Perhaps this image achieves something similar to the Nicaragua image Barthes discusses early in the book: "I understood at once that its existence (its 'adventure') derived from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong to the same world..." To be honest, I have a difficult time discerning between what might be "studium" and "punctum" when observing photographs where someone hasn't pointed one or the other out already. I'm not sure if the terrible cuteness of the pink dress constitutes a punctum because it seems like such an obvious irony as to have been sought out by the photographer. What almost grabs me more (at least in response to the way I foresee Barthes finding a "wound" in the photograph) is the redness of the flowers behind the humvee, or perhaps the scrap of pinkness in the gutter.



I just can't stop looking at this image. It's one of the most awful things I've ever seen. This wound doesn't constitute a punctum, or even "shock" which "consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden that the actor himself was unaware or unconscious of it." This photograph is certainly traumatizing, but my inability to look away must be due to a kind of fetishism. Honestly, I'm not sure how to account for this photograph in terms of the text, other than that there is a kind of theater taking place. A theater of the real, the terrible, and the voyeuristic.



"Photography cannot signify except by assuming a mask. It is this word which Calvino correctly uses to designate what makes a face into a product of a society and of its history...the mask is the meaning, insofar as it is absolutely pure (as it was in the ancient theater)...Is not the very capacity to perceive the political or moral meaning of a face a class deviation?" But where does this purity take place? Is there anything in the face above, disembodied from the context of Iraq in the present day, or from the Middle East in general, that speaks to us? How much do we bring with us to the reading of this face? "As distance, social observation here assumes the necessary intermediary role in a delicate aesthetic, which renders it futile: no critique except among those who are already capable of such criticism." This image speaks to me in the way a film like the Bicycle Thieves might. The maker sets out to depict reality as it is, but as a result of the medium, we still end up with theater, which is of its nature unreal, staged, a well constructed illusion.

All this to say, while I respond deeply to Barthes text on an emotional level, I don't know how to apply it to the reading of images, nor am I certain if that would be the goal in his writing.