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Critical Response What Do We Want Photography to Be? A Response
to Michael FriedAuthor(s): JamesEkinsSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol.
31, No. 4 (Summer 2005), pp. 938-956Published by: The University of
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Critical Inquiry 31 (Summer 2005)
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938
1. I would argue two things about uses of the index and
indexicality in photography theory.First, such readings have made
use of a very selective reading of Peirces semiotic, ignoring
forexample the interdependence of all three kinds of signs; their
division into trichotomies accordingto function (what Peirce calls
rsts, seconds, and thirds); the fact that icon, index, and symbol
aretaken in relation to objects and that two other divisions name
signs in relations to themselves andto what Peirce calls
interpretants; and their ramication into divisions and even 59,049
cases. (Inshort: such readings are so abbreviated that it becomes
unclear in what sense they are citations ofPeirces semiotic at
all.) Second, uses of the index in photography theory have tended
to identifythe indexicality with cause and eect, so that the work
indexicality has beenmade to do couldoften have been done without
any reference to Peirce. These points are discussed in my WhatDoes
Peirces Sign SystemHave to Say to Art History?Culture, Theory, and
Critique 44, no. 1(2003): 522.
2. Roland Barthes,Camera Lucida, trans. RichardHoward (New York,
1981), p. 28; hereafterabbreviatedCL.
Critical Response:What Do We Want Photography to Be?A Response
to Michael Fried
James Elkins
Although Michael Fried is easy on previous readings of the
punctum, ithas arguably been one of the two most often misused
terms in recent pho-tography theory (the other candidate would be
Charles Peirces idea of in-dexicality).1 The punctum is used to
speak about viewers responses that aretaken to be idiosyncratic,
unpredictable, or essentially incommunicable;yet, by citing the
punctum to theorize such responses, historians and criticsmake it
public and accessible to other readers, which is, I take it, the
exactopposite of what Barthes intended. In eect the punctum becomes
an un-usual example of the studium, which Barthes disparagingly
calls a kind ofeducation.2
This problem of the punctum is nestled within the problem of
what canbest bemade ofCamera Lucida. It is strange that after all
the criticalwritingof the last twenty-ve years Barthess little
bookso he called it, re-minding us how much is really in itremains
a central text, cited almost
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Critical Inquiry / Summer 2005 939
3. See Jacques Derrida, The Deaths of Roland Barthes,TheWork of
Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault andMichael Naas (Chicago, 2001),
pp. 3167;Margaret Olin, TouchingPhotographs: Roland Barthess
Mistaken Identication,Representations,no. 80 (Fall 2002): 99118;
and GrahamAllen, Roland Barthes (London, 2003), chap. 9, Camera
Lucida: The ImpossibleText, pp. 12532. Allen argues very directly
thatCamera Lucida blends the discourse or languageof method
(theory) with a wholly personal discourse (of mourning) and thus
unsettles anddisturbs the very results it seems to present (Allen,
Roland Barthes, pp. 12526). Fried cites Olinsessay, noting that she
doubts the existence of theWinter Garden photograph, but does
notcomment on her argument that Barthess desire overwhelmed his
theory, compelling him toconstruct the photograph out of parts of
existing photographs. I take it the essential point is notthat the
photographmust decisively never have existed but that Barthes, the
author ofCameraLucida, needs to use photography to satisfy his
desire to possess or communewith his motherand that the desire
displaces the punctum, like an alibi (Olin, Touching Photographs,
pp. 115,112). It seems to me that in Olins essay the punctum in
Camera Lucida is too unreliable tocontribute to a theory of
photography. Another text that reads Barthess book as an exercise
inself-subversion is StamosMetzidakis, BarthesianDiscourse:Having
Your Cake and Eating ItToo,Romanic Review 91, no. 3 (2000):
33547.
4.Maynard saysCamera Lucida is not a sustained account of
photographs but is actuallyreductive to the subjects photographed,
taken substantively: usually people or details of them andtheir
attire (PatrickMaynard,The Engine of Visualization: Thinking
through Photography [Ithaca,N.Y., 1997], p. 13). A similar argument
regarding Barthess use of photography to make unrelatedpoints is
made in Jean-Michel Rabate, introduction toWriting the Image after
Roland Barthes, ed.Rabate (Philadelphia, Pa., 1997), pp. 116.
5. Nancy Shawcross,Roland Barthes on Photography: The Critical
Tradition in Perspective(Gainesville, Fla., 1997), pp. 6785.
Barthes introduces the third form in The Rustle of Language,trans.
RichardHoward (New York, 1986), p. 281.
by default as a source of insights about photographys essential
features(CL, p. 3). This is despite the fact that readings by
Derrida and others haveshown how the text fails to provide the
theory it initially promises and howit enacts that failure by
contradicting both its claims to universality (Iwanted to learn at
all costs what Photographywas in itself ) and toprivacy(what I can
name cannot really prick me [CL, pp. 3, 51]).3 For PatrickMaynard,
Camera Lucida has no purchase on photography at all and is in-stead
a meditation on mourning and representation that happens to
useimages as catalysts.4 Nancy Shawcross has argued that Camera
Lucida is anexperiment in what Barthes called the third form
between essay andnovel, making it unavailable, except by wilful
misreadings, as a source oftheory.5 Either way, it seems that
Camera Lucida is of limited value in thehistory or criticism of
photography. These criticisms, I take it, comprise ageneral
consensus; yet, at the same time,writers continue topluck
thepunc-tum out of the text in order to speak about private
experience. There isperhaps no better evidence of the disarray of
contemporary theorizing on
James Elkins teaches at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago and theUniversity College Cork, Ireland. His recent books
includeWhat Happened to ArtCriticism? and The Strange Place of
Religion in Contemporary Art. His webpage iswww.jameselkins.com
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940 James Elkins / Critical Response
6. Letmemention and dispense with what I thinkmay be an
objection to this equation of theclaim that the punctum is
unnoticed at the time of the making of the photograph and the
functionof being shown in the antitheatrical tradition. The case of
photography, so it might be said, isdierent from painting, where
the signs of the antitheatrical thematicsuch as, in Friedsexamples,
the open drawer in ChardinsThe Card Castle or the torn jacket in
Soap Bubbles (p. 553n. 16)are placed in the paintings by the
painters.When a photographer inadvertently includes a
photography than the fact that a book as problematic as Camera
Lucida isstill read and cited as a source of insights about
photography.
Michael Frieds Barthess Punctum is the kind of strong reading
thatCamera Lucida requires if it is going to be used as a source
for theorizingabout photography rather than an occasion for
reecting on the impossi-bility of building theories around personal
experiences of certain photo-graphs or as an opportunity to poach a
poetic concept. I expect Friedsreading will put a stop to some of
the looser uses of the punctum, not bydemonstrating how strange
Camera Lucida is (that doesnt seem to havehelped), but by making
explicit what is entailed in subscribing to the punc-tum. For
theory-building purposes Fried is right to stress that the
detailthat strikes . . . as a punctum could not do so had it been
intended as suchby the photographer (Michael Fried,
BarthessPunctum,Critical Inquiry31 [Spring 2005]: 546), precisely
because the point is arguable and pulls thepunctum out of its
solipsistic private-language doldrums. Fried links theclaim about
the absence of intentionality to what he calls the
antitheatricaltradition and, via a reading by Stephen Bann, to a
distinction made by Di-derot between seeing and being shown. The
punctum, Fried glosses,is seen by Barthes but not because it has
been shown to him by the pho-tographer, for whom, literally, it
does not exist. Regarding the second halfof Camera Lucida, in which
the passage of time is proposed as a punctum,Fried points out that
the sense of something being past, being historical,cannot be
perceived by the photographer or indeed by anyone else in
thepresent; hence the punctum understood as a sign of the passage
of time isanother guarantor of antitheatricality and a parallel
instance of seeingwithout being shown (p. 560).
BarthessPunctum is not an easy text to critique.
Itwouldbeunhelpful,I think, to criticize the reading of Barthes for
being narrow and selective;Fried knows it is both and has good
reasons. Nor would it be fruitful tocharacterize the essay as a
rescue mission directed at just a brief passage(one short section .
. . comprising a single page of print [p. 543]) in a textthat is
otherwise irrecoverable for theory. (How else could it be
rescued?)Barthess Punctum is a necessary reading in the specic
sense that it isimpelled by the thematic of antitheatricality that
Fried has explored overthe last twenty-ve years, and it is
supported by examples that have muchricher contexts elsewhere.6 I
take it that his work on the antitheatrical tra-dition is both
fundamental and indispensable for the interpretationofmod-
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Critical Inquiry / Summer 2005 941
feature that will gure, for some future viewer, as a punctum, it
is merely because thephotographer cannot not photograph that
feature. But Fried intends only a parallel of theappearance of not
having been shown, and he emphasizes that Barthes goes well beyond
anythingto be found in Diderot or for that matter any eighteenth-
or nineteenth-century critic or theoristby insisting that the
photograph carry within it a kind of ontological guarantee that it
was notintended to be [antitheatrical] by the photographer (p.
553).
7. Frieds work, I think, is exemplary of modernism and
formodernism, which is what I meanwhen I say that the reading in
BarthessPunctum is necessary. I discuss Friedsmodernism atlength in
TheMaster Narratives and Their Discontents (forthcoming); I have
also discussed his artcriticism (especially in regard to the
crucial dierence between having a claim, a position, and astance)
inWhat Happened to Art Criticism? (Chicago, 2003), pp. 6577; and I
have explored theclose relation between his forms of narrative
address and the claims he makes in my bookOurBeautiful, Dry, and
Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (New York, 2000), pp.
24652.
8. See Fried,Courbets Realism (Chicago, 1990), pp. 28283. The
footnote is anomalous in thatthe book is formattedwith endnotes
rather than footnotes, with only three exceptions, of whichthis is
the longest. It is an asterisked footnote, a full page long, less
than seven pages before the endof the booka genuine compositional
anomaly. I take that as an indication that even though thelogic is
consistent between the footnote and the context inCourbets Realism,
the historicalcontinuity between realism (in painting) and
photography remains troublesome. I thank JoelSnyder for alertingme
to this note, which Id forgotten.
ernism, so it wouldnt be sensible to approach Barthess Punctum
as if itcould open the question of antitheatricality or its
potential applications inthe present; those themes are in the
books, not in this essay.7
Barthess Punctum is a part of a work in progress on photography,
andI imagine that when the book appears much of the reaction will
center onthe jump in Frieds interests from painting to photography.
Its not just thatFried hasnt written much on photography (mainly a
page-long footnotethat hangs, anomalously, from a meditation on
realism in Courbets Real-ism); its thatmodernist criticismhas
longbeen identiedwith claimsaboutthe specicity of media that would
apparently prohibit the move inBarthess Punctum.8 I do not think
either of these points should be wor-risome. The footnote
inCourbets Realism contains several of theargumentsin Barthess
Punctum, including the parallel with Chardin and the crucialstress
on Barthess idea that the photographer can not not photograph
thepartial object at the same time as the total object. The note is
appended toa consideration of the properties of realism in Courbets
painting, and thepassage leading up to the note concludes: the
starkness of the oppositionbetween Realism and photography points
to their rootedness in the samehistorical conjuncture. Thus the
genealogical tree that could present pho-tography as a modernist
art form entangled with a problem of theatrical-ity was already in
place inCourbets Realism. The secondpoint, concerningthe specicity
ofmedia, may seem troublesome because in BarthessPunc-tum Fried
applies several of the same criteria to photography as he
hasapplied to painting, apparently breaching the medium-specicity
that hasbeen central to modernist criticism since Greenberg. But it
is one thing toclaim that some recent ambitious photography
increasingly has claimed
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942 James Elkins / Critical Response
9. Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting,Clement Greenberg: The
Collected Essays andCriticism, ed. JohnOBrian, 4 vols. (Chicago,
1993), 4:86.
10. See RosalindKrauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the
Age of the Post-MediumCondition (London, 1999).
for itself the scale and so to speak the address of abstract
painting (pp. 57071)a claim Ill consider at the end of this
responseand another to tryto learn at all costs what Photography
[is] in itself, as Barthes says (CL,p. 3). Fried doesnt write about
photography because it is faced with thetask of defeating theater
in and through the punctum (p. 568) but, I take it,in order to
justify the importance of some contemporary photographicpractices
by demonstrating their connections with themes that, as he saysin
the footnote inCourbets Realism,were rst articulated around
themid-dle of the eighteenth century. If this appears as a betrayal
of modernistfaith in media-specicity, I wonder if that isnt
becausemodernist criticismhas a structural inability to determine
what constitutes the specicity of amedium. Medium-specicity is
either presented as a givenan inherentset of properties comprising
all that [is] unique in the nature9 of eachmediumor else as an
historical fable, now jettisoned in the age of thepost-medium
condition.10 Barthess Punctum steps around that inbuiltand
unproductive choice by paying attention to the pressure exerted on
thepresent by the historically specic formsmediahave taken,while at
thesametime acknowledging the possibility that media co-opt
properties from oneanother, thereby rearranging, blurring, or
simply switching their historicalroles.
Given all that, it seems to me that the most interesting
questions to beasked about Barthess Punctum only appear when its
reading of the punc-tum is accepted. What I want to know then is:
What kind of photographydoes the newly theorized punctum give us?
Anda separate questionwhat kind of photography does Barthess
Punctum give us? Here Ill pro-pose features and kinds of
photographs that are compatible with thepunctum as it is read in
Barthess Punctum, but are not countenanced inthe essay. These new
features and examples bring Frieds reading into areasthat are, I
take it, not of interest to himareas that, as we know fromCam-era
Lucida, were also of no interest to Barthes. The point here is to
ask howstrictly the reading in Barthess Punctum constrains the
punctum andwhere antitheatricality and the punctum can go when it
comes to currentphotography. The answer to the latter question is:
much further than eitherFried or Barthes wants them to go.
For both Camera Lucida and Barthess Punctum, much depends onwhat
is made of phenomenology. Toward the end of a series of
acknowl-edgements that Barthess approach is nothing if not
personal, Fried re-
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Critical Inquiry / Summer 2005 943
11. First surprise: the rareaman with two heads, womanwith three
breasts, child with atail, etc.: all smiling. Second surprise: the
numen of historical painting, where we are shown themoment that the
normal eye cannot arrest: BaronGross Plague-House at
Jaa,whereBonaparte has just touched the plague victims and his hand
withdraws. This second surprise ishabitual to Painting, but a
surprise when it appears in photography. Fourth surprise:
thecontortions of technique: superimpressions, anamorphoses. Fifth
surprise: the trouvaille orlucky nd: an emir in native costume on
skis. Barthes does not approve of these surprisesbecause they are
orchestrated and therefore, as Fried emphasizes, shown to the
viewer instead oflying unseen in the images, waiting to be
discovered. Barthes says that relying on surprisemakesit necessary,
by a familiar reversal, to nd the surprise in all photography, in
photographyitself. Instead of searching out surprises, amateur
photographers say that whatever odds andends they photograph are
automatically notable (CL, pp. 3233).
12. Barthes copied this from a popularmagazine, which reported
the facts inaccurately:Edgertonsmilk-drop photos were made between
1932 and 1957. See Harold Edgerton, StoppingTime: The Photographs
of Harold Edgerton, ed. Gus Kayafas (New York, 1987), p. 126.
Kayafas tellsme that Edgerton produced about 20,000 negatives of
milk drops and destroyed all but two dozenor so; see Kayafas,
letter to the author, 1999.
marks that Barthess sense of phenomenology is one that, unlike
classicalphenomenology, attaches primary importance to desire and
mourning(pp. 539, 540). Barthes only mentions phenomenology twice
inCamera Lu-cida: once in a passage Fried quotes, in which Barthes
acknowledges thathis phenomenology is vague, casual, even cynical,
and again in section 14,in the course of expositing photographic
shock.
Shock (always, in section 14, in quotation marks), Barthes says,
isquite dierent from the punctum in that shock is less about
trau-matizing than revealing what had been hidden. Shock comes in
veavors, which Barthes calls surprises, also in quotation marks.11
Thethird surprise is prowess: For fty
years,HaroldD.Edgertonhaspho-tographed the explosion of a drop of
milk, to the millionth of a second.12
The only other comment Barthes has about prowess is in a
parenthesis ap-pended to this sentence: (little need to admit that
this kindof photographyneither touches nor even interestsme: I am
toomuchof a phenomenologistto like anything but appearances to my
own measure) (CL, p. 33). In thatone remark Barthes compresses a
massive rejectionso much of photog-raphy has to dowith appearances
incommensuratewith humanmeasurewith a signicant distortion of the
concept of phenomenology. This is notvague or casual phenomenology,
if only because it could be defendedby appealing to Merleau-Pontys
own rejection of scientic epistemologyand his interest in embodied
knowledge of the world. I assume Bartheswould not want to follow
that line of argument because it is also the casethat a photograph
of milk droplets can, in a reading wholly dependent
onMerleau-Ponty, elicit a strongly embodied reaction. How, in a
phenome-nological account, could a milk drop fail to be seen as if
it were human-scaled? Indeed, what can be apprehendedin Kants sense
of that term, in
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944 James Elkins / Critical Response
13. I use vernacular photography here to denote a set of
practices that include portraiture,journalism, street photography,
and the snapshot. See Douglas Nickel, Roland Barthes and
theSnapshot,History of Photography 24, no. 3 (2000): 23639. On
Barthess choice of images, see alsoOlin, Touching Photographs.
which it is opposed to what can be comprehendedwithout being
takenas an image made to our own measure?
I am not fond of this parenthesis of Barthess because the lack
of argu-ment on a point so crucial to the books axial themeof
embodiedexperiencecan only function, it seems to me, as a sign that
a region of photography isbeing hastily and arbitrarily closed o.
Photography is domestic and do-mesticated in Camera Lucida because
it is identied with what is called ver-nacular photography: Little
Italy, Idiot Children in an Institution, Savorgnande Brazza (CL,
pp. 46, 50, 52). Barthes is attracted to pictures of race, ofmental
debilitation, of romantically lost places and people, and above all
topictures of what he thinks are unusual costumes, demeanors, and
faces.13
But what if even vernacular photography included something less
human,less immediately freighted with national, social, ethnic, and
familial signif-icance, less perfectly suited to Barthess own
family history? What if theconcerted search for personal engagement
that impels Barthes in CameraLucida is better described as an
elaborate way of failing to nd a more dif-cult sense of
photography?
Consider this thought experiment: imagine the Winter Garden
photo-graphas good an exemplar of vernacular photography as any,
especiallysince it exists only in the collective imagination of
Barthess readersandtake your eyes o the central gures. Look
instead, in your minds eye, atthe things that surround the
children. You will see almost nothing. A bit ofrailing on a little
wooden bridge and a glassed-in conservatory is all thepicture
contains, provided your imagination does not add
anythingBarthesdoesnt mention (CL, p. 67). (When I tried this, I
foundmymemory addedsome details of their clothing and drooping
plants on either side.) The ab-sence of visual incident makes sense
because for Barthes the photographexists only as away to think
abouthismother; and,byextension, inBarthessaccount photographs are
opportunities to meditate on such things as thepassage of time and
the modulations of memory, loss, and pain.
If I perform this same exercise with any actual family snapshot,
some-thing quite dierent happens: I become aware of half-occluded
pieces offurniture, I notice a mess of foliage outside a window, I
see the overexposedglare of a white wallall the particular matter
of the world that was not thepoint of the photograph. Such details
can be hard to look at because theywill not adhere to my thoughts,
which remain bent on the photographssubject, the one the photograph
was meant to pluck out of the matrix in
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Critical Inquiry / Summer 2005 945
14. The argument I ammaking here is parallel to one made
byMaynard, Engine ofVisualization, pp. 2933, in reference to
scratches and doodles in aWalker Evans photograph,except
thatMaynard is not valorizing photographys incidentalmarks, but
considering it as asurface-marking technology (p. 34).
15. This is also where Barthess equation of photographswith
reproductions of photographsbecomes especially signicant. Fried
puts this quite accurately: for Barthes, being alone with
aphotograph seems above all to have meant being alone with the
reproduction of a photograph in abook or magazine (p. 563 n. 31).
Fried goes on to talk about Ruskin and reading, and hisobservation
about Barthess reliance onmagazines is nearly an argument that, for
Barthes, lookingat photographs is reading. Nothing is lost in
reproduction as far as Barthess theory is concerned.In Barthess
Punctum the physical presence of photographs is important, but not
such things asthe inevitable gloss of a photographs water-resistant
surface, the slight depth of its layers of grain,and the heft of
its paper backing (or the translucency and thickness of the plastic
support, in thecase of a light box). The stu that comprises
photographs gets a bit lost, even though it is not
which it is, in fact, embedded. Those nearly unseeable pieces
and forms,shapes and parts are the on-and-on of the world, its
apparently unendingsupply of usually dull and sometimes
uninterpretable stu, and forme theyare proof of a dierence between
whatever photography is and the agendasof vernacular photography in
particular.
Or take an example reproduced in Camera Lucida,Alexander
GardnersPortrait of Lewis Payne, the one of whom Barthes says the
punctum is: heis going to die (g. 1; CL, p. 96). All Barthes says
of the background is thatGardner photographed Lewis in his cell.
The wall is apparently two ironsheets, welded together with
enormous rivets. The photograph was takennot in Lewiss cell but in
theNavyYard inWashington, so it is possiblePaynewas posedon front
of a ship. But it goeswithout saying thatevendiscoveringthe exact
location would not remove the mass of apparently unimportantdetail
that is the photograph, apart from the small portion that depicts
thehandsome boy (CL, p. 96).14This isjust to be literal about itan
imageof scratches and scrapes on iron sheets, with a gure
interposed.
These ordinarily unnoticed forms can prick me, as the punctum is
sup-posed to do. But more often they thrive in my peripheral vision
like aninfestation. They resist interpretation not so much because
they are irrel-evant to the production and dissemination of
photographs, and certainlynot because they are likely to be
fragmentary and therefore illegible, butmainly because they tend to
be boring; they are only available to be seenbecause the photograph
has placed them there. In Gardners photograph Ind the
scratchesincluding those on the print itselfmore absorbingthan the
handsome boy, more wounding and bruising (to use two ofBarthess
words) than his shiny manacles or his prison-issue woollen shirtand
pants, and certainly more poignant than his xed, o-center stare(CL,
p. 27). What is this stu if not the texture of antitheatrical
meaning invernacular photography, seldom intended as such by the
photographerand rarely even noticed by viewers?15
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946 James Elkins / Critical Response
f igure 1. AlexanderGardner, Lewis Payne. (Apr. 1865). From
civilwarphotos.net
necessarily a sign of theatrical address and even though it is
not irrelevant in large-scaleinstallations like Struths
orWalls.
Peripheral stu is a problem for the punctum as it is presented
inBarthess Punctumnot because it disturbs the argument but because
itimplies that the punctum is wider, and wilder, than accounts of
vernacular
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Critical Inquiry / Summer 2005 947
16. This is addressed in a work in progress, written
againstCamera Lucida, tentatively titledCameraDolorosa: On Visual
Desperation. An excerpt has appeared as Harold EdgertonsRapatronic
Photographs of Atomic Tests,History of Photography 28, no. 1
(2004): 7481.
17. After transmission electronmicroscopes (TEMs) the next to be
developed were thescanning electronmicroscopes (SEMs). In the last
fteen years of the twentieth century there were
photography can admit. This is where my interests diverge from
Friedsreading and from Camera Lucida. I prefer another photography,
one thatis not vernacular, does not rely on gures or recognizable
scenes, that is lessclearly a mirror of any viewers memories.16
Vernacular photography is aparticular moment within photography and
no longer, I think, its mostcharacteristic one.
Fried mentions the subject I have in mind when he says digital
photo-graphs undermine the conditions of the punctum bymaking it
possible thata partial object in the photograph that might
otherwise prick or woundme may never have been part of a total
object, which itself may be a digitalconstruction (p. 563). In the
sentence just preceding that, Fried notes thatdigitalization
threatens to dissolve the adherence of the referent to
thephotograph, thus eroding the fundamental claim that the
photographercould not not photograph the partial object at the same
time as the totalobject. There are two claims here: rst, that
digitalizationmakes it possible(or easier, since darkroom
manipulations can generate the same result) todetach the referent
from the photograph; second, that this detachment canalso work
within the object, detaching the part object from the full object.I
am not convinced that the punctum, or the images antitheatricality,
arenecessarily threatened by either possibility. The presence and
ecacious-ness of the part object are independent of
digitalizationbecause theconceptof the part object arises from a
certain understanding of the internal struc-ture of pictures and
objects. Part objects can be found as readily in pho-tographs of
galaxies, which are assembled from layers of cleaned andenhanced
digital images, as in the background ofWessingsNicaragua. Nordoes
the detachment of the photograph from its referent threaten
theopera-tion of the punctum because photographs with subjects that
are wholly dig-itally constructed can be understood as having
overlooked elementswaitingto be discovered by each viewer. I take
it the perception of the presence ofoverlooked forms, like the
discovery of the part object, are eects of habitsof viewing we have
inherited from gural photography and painting; dig-itization is
epiphenomenal to those habits and does not aect them.On theother
hand particular nongural digital images can be understood as
ex-tensions, into unfamiliar territory, of the punctum and of
problems attend-ing antitheatricality. I will give one example.
A number of electron microscope technologies, all of them
digital, in-volve image-making procedures that are unknown in
previous photogra-phy.17 Scanning probe microscopes are an
interesting development in this
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948 James Elkins / Critical Response
also SPMs (scanning probemicroscopes), including STMs (scanning
tunnellingmicroscopes),AC-STMs, AFMs (atomic forcemicroscopes),
CFMs (chemical force microscopes), andat thevery end of the
centuryNSOMs (neareld scanning optical microscopes). See Newbury
andWilliams, The ElectronMicroscope; for CFMs, see AleksandrNoy,
Dmitri Vezenov, and CharlesLieber, Chemical ForceMicroscopy,Annual
Review of Materials Science 27, no. 1 (1997): 381421.Those basic
kinds subdivide into an astonishing number of evanescent
technologies: inelastictunnelling spectroscopy, ballistic electron
emissionmicroscopy, scanning spin-precessionmicroscopes, scanning
thermalmicroscopes, and a dozen others just between 1981 and 1995.
Theseand others are cited in H. KumarWickramasinghe, Progress in
Scanning ProbeMicroscopy,ActaMaterialia 48 (Jan. 2000): 34758. The
last few years have seen the development of
scanningcapacitancemicroscopes,magnetic resonance forcemicroscopes,
and atomic-resolutionacousticmicroscopes. See for example J.
Schmidt et al., Microwave-MixingScanning CapacitanceMicroscopy of
pn Junctions, Journal of Applied Physics, 15 Dec. 1999, pp.
709499.
18. A good introductory text is Scanning TunnelingMicroscopy I:
General Principles andApplications to Clean and Adsorbate-Covered
Surfaces, ed. Hans-JoachimGuntherodt and RolandWiesendanger (New
York, 1994). I thank Jie Liu for this reference.
19. See J. Terso and D. Hamann, Theory and Application for the
Scanning TunnellingMicroscope,Physical Review Letters, 20 June
1983, 19982001.
20. Nor are they electron orbitals, as is sometimes implied. See
the incisive essay by Eric Scerri,Have Orbitals Really Been
Observed? Journal of Chemical Education 77, no. 11 (2000): 149294.
Ithank Davis Baird for drawing this to my attention. It is possible
to locate individual chemicalbonds within singlemolecules; see
Barry Stipe, Tuning in to a SingleMolecule:
VibrationalSpectroscopywith Atomic Resolution,Current Opinion in
Solid State andMaterials Science 4(Oct. 1999): 42128, and B. C.
Stipe, M. A. Rezaei, andW. Ho,
Single-MoleculeVibrationalSpectroscopy andMicroscopy, Science, 12
June 1998, pp. 173235.
21. Amore extended study of this and other imaging technologies
is forthcoming as Six Storiesfrom the End of Representation. An
early paper is Eduard Chilla,W. Rohrbeck, andH.-J. Frohlich,Probing
of Surface AcousticWave Fields by a Novel Scanning
TunnellingMicroscopyTechnique:Eects of Topography,Applied Physics
Letters, 28 Dec. 1992, pp. 31079. I thank Eduard Chilla fora tour
of his lab.
regard because they do away with lenses altogether, substituting
a tinypencil-shaped tip that hovers just over the atoms in the
sample. By variousmeans, the tip registers the atoms presence,
typically by waving back andforth in response to the surface, and
that vibration generates the picture.
A kind of scanning probe microscope called a scanning tunnelling
mi-croscope (STM) produces pictures that can bemanipulated to look
like or-dinary surfaces (g. 2).18 Each lump in the topography is
said to representan atom, but, more precisely, STM images do not
resolve atoms at all; theymeasure a probability function, which
depends on the likelihood of elec-trons tunnelling between the
atoms of the sample and a tiny probe thathovers overhead.19 What
seem to be atoms as solid as little hills are reallymathematical
functions of properties of the atoms.20
One step further away from familiar vision is
theatomic-resolutionscan-ning acoustic tunnelling microscope
(SATM). The idea is tomake the sam-ple vibrate, using ordinary
sound waves of very high frequencies and towatch how individual
atoms move. Much of the work on SATMs has beendone in a laboratory
headed by Eduard Chilla at the Paul-Drude-Institutefor Solid State
Physics in Berlin.21 Initially, the problem was that the ma-
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Critical Inquiry / Summer 2005 949
22. As the probe tip scans over the surface of the gold crystal,
a tunnelling current passesbetween the gold atoms and the tip. That
current always goes straight from the tip to thetopography;
sometimes the current is vertical, and other times it is slanted.
The little ellipsesstand up vertically in the surface, and each
atom is at a particular place in its elliptical path whenthe probe
approaches. (All the atoms in the sample are in virtually identical
places because theimage is stroboscopically rapid in relation to
the size of the SAW.)When the tunnelling currentis colinear with
the atoms positionits displacement vectorthen the phase image
registers amaximum.When it is noncolinear, some intensity is
subtracted.Hence the phase image is apicture of added and
subtracted vectors, not topography in the ordinary sense. In
addition the
terials tended to vibrate far more quickly than the scanning
probe tip couldmanage, so that images of atoms were blurred. The
key was to add an al-ternating current to the circuit with a
slightly dierent frequency: then thetwo frequencies (the materials
own surface acoustic wave [SAW] and theadded AC frequency) mix,
producing a frequency that is much slower andcan be detected.
The result, in this experiment, is pictures of individual gold
atoms vi-brating. Figure 3 shows the phase (top) and amplitude
(bottom) of the at-oms vibrations. In such a close view, all the
atoms are in phase with oneanother so ideally the two pictures are
uniform when the sample is perfectand at. When the phase and
amplitude pictures are enlarged, they showsome ne structure, which
can be modelled by computer (g. 4).22
Consider what is being made visible in these images. These are
not im-ages of a surface (even a surface of atoms) because they
record tunnellingcurrent and not the view from one place. Nor are
they images of static ob-jects, but rather the mathematical
dierence of two frequencies; the objectand the scanning probe tip
were both vibrating in the range of 50,000 timesa second. They are
not pictures of heights and depths but of the orientationof
vectors. We are very far from light here, and yet, strangely, we
seem tobe looking at what appear to be solid objects.
Now, I do not think these are particularly interesting as
photographs;they are coarse and muddy, and their hidden geometry is
not that surpris-ing. They lack the density of meaning and the
aective power that viewers(not including me) might want to
associate with art.23 But they are full ofthings the operators
could not not capture, rich in accidents, and speck-ledwith . . .
sensitive points (CL, p. 27); they conform to thepunctum. Theyare
also, I nd, deeply absorptive and at the same time reective of
their
bright spotsthey should not be called atomsare elliptical
because the atoms are like littlespheres half-sunk in water: as
they vibrate elliptically, they trace out an ellipsoidal surface,
which iswhat the probe tip encounters. See T. Hesjedal, Chilla, and
Frohlich, Direct Visualization of theOscillation of Au (111)
Surface Atoms,Applied Physics Letters, 15 July 1996, pp. 35457
andScanning Acoustic TunnellingMicroscopy and Spectroscopy: A
Probing Tool for AcousticSurface Oscillations, Journal of Vacuum
Science and Technology B 15 (July 1997): 156972.
23. They do not lack density of scienticmeaning;muchmore can be
said about the hexagonsand ellipsoids that the computer simulation
reveals, and that is what is of interest to Chillas team.
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950 James Elkins / Critical Response
f igure 2. Gold crystal, (111) surface. (a) STM image. FromT.
Hesjedal,E. Chilla, and H.-J. Frohlich, Direct Visualization of the
Oscillation of Au(111) Surface Atoms,Applied Physics Letters, 15
July 1996, p. 355, g. 1a.
own medium and that mediums limitations, and for those reasons
theycannot be excluded from a modernist discourse intent on
capturing thehistorically signicant moments of realism.
What bothers me about attempts to revise or adapt Camera Lucida
isthat they follow Barthes in shrinking photography to the
dimensions ofvernacular image-making, even when (as is the case
with Frieds emphasison the unintentional nature of the punctum)
they provide theories of thestructure of photographic images that
are not at odds evenwith sucharcaneimages as the ones produced by
atomic-resolution scanning acoustic tun-nelling microscopes. If I
am right that the punctum as it appears inBarthess Punctum goes
further than Fried or Barthes want it to, thenthese photographs are
troublesome. Or to put it dierently: if at least someof
contemporary photography is taken to be adequately captured by
Friedsrevision of the punctum so that it is open for consideration
as a modernistart linked to the antitheatrical tradition, then it
is necessary to ask whatother criteria and interests work to
exclude images outside vernacular pho-tography. It is a genuine
problem that images like the ones I reproduce herecan be used to
raise questions about photography, seeing and being seen,images and
image making, the punctum, absorption, and realism, that are
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f igure 3. Gold crystal, (111) surface. Top: SATM image of the
phase ofoscillating atoms; bottom: SATM image of the amplitude of
oscillatingatoms. FromT. Hesjedal, E. Chilla, andH.-J. Frohlich,
DirectVisualization of the Oscillation of Au (111) Surface
Atoms,Applied PhysicsLetters, 15 July 1996, p. 355, gs. 1c, d.
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952 James Elkins / Critical Response
more radical and less tied to the exigencies of human scale than
questionsraised by photographs of desire and mourning. Vernacular
photographyis only a tiny portion of photography and probably its
most intellectuallyunadventurous part. Vernacular photography is
also, I think, contemporaryphotographys most nostalgic moment, and
Ill argue that briey by way ofa conclusion.
At one point in Camera Lucida Barthes expresses his dislike for
photo-graphs that have no gures: Oh, if there were only a look, a
subjects look,if only someone in the photographs were looking at
me! (CL, p. 111). Friedpoints out that several photographs
reproduced in Camera Lucida lack g-ures, but he concludes that the
fact remains that Barthess selection of ex-emplary photographs is
almost exclusively devoted to images of persons(p. 561 n. 25).
Aside from a few choices such as Niepce andDaniel Boudinet(whose
photograph is the only color image inCamera Lucida),Camera Lu-
f igure 4. Gold crystal, (111) surface. (a) detail of Figure 3,
top; (b)computermodel; (c) detail of Figure 3, bottom; (d)
computermodel.From T. Hesjedal, E. Chilla, andH.-J. Frohlich,
Direct Visualization ofthe Oscillation of Au (111) Surface
Atoms,Applied Physics Letters, 15 July1996, p. 355, g. 2.
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Critical Inquiry / Summer 2005 953
24. See Fried,Manets Modernism; or, The Face of Painting in the
1860s (Chicago, 1996).25. Seemillenniumpark.org/crown.htm
cida proposes a fairly coherent canon of images of persons that
spansseveral generations from Stieglitz to Sander, Kertesz, Klein,
Wessing, Ave-don, and Mapplethorpe. Frieds choices are also images
of persons byThomas Struth, JeWall,Walker Evans, RinekeDijkstra,
ThomasRu, andBeat Streuli. That is an interestingly dierent list
from Barthess, not leastbecause the more recent photographers
prefer ambitious, largesome-times enormousformats (p. 569).
It is true that Streuli, Ru, Dijkstra, and Wall in particular t
well withelements of the tradition Fried has explored. Althoughhe
does notmentionit in the essay, the blank looked-at-nessof
someofStreulis andRusguresis provocatively similar to the
animalistic presence of gures in Milletspaintings, which Fried has
explored inManets Modernism.24 It is certainlytrue that Streulis
and Rus images have their places in a longer history offrontal
poses, stares, and what Fried brilliantly articulates under the
termfacingness, a problematic that began in the 1860s and continues
to this day.Yet as art the new photography is often anodyne and
unchallenging. Friedremarks of street photographs made by Evans,
Streuli, and others that ab-sorption shades into distraction, a
less deep condition (p. 549). Barthesworries the same point: how
can one have an intelligent airwithout think-ing anything
intelligent, just by looking into this piece of blackplastic?(CL,p.
30). What happens in some work by Struth, Wall, Dijkstra, and
Streuli ismore like a vegetative state than distraction or even the
pure unreadableblankness that might, in theory, attend the act of
being seen. I think Friedis right to link photographers like Ru and
Streuli to the thematic of fac-ingness and address, but I am not
convinced that the new work carries onkey elements of that thematic
in anything other than an enervated andgrossly simplied
fashion.
In Chicagos Millennium Park, for example, the Spanish artist
JaumePlensa has installed two fty-foot high glass-brick towers (g.
5).25 The in-ward-facing sides of each tower have video projections
of faces, tightlycropped to the corners of the eyes and the chin.
They run twenty-fourhoursa day on four-minute loops. (The loops
have one-minute extensions,whichappear randomly, during which the
models pout and, in summer, waterpours from hidden openings in the
walls behind the images of themouths.)The project was incomplete
when it was installed in July 2004; Plensa leftinstructions for the
lming of a total of one thousand faces. The faceschange expressions
in slowmotion, andwhen themodels blink eachclosing
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f igure 5. JaumePlensa,Crown Fountain. MillenniumPark, Chicago.
2004. Photo by theauthor.
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Critical Inquiry / Summer 2005 955
is a professor of lm, video, and newmedia at the School of the
Art Institute and is in charge oftechnical support and of producing
the remainder of the tapes (Plensa produced very few).
27. It is tting that there are also videos of water and plants
that run, in random sequences, withthe videos of faces.
28. Diatribe (1985), for example, struck Thomas Crow as similar
to Van GoghsOutskirts of Paris(188688), partly on the basis of T.
J. Clarks reading of the signicance of the Parisian banlieu
inimpressionismand postimpressionism;Clark, in turn, is one ofWalls
sources. See Thomas Crow,Modern Art in the Common Culture
(NewHaven, Conn., 1996), pp. 16061.
and opening of the eye lasts around half a second, giving the
faces a cowlikelook.26 At twilight, the faces glow with a uniform
color-corrected orangeand are visible over ten blocks away. Crown
Fountain, as it is called, seemsto work well as a public water
sculpture, but the succession of blank staresand meaningless smiles
is more enervating than absorptiveless percep-tion without seeing,
in Barthess sense, than a kind of plantlike stupor.27 Iwonder if
this kind of amiable emptiness, which is also typical of
Streuliswork, is an interesting future for photography.
The draining-away of the sheer force of being looked at straight
in theeye (CL, p. 111), andof the strategies for avoiding sheer
theatricality indoingso, is one issue; another is the tempting art
historical parallels such workoers. For a decade now, Walls work
has exerted a strange fascination onart historians. Thomas Crow,
Thierry De Duve, and now Fried are amongthe historians who have
written about his work. I regard Walls work as atrap laid for art
historians, especially those familiar with the key momentsin the
history of art that Wall likes to take as points of departure
(even, onemight say, those who helped frame those very moments). A
number ofWalls photographs are almost predigested for art
historical consumption:they are obviouslymodelled on famous
precedents; their treatmentof thoseprecedents is often responsive
to the existing art historical literature (writ-ten, in some cases,
by the samehistorianswhonowndthemselvesattractedto Walls work); and
they propose variations on those precedents that arethemselves
within the boundaries of nineteenth-century narrative and re-alist
practice.28 I wonder if Wall might not be a false friend as
languageteachers like to say, an artist whose interest depends on
his allusions to keymonuments and texts of art history. To my eye,
the double anity withnineteenth-century traditions and late
twentieth-century art historicalscholarship is a bad sign. It is
necessary to distinguish between practicesthat grow out of
historical traditions, taking their strength and meaningfrom those
traditions, and practices that play o supercial links to tradi-
26. Because the loops have to be exactly four minutes long,
because the artist preferred slowmotion to fast motion, and because
they have to blend seamlessly with the one-minute loops,
eachfour-minute loop runs at a slightly dierent rate. The eect is
that some appear nearlymotionless,and others move at an almost
natural speed. I thank JohnManning for this information;Manning
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956 James Elkins / Critical Response
possibilities of contemporary criticism, including the
possibilities Fried explores in BarthessPunctum.
30. For Breuer, see for examplemy Renouncing Representation,
inMarco Breuer and Elkins,Tremors, Ephemera (exhibition catalog,
Roth Horowitz Gallery, New York, 22 Apr.26May 2000),and Breuer,
SMTWTFS (New York, 2002).
tion, wearing their anities on their sleeves.29 I thinkWalls
work is signi-cant for dierent reasons, in particular for the aws
and overlookeddetails that persist in his tableaux despite his most
meticulous eortsef-fects that cannot be eradicated because the work
is photography and notpainting andwhich are at once antitheatrical
andwell suited toFrieds read-ing of the punctum.
For me large-scale, ambitious narrative and realist photography
includ-ing Walls, Struths, Rus, Plensas, and Streulis does not
compel convic-tion. I agree that ambitious photography increasingly
has claimed for itselfthe scale and so to speak the address of
abstract painting (pp. 570571), butI am not taken by the results. I
think it is necessary to locate contemporaryart photography
inGerhardRichter andEdRuscha and in artists likeMarcoBreuer who
experiment with photographys basic materialsand to
locatecontemporary photography as a whole not only by reference to
art but tothe many kinds of scientic, technological, and
utilitarian images and theirdigital and philosophic
possibilities.30Photography such asWalls relies sus-piciously
heavily on nineteenth-century academic painting. A parallelmight be
made here between Wall and Robert Mapplethorpe: both havebeen
interested in compositional strategies that canbe found
innineteenth-century painting fromHippolyte Flandrin onwards. Itmay
be that contem-porary large-scale gural photography is less an
interesting way forwardthan a last, nostalgic, academic echo of a
premodernist past.
29. Here I seem to agree with RosalindKrauss, Reinventing
theMedium,Critical Inquiry 25(Winter 1999): 297 n. 14, in which she
characterizesWalls nineteenth-century references aspastiche. But
the reference is too brief to know exactly what she means by
pastiche, and it ismade in context of a review of postmedium
production (p. 296) that I nd limits the
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