CHAPTER 1

RACE AND REPRODUCTIONIN CAMERA LUCIDA

In his influential study of photography, Camera Lucida: Reflectionson Photography, Roland Barthes famously makes himself the measureof photographic meaning. The book is his attempt "to formulatethe fundamental feature" of photography "starting from a fewpersonal impulses" (8–9). In other words, Barthes seeks to discoverthe essential characteristics of photography through his own particularresponses to images. It is this profoundly personal treatmentof photography that lends Camera Lucida both its most evocativepower and its most frustrating limitations.

Barthes's text has been tremendously important and generative,both theoretically and methodologically, for photography scholars.As his work has demonstrated, the personal can be a powerfulpoint of departure for critical analysis, but as feminist scholarshave insisted for decades, "the personal is political." ReconsideringBarthes's individual and idiosyncratic path to the universal in CameraLucida reveals the political import of his "personal impulses." Aclose reading of the text suggests that many of Barthes's most importantinsights are informed by complicated, and sometimes vexing,personal-political inclinations. Indeed, Barthes's very conception ofphotography is laden with anxieties about race and reproduction.

Barthes's attempts to define the punctum consistently registera sensation of racial or sexual inquietude. Further, although thepunctum is triggered by the photograph, it ultimately has little todo with the image itself. It is an inexplicable response called forth bya photograph, and its troubling, unsettling effect is always a shockand surprise. Barthes argues that the punctum "is a kind of subtle beyond—asif the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see" (59),and for him, the punctum is consistently that detail, that something in aphotograph, that triggers a relay of thoughts and emotions back into hispersonal history. The punctum is the trace that launches Barthes beyondthe that-has-been of the photograph, beyond the photograph's referentialdenotation, beyond what can be seen, and into his own memory and experience.The punctum unsettles the fixity of the image, making it availableto Barthes's private narrative.

The Punctum

Barthes defines the punctum in distinction to the studium. As manyscholars have rehearsed, he suggests that the studium includes the culturalknowledge that informs one's reading of a photograph; the studium isshaped by "a certain training" (26) that effects a culturally prescribed readingof a given visual field. The punctum is a much more personal responseto certain details in the photograph that "wound" or pierce an individualviewer, punctuating, or breaking through the trained reading of the studium(25–27). Barthes proclaims, "In order to perceive the punctum, noanalysis would be of any use to me." He thereby suggests that the punctumcannot be codified or predicted for any individual viewer. As readers ofBarthes's text, however, we can assess the examples he uses to describe thepunctum, and note the subtle patterns that inform them.

In a salient example, Barthes explains the workings of the punctumthrough his reaction to a photograph by James VanDerZee, a group portraitmade in 1926 (see figure 1.1). His studium description of the image isnotably condescending: he states that the photograph "utters respectability,family life, conformism, Sunday best, an effort of social advancement inorder to assume the White Man's attributes (an effort touching by reasonof its naïveté)" (43). Barthes's explanation of the studium is laden with apaternal racism that readers are asked to ignore in pursuit of that whichreally interests him, the punctum. He calls upon the studium as if it is apparent,transparent, as if this lovely formal portrait could not be read inany other way, as if all readers would share his bemused reaction to theimage and its subjects. While Barthes's reading might certainly be attributedto a predictable set of European cultural codes, readers are not askedto "see" those codes as part and parcel of the studium, but instead to seethrough them to the meaning Barthes presumes. In other words, CameraLucida asks readers to view a race-based paternalism as natural, or besidethe point, rather than as a culturally codified part of the studium to be putunder examination.

The foundation from which Barthes moves to a discussion of the punctum,his studium reading of the photograph by VanDerZee, is thus perplexing,and his extended rumination on the punctum vis-à-vis this photographis also curious. Considering the image further, Barthes proposes thatwhat truly interests him in the image, the punctum, the details that prickhim, are the strapped pumps worn by the woman who stands in the photograph.He notes: "Strange to say ... this particular punctum arouses greatsympathy in me, almost a kind of tenderness" (43). Here the shiny shoesof an unnamed woman provide the inexplicable something that compelshim and captures his imagination. But then the punctum shifts. Recallingthe photograph in a later explanation of the punctum as latent, as thedetail that haunts the viewer only after the image itself is no longer underview, only after it has been transformed into a visual memory,...