“Some soldiers with nuns behind them served as an example to explain what the punctum was to me… but when Bruce Gilden photographs a nun and some drag queens (New Orleans, 1973), the deliberate contrast produces no effect on me, except perhaps one of irritation. Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful… it does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object.”
Fried quoting Barthes’s Camera Lucida, framing his argument linking punctum and anti-theatricality.
“That is it; that is all Barthes has to say with respect to the punctum, about the point of view, the activity, of the photographer as distinct from the response of the viewer… it is enough to situate Camera Lucida in relation to the central current or tradition of anti-theatrical critical thought and pictorial practice that I have tried to show… Understood in this context, Barthes’s observation… that the detail that strikes him as a punctum could not do so had it been intended as such by the photographer is an anti-theatrical claim in that it implies a fundamental distinction, which goes back to Diderot, between ‘seeing’ and ‘being shown’.”
Fried argues.
