Critical Response What Do We Want Photography to Be a Response to Michael Fried

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 Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/444520 .Accessed: 03/05/2015 15:18

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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


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


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-



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



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-



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



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



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



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



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



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-



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.



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


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.



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.



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


f igure 5. JaumePlensa,Crown Fountain. MillenniumPark, Chicago. 2004. Photo by theauthor.



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



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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Critical Response What Do We Want Photography to Be a Response to Michael Fried