Punctum Created by Alice Greenhill
An uncanny exploration into the human body
An introduction to Punctum “Punctum is an object or image that jumps out at the viewer within a photograph'that accident which pricks, bruises me’” (Powell, 2008). Within his book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes created punctum: the idea that an aspect, which is often a detail of a photograph, can hold our gaze. The subject matter of Punctum has been explored through a series of images throughout this book, to create an eerie and unfamiliar feeling.
‘Every affect belongs to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind.’ – Sigmund Freud
‘Strange within the familiar’ - Mark Fisher
‘To think that we might have found comfort in a world suited to our nature, only to end up in one so resoundingly strange!’ -Thomas Ligotti,
‘We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque’ -Mark Fisher
‘If only it were susceptible to real strangeness, perhaps it would seem more like a home to us.’ -Thomas Ligotti
‘The uncanny valley can be defined as people’s negative reaction to certain lifelike’ – Rina Caballar
“Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now.� -Ayn Rand
‘The photograph is an extended, loaded evidence as if I caricatured not the figure of what it represents, but its very existence. The photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new hallucination’ - Roland Barthes
‘Humans do not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of recombining nature's products into hideous new forms.’ -Mark Fisher
‘Upon reaching the uncanny valley, our affinity descends into a feeling of strangeness, a sense of unease, and a tendency to be scared or freaked out’ – Rina Caballar
‘I will say at once that both courses lead to the same result: the “uncanny” is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.’ – Sigmund Freud
‘We’re trained to spot even the slightest divergence from ‘normal’ human movements or behaviour,’ -Rina Caballar
‘Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.’ - Roland Barthes
‘It takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there I animate this photograph and that it animates me’ - Roland Barthes
Bibliography− Barthes, R, 1980, Camera Lucida, Reflections on photography. 1st American ed. New York and wang, 1981 − Caballar, R, 2019. What is the Uncanny Valley, viewed 10/05/2020. Available from: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/ what-is-the-uncanny-valley − Fisher, M, 2016, The Weird and the Eerie, Watkins Media, 2017 − Freud, S, 1919, The Uncanny, The standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud, volume XVII 1927-1919 − Ligotti, T, 1984, The nightmare Factory, Fox Atomic 2007 − Luckhurst, R, 2017. Making Sense of “The Weird and the Eerie” − Miller, G, 2014, The Uncanny Valley: Tales from a Lost Town, West Arcadia press, 2011 − Powell, G, 2008. Stadium and Punctum, viewed 10/05/ 2020. Available from: https://georgepowell.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/studiumand-punctum/ − Rand, A, 1943, The Fountainhead, Bobbs Merrill, 1943, 1st edition
Puntcum Created by Alice Greenhill