In 1980 the French theorist Roland Barthes published Camera Lucida and since then perhaps very few graduate students in photography have escaped its presence. I was never assigned this book but it still feels like compulsory reading, and even compulsory re-reading. Its only real rivals in the sense of required theoretical texts for the “serious photographer man” might be Walter Benjamin’s 90 year old essay, Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, or Susan Sontag’s 1977 book, an affectionate lashing of the medium called On Photography.

I’ve tended to struggle with critical theory as a photographer. It leaves me both fascinated and dismayed. The problem might be in the name of the discipline. Namely that, when it comes to photography, the theory tends to be overwhelmingly critical. Read enough of it and it’s hard not to feel as if everything you want to create has been prematurely recognized as problematic. It seems as if every facet of the medium has been attacked and discredited and that the best thing to do - if a photographer does not want to be complicit in a sort of runaway train of exploitative consumer capitalism (and who does?) - is to disown the pursuit altogether and retreat to an outhouse in the woods. Yes, an outhouse. No, not a cabin.

In the past after reading Sontag I’ve wondered if the most ethical path forward is to put down my cameras, despite never wanting to do anything else with my professional life (other than skateboard, but ankles and dreams die hard). This despite the fact that I did and still do believe photography can be a force for good. After some soul searching, one may realize that theories are only that. In the case of photography it feels like they often theories against. But we photographers have a responsibility to maybe try to present better theories for.

It’s not just my sense. In 2008 Susie Linfield, a in a Boston Review piece titled Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography?¹ explicitly named the problem. A cultural theorist broadly defending the medium still feels uncommon. I expect to revisit her at some point.

This brings me to Roland Barthes, though.

Camera Lucida is a book that stands out because of its personal nature - written while grieving for his mother as a way to try and know her more through the photographs of her left behind. The book has a more appreciative, curious and almost at times almost bewildered tone towards photography.

To Barthes, a memorable photograph will contain a detail, often small and initially unassuming, and sometimes, to my reading, even incidental, that will break through to the viewer in a particular and wholly subjective way. This detail might be something that the photographer does not even notice upon making the image, or if they do, they may not intend for it to be noticed in depth. In the photographer’s mind, it be ancillary.

Barthes calls this detail the Punctum, and for me, it is what completes the journey of the photograph - which is to say from its creation to its recognition by someone. The punctum is the sound that must be heard for the tree in the forest to have really fallen down. A picture with no punctum is essentially visual noise. It’s never really noticed by a viewer and therefore never really valued. If a picture is never really valued by anyone, it’s total value is arguably negligible, right? What good is a brilliant book never read by anyone, anywhere?

Barthes’ concept is distinctly personal - it is something beyond and separate from the generally accepted meaning of an image (what he calls the Studium). Besides being personal, Barthes’ punctum seems to be orthogonal to ideas of taste or quality - the traits that seem to be so widely esteemed in criticism. I think this should be notable to any photographer who has had the idea of craft battered into them so hard that it is impossible to see value in a photograph that doesn’t look like a technical achievement.²

As an example, in the above image Wandering Violinist, Abony, 1921 by André Kertész Barthes finds his punctum in, of all things, the dirt.

”Now what I see, by means of this ‘thinking eye’ which makes me add something to the photograph, is the dirt road; its texture gives me the certainty of being in Central Europe; I perceive the referent (here, the photograph really transcends itself; is this not the sole proof of its art? To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?), I recognize, with my whole body, the straggling villages I passed through on my long-ago travels in Hungary and Romania.”

Why am I bringing up this concept now, though?

Anyone who knows me probably understands that, at this point, I tend to look askance at AI technology in most forms, but am particularly interested in constructing a defense of real photography³ in a time when I think it will eventually be superseded by computer generated pixel trash heaps of advertising and propaganda, or in common parlance, slop.⁴

In Barthes we can find language to apply to today’s situation. I never have, and can’t imagine ever will, see an AI generated image with a punctum. It seems impossible by virtue of the way the image is generated. This isn’t to say an AI generated image can’t have curious, even enticing details. Even details that spur some emotion, that pull a long forgotten string of memory. It’s not to say an AI image can’t be interesting (unlikely though) or beautiful (usually in the shallowest, least nourishing of ways, like the red shell of a Skittle). But the genesis of the AI image renders the punctum impossible because it is not rooted to anything real. To note the punctum of a photograph, as a viewer, as Barthes does, is a human response to an image with foundational human⁵, or at least, organic traits.

In a generated image, no matter how real it looks, the source of the curious details will always be, at their most interesting, a flaw in the machine process. It’s possible that it might seem as if the punctum could exist in a well executed AI generated image that traffics as a photograph⁶ for the viewer who doesn’t know the provenance of the picture they see. But doesn’t this matter? What of when they (or I) learn of the provenance? The connection to the image through the punctum vaporizes. At best, the punctum is a temporary cloud on the ground, a heavy fog that leaves one confused and half-seeing, and then half-depressed and disappointed for a few moments.

The read of the picture then becomes obvious; compared to representation of the physical world, the AI generated picture leaves me cold. And after that, even a little dead inside, left to wonder what sort of humanistic purpose this image can even serve? No matter what it looks like it means nothing more than visual static. This impossibility of a punctum isn’t because the image is a lie (many photographs could be said to be a lie). It’s because the genesis of the image is non-human. The genesis of the image is born of a dehumanizing process, even.

A flaw in the machine, a curious visual aberration, seven toes on a baby for example, is about as good as it gets. Quickly any curiosity is revealed as misplaced. The picture loses any novelty, any meaning whatsoever as soon as the provenance is known. No matter how it looks, it will always be, should always be, read the same way. It has no connection to anything out in the world. It had no real human intention behind it, and no, I don’t think prompts guiding a machine what to spit out cannot count as such. The AI image that looks like a photograph is a deceitful by its very nature, it has nothing good to say to me, to us.

I will close with Barthes, again, where he draws a direct line between the photographed subject and the resulting image. It’s worth noting that he is referring specifically to black and white film and prints made with silver, and I do think that with digital technology the connection he notes is somewhat eroded, but I feel the point stands when comparing a photograph to another visual image.

“The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here.”