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Space and Culture

Barthes Space of Confinement: Affect, Virtuality and the Photographic Punctum
Roland Barthes (1981) wrote that cameras were clocks for seeing (15) which show us the passage of time.This has a certain affinity but is not precisely the same as Bergsons conception ot duration or dure. The Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of Look, See and here it is; it points a finger at certain vis--vis, and cannot escape this pure deictic language (5).

However, gesturing with the camera must, like mannerisms, be social as well as cultural.Barthes structuralism picks up on the embeddedness of the photograph within interaction by identifying both a literal studium and also a more virtual punctum of photographs, a kind of subtle beyond (57), which a text by Tonya Davidson reminded me refers to how the photograph becomes performed through the spectator. The mobile phone camera is a different performance and the digital images are complemented by a different spectatorship which looks for the punctum rather than the studium.The question or problem of the mobile phone image is much more strongly not one of literal content but of what is/was passing through the moment captured in the time of the image.The time-image and movement-image do not coincide.Although the moment captured is past and, as one says, gone (where?), the movement or flow of time and events which passed through the moment continues into the present of the spectator.In this way, an understanding of mobile phone images seems to be less dominated by the questions of death and the irretrievability of the past which preoccupy Barthes (his central example is a photograph of his dead mother).The image blurs the distinction between a present spectator alive to the image, and the liveliness of the past moment captured by the image its virtuality. In this way the image is part of an affective relation between a then and there and a here and now.As in Spinozas sense, this affect (influence) is virtual.It denotes the unsaid, unacknowledged, tacit aspects of a relation, as in when one shrinks from meeting a person one sees coming towards one.Affect is thus an indicator of not just tension or attraction but of power: that is, the being of a certain Other expands or contracts my own capacity to act and self-actualize freely.The mobile phone image also participates in this affective power relation (Barthes relation to his departed mother, for example).The image can be a space of confinement to borrow a phrase from Olga Pak.In as much as it is taken by an individual and immediately shown around the rest of a party as a prop in an ongoing social scene, it is doubly taken up in a weave of affect which involves domination and subordination, leadership and assertion, acquiescence and faith. Mobile phones, like other devices which make images become third eyes: apparently impersonal witnesses whose images bolster certainty and confidence in a particular
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perspective because they are so often apparently at one remove from the photographer.The tradition of the naturalism of the snapshot, its unaffected realism and affinity to whats just there makes it difficult to see the full intentionality of the photographer.Yet both the studium and punctum of the images, what passes through the photographic glance, like the momentary flicker of alarm on a subjects face, acquires the air of an authorized version of the moment.Affects that do not pass through the image captured in a particular moment slip away.Mobile phone images made by holding the phone at arms length and turning it on oneself and ones group or party further amplifies this memorial quality and the sense of the phone as an actant (Latour) or prop participating in and affecting the ongoing interaction in ways which may not be obvious to the photographer, the spectator(s) or the participants. What passes through the mobile phone image, the punctum or virtuality of an ongoing flow of action rather than the instant or composition itself is doubled by the intercession of the image in an ongoing interaction and play of affect.Affect and influence point us to power and a certain authority which is itself virtual and which is an outcome of a selective capturing of affect as the puntum of the image.

This was written by Anne Galloway. Posted on Thursday, November 2, 2006, at 16:12. Filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

punctum. El studium, tiene que ver con la cultura y el gusto. Puede interesarme una fotografa, incluso a veces emocionarme, pero con una emocin impulsada racionalmente, por una cultura moral y poltica. Muchas fotografas permanecen inertes bajo mi mirada. Pero incluso entre aquellas que poseen alguna clase de existencia ante mis ojos, la mayora tan solo provocan un inters general () . Me complacen o no pero no me marcan. La fotografa puede gritar pero nunca herir. No hay ningn punctum. El punctum de una fotografia seala Barthes es ese azar que en ella me despunta. Surge de la escena como una flecha que viene a clavarse. El punctum puede llenar toda la foto (....) aunque muy a menudo slo es una detalle que deviene algo proustiano: es algo ntimo y a menudo innombrable