ABSTRACT
(First published in Afterimage, April 1985)
Looking first at Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, Jane Gallop takes his idea of the active reader and considers its applications to the photographic rather than the literary text. Turning to his Camera Lucida, she explores the literal meaning of the punctum (Barthes’s term for the piercing detail that prompts reverie and narrative curiosity) and extends this into a reflection on the relation between photography and sexuality.
