The Sound of Silence: On Photography and Trauma (original) (raw)

THE THEATRICALITY OF THE PUNCTUM : RE-VIEWING ROLAND BARTHES' CAMERA LUCIDA

I first encountered Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (1980) in 2012 when I was developing a performance on falling and photography. Since then I have re-encountered Barthes’s book annually as part of my practice-as-research PhD project on the relationships between performance and photography. This research project seeks to make performance work in response to Barthes’s book – to practice with Barthes in an exploration of theatricality, materiality and affect. This photo-essay weaves critical discourse with performance documentation to explore my relationship to Barthes’s book. Responding to Michael Fried’s claim that Barthes’s Camera Lucida is an exercise in “antitheatrical critical thought” (Fried 2008, 98) the essay seeks to re-view debates on theatricality and anti-theatricality in and around Camera Lucida. Specifically, by exploring Barthes’s conceptualisation of the pose I discuss how performance practice might re-theatricalise the punctum and challenge a supposed antitheatricalism in Barthes’s text. Additionally, I argue for Barthes’s book as an example of philosophy as performance and for my own work as an instance of performance philosophy.

Reading ‘Studium’ and ‘Punctum’ in Steve McCurry and Raghu Rai’s Photography

Trames. Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2017

The paper attempts to study 'studium' and 'punctum' proposed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida with reference to the prominent photographers, Steve McCurry and Raghu Rai. It deals with the orientalist and occidentalist photographic gaze that primarily investigates the imaging of India. Steve McCurry delves on the intersubjective cultural spaces that diffract from the reciprocal exchange of images and Derridian notion of 'interiority/exteriority'. For McCurry, photography is not a technological miracle, rather it is an extension that is evoked from the consensual relationship between the photographer and the photographic subject. Raghu Rai on the other side chooses to acknowledge reflections of the societal attitude that transform the art of living. He depicts the subject's expression that explores the objective view of images. Hence, the paper focuses on the cultural longing and intricate relationship between cultural paradigms of the referential signs of the photographic image.

Photography, dance and the concept of punctum

2007

ed. Unlike the specific "trace" connection between the photograph and the subject, the choreographic journey is guided by the perception of the individual dancers and the choreographer. The factor of heautoscopy and the variability it negates, is therefore present from the very beginning of the dance communication system. It was often the Photograph's specificity that facilitated Barthes experience of punctum. However, the very different and inherently abstract way in which the dance traces the world creates a more open system that places more emphasis on the role of the viewer.