LESSON 78
Reading a photograph
How to look, and how to critique.
IN THIS LESSON
- Why read pictures at all
- Barthes: studium and punctum
- Sontag: looking and acting
- In practice: a four-step critique
- In practice: giving and taking criticism
Why read pictures at all
Looking at a photograph and saying why it works, or does not, is the fastest way to improve your own. Critics and writers have given us useful tools. Two books stand out in the source material. Susan Sontag's On Photography, a 1977 collection of essays first published in The New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, published in 1980, was described by Geoffrey Batchen in 2009 as perhaps the most influential book written about the photographic experience. Neither author was a photographer, and both books have been widely criticised as well as praised.
Barthes: studium and punctum
Barthes offers two words that are now part of the vocabulary of photography. The studium is the cultural, political and general interest a picture holds: what it shows, the context, what an informed viewer understands from it. The punctum is a small detail that pierces a particular viewer personally and makes a direct connection with the person or thing in the picture. The studium is shared; the punctum is personal and often accidental. Barthes wrote the book after his mother's death, and it is as much about loss as about pictures. His terms help separate what a picture is about from what it does to you.
Sontag: looking and acting
Sontag examined the role of photography in society. She contrasted Diane Arbus's work with the Depression-era documentary photographs of the Farm Security Administration, and argued that the flood of photographic images encourages a voyeuristic relationship with the world, making all events seem equally significant. She also argued that recording and intervening pull against each other: the person taking the picture is not acting in the scene, and the person acting cannot faithfully record it. In 2003 her book Regarding the Pain of Others revisited some of these views. These ideas are worth holding when you photograph other people's hardship.
In practice: a four-step critique
This section is working practice. First, describe: say what is in the frame, plainly, without judging. Second, analyse: how is it made? Note light, composition, moment, colour, lens and distance, using the lessons in this School. Third, interpret: what does it seem to be about, and what is its context? This is close to Barthes's studium. Fourth, judge: does the way it was made serve what it is about? Then, separately, name any detail that moves you personally, the punctum. Keep the steps apart. Most weak critiques jump straight to judging and skip the looking.
In practice: giving and taking criticism
Also practice. When critiquing someone else's work, start with what the picture is trying to do, not what you would have done. Be specific: the bright window at the left pulls the eye away from the face is useful, I don't like it is not. Suggest one or two changes rather than ten. When receiving criticism, listen fully before answering, ask questions, and write down points you hear more than once. You do not have to agree, but you do have to understand. A regular critique group of three or four people is one of the best tools a photographer can have.
Try it today
- 01Choose one famous photograph and write three sentences that only describe it.
- 02Add three sentences on how it was made: light, frame, moment.
- 03Write its studium in one line and your own punctum in another.
- 04Apply the same four steps to one of your own pictures.
- 05Swap pictures with a friend and give each other two specific suggestions.