1.
“I decided I liked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it” (p. 3).
2.
“We might say that Photography is unclassifiable” (p. 4).
“A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent (as is the case for every other image, encumbered – from the start, and because of its status – by the way in which the object is stimulated): it is not impossible to perceive the photographic signifier (certain professionals do so), but it requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection” (p. 5).
“Photography is unclassifiable because there is no reason to mark this or that of its occurences; it aspires perhaps, to become as crude, as certain, as noble as a sign, which would afford it access to the dignity of a language: but for there to be a sign there must be a mark; deprived of a principle of marking, photographs are signs which don’t take, which turn, as milk does” (p. 6).
3.
“the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the hears of this critical language, between several discourses, those of sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis – but that, by ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me (however naive it might be) : a desperate resistance to any reductive system.” (p. 8).
4.
“I observed that a photograph can be the object of three practices (or of three emotions, or of three intentions) : to do, to undergo, to look. The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves…and the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emmited by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead” (p. 9).
5.
“Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of “posing,” I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image” (p. 10).
“I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it” (p. 11).
“I experience it with the anguish of an uncertain filiation: an image – my image will be generated: will I be born from an antipathetic individual or from a “good sort”?” (p. 11).
“What I want, in short, is that my (mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) “self”; but it is the contrary that must be said: “myself” never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society sustains it), and “myself” which is light, divided, dispersed” (p. 12).
“In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares)” (p. 13).
“Ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me (the “intention” according to which I look at it) is Death: Death is the eidos of that Photograph” (p. 15).
“For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches – and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing” (p. 15).
6.
“I was to rediscover in the photographs of the Spectator whom I was and whom I now wanted to investigate” (p. 16).
“without asking; they are only “images,” their mode of appearance is heterogeneous” (p. 16).
7.
“So it seemed that the best word to designate (temporarily) the attraction certain photographs exerted upon me was advenience or even adventure. This picture advenes, that one doesn’t” (p. 19).
“Without adventure, no photograph” (p. 19).
“So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation” (p. 20).
8.
Borrowing from Phenomenology – “I stooped, keeping with me, like a treasure, my desire or my grief; the anticipated essence of the Photograph could not, in my mind, be separated from the “pathos” of which, from the first glance, it consists” (p. 21).
9.
“I understood at once that its existence (its “adventure”) derived from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong to the same world (no need to proceed to the point of contrast): the soldiers and the nuns” (p. 23).
10.
“What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training. I did not know a French word which might account for this kind of human interest, but I believe this word exists in Latin: it is studium, which doesn’t mean, at least not immediately, “study,” but application to a thing, taste for someone, a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity” (p. 26).
“This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefor call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (p. 27).
11.
“But even among those which have some existence in my eyes, most provoke only a general and, so to speak, polite interest: they have no punctum in them: they please or displease me without pricking me: they are invested with no more than studium. The studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste” (p. 27).
“The studium is a kind of education (knowledge and civility, “politeness”) which allows me to discover the Operator, to experience the “in reverse,” according to my will as a Spectator” (p. 28).
12.
“Photography can tell me this much better than painted portraits. It allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this “me” which likes knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it” (p. 30).
13.
“The camera obscura, in short, has generated at one and the same time perspective painting, photography, and the diorama, which are all three arts of the stage; but if Photography seems to me closer to Theater, it is by way of a singular intermediatry (and perhaps I am the only one who sees it): by way of Death” (p. 31).
14.
“The first surprise is that of the “rare” (rarity of the referent, of course); a photographer, we are told admiringly, has spent four years composing a photographic anthology of monsters (man with two heads, woman with three breasts, child with a tail, etc. all smiling)” (p. 32).
“A fourth surprise is the one which the photographer looks for from the contortions of technique: superimpressions, anamorphoses, deliberate exploitation of certain defects” (p. 33).
“All these surprises obey a principle of defiance (which is why they are alien to me): the photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes “surprising” when we do not know why it was been taken;” (p. 34).
15.
Since every photograph is contingent (and thereby outside of meaning), Photography cannot signify (aim at a generality) except by assuming a mask” (p. 34).
