ABSTRACT
(First published in Exposure 23.4, 1985)
Certain photographs have the power of an embryonic fiction. Roland Barthes’ idea o£ the punctum - the compelling, often marginal detail that stirs curiosity in the viewer - offers one way of analysing this effect. A great many kinds of photographs (portraits, photojournalism, even barely peopled landscapes. . .) suggest an arrested moment in some narrative. Susan H. Aiken’s essay reflects on literary authorship and photography in relation to the writer Isak Dinesen.
Photography has something to do with resurrection . .. the survival of this image has depended on the luck of a picture made by a provincial photographer who, an indifferent mediator, himself long since dead, did not know that what he was making permanent was the truth - the truth to me.
- Roland Barthes, Camera LucidaThe importance of the account was not lessened but augmented with time, as if. . . the greatest wonder about it was that it did not change. The past, that had been so difficult to bring to memory, and that had probably seemed to be changing every time it was thought of, had here been caught, conquered and pinned down before his eyes. It had become History; with it there was now no variableness neither shadow of turning.
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa