On Punctum

“If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it,” Rolland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida. 

Like Barthes, I am fascinated by images that disturb or distress. The goal of this project is to explore why we pause over pictures that disgust us, and what we can learn from such images. Even though we might find a particular image perturbing we can’t help but look at it. In fact, it becomes hard to look away. It arrests the eye. Is this some sort of sadistic pleasure—my eyes taking in objects that hold the power of attraction and revulsion simultaneously?

I’m snared by certain details in photographs because they contain punctum. Like the period under an exclamation point, a sharp needle prick, the hole an arrow makes, the spot where lightning strikes, punctum is a detail that attracts or distresses the viewer. The punctum can arouse sympathy or a flash of insight. Barthes explains “However lightening-like it may be, the punctum has…a power of expansion. This power if often metonymic.” For Barthes, photographs could transcend themselves, becoming no longer the medium, the stand-in representing reality, but reality itself. He asks, “Is this not the sole proof of its art?”

The argument that art must strike a universal chord to be effective is not a new one. If the images contained in this blog have any universality, it’s in their power to disgust the viewer. As early as 1872 Darwin recognized disgust as a basic emotion identifiable across cultures. Disgust has a universal facial expression too: squinted eyes, wrinkled nose, and curled upper lip. The other common theme these images share is that all, in some way, reference the Body. Although the stimuli that trigger disgust can be very individualized and can change due to social conditioning and a person’s age and experience, most, if not all, triggers involve the Body.

It is not my intent to stand on a soap box and scream, though many of the disturbing images—in the way the bear witness to atrocity—might spur social activism. It is not my aim to simply gross out my audience either—though some images might invoke the gag reflex. Instead, my goal is to explore—through description and story—what these disturbing images mean. Perhaps ruminating on the images is a subversive notion. After all Barthes would think so. He believes “photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.” I hope the images I write about do all of the above.

May the content contained here not only transmit a slice of reality but also spur contemplation.

Lynching

Dead bodies hung from telephone poles and bridges like banners, kites, flags. Limp corpses displayed and beseeching: LOOK. Projected on my classroom’s screen: here is the aftermath of a manhunt. Prey proudly displayed. My students and I look at a tree with a cluster of dead black men hanging—and I think like grouse, like a bevy of pheasant. This is trophy.

Source: Without Sanctuary

We look at the corpse of an unknown black man dangling from rope lashed to his broken wrists, which are cracked back to a right angle. He is strung up on a wooden-tripod, 10 feet in the air with a pulley. The same kind of set up used to butcher a hog. His flayed ribs show deep gashes from whipping. His head thrown back, arches to heaven in that last moment he gasped for breath. In the foreground of the picture: white men circled up in casual conversation.

Source: Without Sanctuary

Lynching photographs are easy to come by now that one can Google the term. Whole websites archive this history and reproduce one flinty pixel at a time images of atrocious cruelty, violence, and torture. Most of these photos were taken and printed as souvenir postcards from the late 1890s through the 1930s. As picture postcards these images symbolized the banal and the common. Something cheaply bought, mass produced, and collectable. Now we label them more accurately: horrific monstrosities. I am at odds with such a clash, which leaves more questions than can I feel capable of answering. How could people, Americans, living where I live condone and participate in mob murder? Why would anyone want to commemorate such suffering with a keepsake? Or to mail it to a friend?

It is precisely this clash—the oddness and commonality of these images—that makes me tell my college freshman English students: we must look. I warn them: these are disturbing images. This happened here in Georgia—maybe not in your lifetime—but close. The last reported lynching in the US was in 1965.

We watch a narrated online slide show called Without Sanctuary by James Allen. We are plied with death and horror again and again with each photo change. Though we look, my 25 students and I, we can’t really see. The images are so horrific they become unreal. We look without seeing and gloss over truth, because to do otherwise would be too upsetting. Susan Sontag, discusses this phenomenon in her book Regarding the Pain of Others. In some ways, these images only reaffirm our safety from our modern classroom. These pictures confirm for us our invulnerability Sontag would argue because they are made into spectacle. Something showy and theatrical—over the top. Something beyond our grasp. None of us really believe lynching could happen to us. None of us want to imagine living in a world where the constant fear of being killed by a lynch mob lurks.

I look around the darkened room. I meet the gaze of one woman in the front row. Her eyes brim with tears. She really sees, I think. Though we live in a town that is 50% African American, she is the only student of color in the room. What must she think? I have my doubts at this moment. Who am I, a white Yankee, to come into this college in the Deep South and force my students to look at these images? Who am I to make them confront this evil, to make them squirm?

At the end of the semester this woman wrote to me: “Although watching pictures of lynchings and reading about disgustingly vivid African American killings was a tad much for me, it did show me how courageous you are to stand at the front of the classroom every Tuesday and Thursday morning discussing something that was noticeably uncomfortable to everyone in the room.”

But I don’t feel courageous. I feel like I have failed. To look is not enough. We must also see, and if we trust our knee-jerk response, to condemn immediately, and get back up on our moral perch then we’ve missed it. “Look how far we’ve come! Nothing like that happens anymore,” we say with a bit too much enthusiasm in our voices. Our ardor comes through as something cracked and hollow.