Photographs play an important role in all our lives, and for this reason they can also have therapeutic value. For example, when we take out a family album and look through snapshots of relatives and loved ones who have died, we may experience many different states of mind, ranging from nostalgia to reconciliation with the past, and even come to understand more clearly who we are through what we have been. How can such an intimate phenomenon be explained? Photographs may strike us because of the subject portrayed, the photographer’s point of view, their aesthetic form or their historical value; yet this kind of interest is often impersonal and not deeply involving. Beyond this, the photographic medium tends to return an element that, for reasons that are difficult to explain, establishes a profound bond with the person looking at the image: with that person alone and with no one else. These complementary aspects are what Roland Barthes called, respectively, the Studium and the Punctum of photography. In this article we will see how the Punctum makes possible that inexplicable significance of photographs that involves us so personally and that has important implications for phototherapy.
PRELIMINARY REMARKS: PHOTOGRAPHS IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THERAPY
For Linda Berman, the value of photography in psychoanalytic therapy lies in the exceptional route it can provide into the unconscious, because through photographs the patient can come into contact with behaviours and traumatic experiences that have left their mark. Images can trigger, through an associative chain, a series of emotionally charged memories. They revive the shadows of a forgotten past pushed out of waking consciousness, a past that nevertheless continues to exert its influence in the present. Photographs can help us face our problems by bringing us face to face with internalized monsters that, in pathological cases, interfere with everyday life. Once a relationship of trust with the therapist has been established—a prerequisite for a successful therapy—the return of repressed material must be followed by the search for a unifying meaning in the symbols, metaphors and enigmatic messages that the patient draws from photographs and translates into words. Meaning, in fact, can be found not only in the subject’s discourse but also in the selected photographs, most often taken from private albums. During the working-through phase, the continuous re-examination of issues brought to light through image analysis aims to clarify blocks and defence mechanisms so that a painful situation can be reframed in a way that is more adaptive for the patient. This also makes it possible to observe how attitudes toward a photograph have changed and therefore to use the image as a measure for monitoring changes within ourselves. The factor underlying the psychological and cognitive process of identifying, understanding and restructuring lived experience, briefly outlined above, concerns two aspects of photography that are at once obvious and often overlooked: its Punctum and its attestation of the existence of what has been. To clarify these concepts as well as possible, I will draw on Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, devoting a separate section to each.
STUDIUM AND PUNCTUM: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL INQUIRY
Barthes begins by asking how the photographic image differs from the wider community of images that pervade consumer society, and whether it possesses a “genius” of its own. In principle, nothing would prevent us from classifying photography into aesthetic or rhetorical genres, as is done with painting; yet such a classification would remain external to its object and unrelated to its essence. There are professionals and amateurs, landscape photography and the nude, and one might even, with the retrospective logic of historiographical classification, identify movements with a certain unity of purpose, such as experimentalism, conceptualism, pictorialism and so on. But is this enough? In what way could a photograph claim autonomy? At first we might say that a painting and a photograph are always a painting and a photograph of something or someone. Both have a content that determines their referent, but this determination proceeds in very different ways and rests on very different assumptions. In the case of painting, the artist may use a model merely as a point of departure and progressively distance the work from it; the photograph, by contrast, remains inseparable from its referent. Painting represents the object, whereas the photograph simply presents it without simulating it. In a painting, the pipe—to recall René Magritte—is never merely a pipe, but a composite mixture of preparatory drawings, pigments and intentional choices that refer back to an active mind that selects, controls and deliberates. As a creative act, the painting elevates what it depicts, rescuing it from the relentless passage of time and preserving it as an archetypal example. Photography, on the other hand, is wholly burdened by contingency, of which, for Barthes, it is the transparent and lightweight envelope. It is indexical because it is as though it were pointing a finger toward whatever stood at the opposite end of the camera lens. By its very nature, photography has something tautological about it: a photograph of a pipe is, inexorably, a pipe. There is no substantial distinction between the technique through which an image is acquired and the thing that the image is of; the two factors of the equation always coincide. If photography is therefore condemned to depend upon its immediate referent, since without such a referent the photograph could not exist, and if that toward which the photograph “points” is a fleeting and transitory instant, how can we hope to define its essence? At this point Barthes realizes that the inquiry must take an unusual and little-travelled path, borrowing the purpose and language of phenomenology: a somewhat distorted, vague and free phenomenology that accepts the liberty of analysis even when it means evading some of its own principles. We must begin again from what appears to the subject, from what is significant to that subject in a photograph, while placing aesthetic, historical and scientific judgements in brackets. What is needed, in other words, is a science of subjectivity capable of reasoning from its own moods in order to reach a general understanding of what makes photography—an uncertain and not fully consolidated art—so special. Faced with many photographs, we express judgements ranging from “I like it” to “how nice,” when our response is positive, and from “it leaves me indifferent” to “it bothers me,” and so on. This is a familiar and accepted approach. We recognize the components, practices or conditions of possibility of a photograph. On one side stands the Operator, the photographer; on the other, the Spectator, that is, all of us as we browse newspapers, books, archives and collections of photographs. There is also the person or thing photographed, the target of the referent, which Barthes calls the Spectrum; through its Latin root, the word preserves a semantic relation with spectacle and theatre. Once these three aspects have been identified, we can proceed further. Among the many photographs selected and filtered through culture, some produce subtle pleasures, as if they pointed Barthes toward an unspoken centre, while others leave us unmoved. The pleasure may derive, for example, from the style of the Operator or from the Spectrum displayed. Some photographs attract attention because of their political testimony and can be appreciated like good historical paintings. Interest is strengthened by general knowledge transmitted through the rational relay of moral culture and historical belonging. Many documentary photographs of war have this effect on us as observers. What strikes us most is the general information they carry, and on this basis we experience a kind of indefinite curiosity. Photojournalism and photographic reportage, through their capacity to testify to undeniable facts, lead us toward a moderate affect, an affect trained and prepared by education. How could we remain insensitive before images showing an uprising or signs such as ruined streets, death and suffering? The affect that emerges certainly involves some form of participation by the Spectator in relation to the Spectrum, but not one that necessarily produces a feeling of great intensity. Barthes finds in the Latin word Studium the term that best expresses a concerned, human interest in something. The Studium is our participation in the figures, expressions and settings that we seek out because they intrigue us, from the inventiveness of the Operator to the exotic quality of the Spectrum relative to our geographical position as Spectators. With regard to the Operator, we may be captivated by the chiaroscuro and plays of light of Bill Brandt or by the abstract compositions of Alfred Stieglitz; with regard to the Spectrum, we may be astonished by Diane Arbus’s freaks or by Karl Blossfeldt’s buds and plant seeds. All of this, however, carries us only so far and does not exhaust the object of Barthes’s inquiry. Alongside the Studium there is a second element that breaks through it: the Punctum. The Punctum is what pricks, what produces the puncture of a sharp instrument; it is a small hole or stain, but also the fatal element in a photograph that seizes us. The most remarkable aspect of the Punctum is that it comes to us without our consent. We do not voluntarily look for it; rather, it is the Punctum that catches us unprepared and strikes with the precision of an arrow hitting its target. Here affect becomes more intense and less controllable. At times we do not even consciously notice it, because our higher consciousness is occupied with the field of the Studium; yet we cannot avoid perceiving the Punctum, even unconsciously. It reveals in the photographed subjects what had been well hidden, what the actors on the scene—since every individual in front of a lens becomes an actor through the forced pose—did not know or were not aware of. To grasp the Punctum, no special act of reflection is required. Barthes says, emphatically, that it is enough for the photograph to be large and that, in order to see it well, it may even be better to raise one’s head or close one’s eyes. The rest follows by itself. What we mean by this Latin term can encompass a wide range of referents whose specificity lies in the fact that they exist only within a privileged and exclusive relationship with the observer. If the Studium can be grasped in a similar way by anyone who shares a minimum of common knowledge, as happens with worn, distant photographs that serve as a pretext for an ethnological desire to learn the customs of a population, the Punctum is inviolably unique and unrepeatable. Yet the two cannot be separated and kept apart, because both are co-present on the two-dimensional surface of the photograph. We can thus move to the second fundamental concept in Barthes’s analysis, closely connected with the distinction between Studium and Punctum.
WHAT-HAS-BEEN: PHOTOGRAPHY AS AN ATTESTATION OF EXISTENCE
We have said that the Punctum denotes an intimate quality that the observer, as Spectator, establishes with a photograph. It is something that involves participatory affect and pain. It may prepare the way for a shock or represent a moment of sudden revelation, an epiphany. This is what happened for Barthes with his photograph of the Winter Garden, the only photograph that for him truly exists. It is an old photograph, its corners worn away, coloured in a dead sepia tone, showing two children standing together at the end of a small wooden bridge. One of them is the French writer’s mother at the age of five; the other is her seven-year-old brother. Why does Barthes feel this photograph so intensely? What is its Punctum? In the girl’s face, Barthes found again the absolute innocence and goodness that had shaped the being of his adult mother without having been inherited from anyone. In other photographs, by contrast, Barthes recognized only a region of his mother’s face, the relation between her nose and forehead, or the movement of her arms. He saw her in pieces, yet she escaped him as a whole: he recognized differences, but not her essence. The Winter Garden photograph returns a sensation as certain as memory. The reason is that a photograph gives us certainty that what it depicts existed. Every photograph certifies, in black and white, that whatever stood beyond the camera shutter was there in flesh and blood. In photography, unlike imitation or illustration, one can never deny that the thing has been there. Reality and the past enter into a harmonious and non-contradictory conjunction. The noema of photography—its pure essence—is the past tense of the “that-has-been.” Although Barthes’s mother was dead, the Winter Garden photograph restored the truth of what she had been and had always been, because at the moment of the exposure she had been there, illuminated by light. The undeniable presence of the living body impressed upon the film preserved the reality of its manifestation. Even when that presence has been lost, the photograph always proposes the what-has-been again and reactivates it. The Punctum, the radiating and unreachable nucleus that comes from the girl’s face and gestures as she stands slightly apart and smaller than her brother, acquires force and consistency through the living emanation of the referent. The photographic image is imago lucis opera expressa, an image “drawn out,” or “pressed out,” by the action of light. This is the source of the wonder we feel before a photograph belonging to our private diary. When we see ourselves in a snapshot or film recording, we are inwardly involved and participate with an active, even playful affect. Emotional participation arises from the identity relation we establish between the child or adolescent self—the Spectrum staring at us from the photograph—and the adult self who occupies the position of Spectator. We are spectres insofar as the photograph exhumes bodies that existed in the past but are now something else, or no longer exist, and yet undeniably have been. In an art-therapy session involving images, when a patient is asked to choose photographs to work with, they will usually consider those that best display certain salient features of their identity. Such photographs, as certificates of presence, expose a Punctum that is significant for the person who owns them. They are certificates of a past as certain as the present, just as what we see on the photographic paper feels as certain as what we can touch. This is why Barthes’s investigation into the essence, or noema, of photography eventually turns into an autobiographical confession of the pain and wounds he experienced in his relationship with his mother: a relationship woven from silences and loving care for a woman who, now elderly, had become childlike again, and whom Barthes cared for as though, in a reversal of roles, she were a daughter he himself had brought into the world. The inquiry had begun with the idea of outlining a pure science of the photograph, stripped of all accidental and empirical data, and arrived instead at the conclusion that total, participatory affect—guaranteed by the what-has-been—is photography’s distinctive trait.
CONCLUSION
Whenever we look at a photograph, two events may take place within us: one connected with the intellect, the other with emotions and memories. In the first case, we may use the image simply as a pretext to tell someone what we like or do not like about it—“I like it,” “I don’t”—or to show our children or display our latest car. In the second, photographs open up a rich, multifaceted and potentially infinite world because of the singularity of each individual. The same photograph can in fact provoke completely different, and sometimes unpredictable, reactions depending on the Punctum it awakens in one person but not in another. In the specific case of PdT, the effectiveness of the cards lies in the awakening of dormant fragments of the self that encounter a correspondence with what the photograph carries. This is a multidimensional value that can hardly ever be explained or exhausted once and for all unless we consider how every photograph is the indelible imprint—the stigmata—of a spectre that once existed and that continues to exist like an ever-living corpse.