ABSTRACT
"The language in which photography deals," writes the novelist and critic John Berger "is the language of events". This chapter traces efforts made by historians and non-historians to make sense of the idea of an event and then explore its implications for photography as the language of events. It focuses on the concept of the event, which has been the source of a lively debate in French theory and then offer some thoughts on its relevance to the still influential ruminations on photography presented in Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. The counter-concept to studium in Camera Lucida is, of course, punctum. Unlike the unary photograph that has nothing but a studium, an image with a punctum is disturbed, split, often with a singular detail that operates like a part object. It is uncoded and impossible to render intelligible in a semiotic system.
