Above: Tom Gauld's illustration from Sunday's New York Times Magazine.
Two of photography’s most-renowned theorists were name-checked in the May 8, 2011 New York Times.
Roland Barthes appears in Ken Johnson’s discussion of the widely-circulated (and oft parodied) photograph of U.S. officials watching the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Does it truly convey the “situation” in the situation room?:
… the expression of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stands out. She holds her hand over her mouth and appears, what? Shocked? Awed? Dismayed? She is what the French critic Roland Barthes called the “punctum,” the not necessarily conspicuous detail that gives a photograph its emotional resonance.
But Mrs. Clinton has said she does not recall what they were watching, and attributed her hand-to-mouth gesture to allergies. For all we know, the officials might have been watching a ballgame.
Barthes and Susan Sontag get a mention in A.O. Scott’s “On (Digital) Photography: Sontag, 34 Years Later” in the Magazine. If you’re in a hurry, Tom Gauld’s illustration (above) succinctly summarizes Scott’s “riff”. We are awash in images. A once precious drip has become an uncontrollable flood. How do we move forward?
