Output details

Punctum.

A photographic film which makes use of the snapshot and focuses upon memory and loss

This research explores how the potency of the photographic image – specifically the family snapshot – can be regarded not only as a site of memory but also a site of mourning. Drawing upon the filmic and photographic it applies and articulates through practice Roland Barthes’ concept of punctum as discussed in Camera Lucida (1981, reprinted 2000). As Barthes states, ‘A photograph’s punctum is that accident that pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’ (2000:27). Punctum examines whether there can be a commonality of viewer emotional response and whether the punctum response, as defined by Barthes, can be triggered through prefabricated vernacular sounds and images. Barthes own exposition has at its rhizome a found photograph of his Mother as a small child; similarly this practice-based research knowingly selects, films and exhibits prefabricated photographs which can readily be generalised by the viewer to those found within family albums.

The research explores this punctum response by articulating through film and image that strange affective dimension at the heart of photography – the idea that the specificity of the photographic medium allows for a paradoxical presentation of a future yet to come (a piercing and wounding quality), as well as the compelling presentation of a moment of the past in the present. The film Punctum creates a sense of nostalgia – including a knowingness of what used to be. Barthes renders this as an awareness of the catastrophe of what is to come, the image being a petit mort – each photograph a tiny death, where the

moment, however joyful or otherwise, has ‘passed’. Through visual stillness (a locked off film camera and prefabricated vernacular photographic images) and the use of demotic sound (aging working class voices) the research offers a manifestation of Barthes’ theorisations and offers insight through a creative exposition of his theory.