until line fourteen of the first poem for the writer to escape the frame and the punctum to materialise. The writer is captivated by Olympia's gaze, but through this process is able to capture what the naked woman sees, not himself, the banal spectator, but the sunny garden in the painting opposite.
Olympia
His ‘yellow bellied odalisque', half painted
half sketched, outraged the Salon's bourgeois passion.
They strung her up well out of reach. Acquainted
with Ingres’ languid goddesses, high fashion
extolled coy Venuses with moist eyes rolling
in servile ecstasy. Olympia’s gaze
confounds voyeurs by craftily controlling
ardent males; drawn by her power to amaze,
they sense too late Manet, not God, created
woman. Anonymous bouquets from doting
suitors, haughtily she ignores. Defeated,
admirers pay out handsomely for nothing:
no painted lady proffers carnal pleasure,
that sloe-black stare remains her only treasure.
Olympia's Reply
All day I watch my onlookers pass by;
I know each one: the quiet connoisseur,
the withering critic and the shy voyeur.
They choose to see behind my hawkish eye
the artist's role, the calculated stare
that seeks delight in mawkish male discomfort.
They cannot own me, though I may be bought,
it's their desire, not mine, that I lay bare.
Admirers, I dismiss with cool disdain.
Instead, all through the empty evening hours,
I contemplate the Monet opposite;
disregarded, I delight in the mundane -
the breezy sky, a garden full of flowers,
and Summer days, eternally sunlit.
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