This piece resonates deeply with my own perspective, I believe the fundamental line between authentic photography and AI imagery lies exactly where Roland Barthes placed it: in the 'that-has-been' (ça-a-été). A photograph is, first and foremost, a fossilized trace of a presence, the physical certainty that real photons once touched a subject before eventually reaching us. When this bond is severed, as it is with AI, the "magic" vanishes. The punctum cannot be manufactured or sought out as a mere compositional exercise; it must strike you on its own. There is an even more intimate layer to this: we often talk about the punctum as if it were a detail sitting on the surface of the paper, but I’ve come to realize that the punctum is actually within us. It is not an object or a detail, but the emotion that erupts when the external world aligns perfectly with our own 'invisible baggage' (to recall Ansel Adams, the books read, music heard, and people loved that we carry with us). The punctum is the smell of a place or the specific silence of an afternoon from our past that are recalled by the photograph. A photograph is an "open work" that requires our own life experience to be completed. AI can mimic the surface, and it can certainly produce aesthetic perfection, but it can never generate that friction between the real and our inner invisible baggage. Without it the image leaves us cold because it is a silence that has nothing to say to our present.
Punctum might be the right term to describe what I'm sensing as a newer photographer participating in review salons at CPW for the past year.
I notice how myself and most other salon mates bring new work and might struggle with explaining "Why." This has become a leading area of inquiry I have held for many months after these observations.
I realized the punctum for me is back in the moment of creation. It's all back there. Often, I don't even know what it was, but that is still valid. So when we bring work to share and describe, or we submit to a call for work, the punctum is already in the image. It's not in the thoughts and words about it. There's a sense of being pushed to describe something that already possesses the description.
Punctum. I had to look that up. I've so often wondered if there was a word for the thing in an image that makes us stop scrolling. Sometimes it's hands drawn up in the coat. Sometimes is a barely noticeable but still very noticeable immodest show of skin. In the latter, the punctum is so often overplayed.
On the other hand, a lot of the time, I feel it is best to not attempt to define magic. I’ll look at something that transcends all the organized thoughts and I just let it go. Like listening to a great moment in a piece of music. Today we are living in such a hyper institutionalized world, it feels great to erase my mind and just let my passions go crazy both as an artist and as an observer. A recent Lorna Simpson exhibit at the Met Museum had that effect. I didn’t need to self explain or figure it out. The work enveloped me, full stop.
John Berger is one of my favorite critics because he avoids this overly negative view of photography as always exploitative. There's even a discussion between him and Susan Sontag on YouTube that's worth a listen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoHCR8nshe8
I read On Photography in college and it had exactly the effect you suggested. I put down my camera, as I couldn't reconcile how I used it to mediate my experience and the inherent "exploitation" of harvesting images from the world. I turned to printmaking, litho and intaglio, a way of making images whose content is mostly about the artifacts that the image making process creates. I soon returned to photography with an ethic of how the act of making a photograph is a joint contract of connection and consent, and how it can be expansive for both of us. That served me well in my long career as a commercial photographer, where the whole point is to create an image with a purpose and a function.
Beautiful piece. I’m part of a Photography Studies club, and we just discussed Camera Lucia’s. Haven’t read it in over a decade. It was interesting to try to navigate the notion of punctum in a world where photography has evolved so drastically since when Barthes published his book. In many ways, it’s no longer applicable… the idea that punctum is only assigned to photography, and excluding video and other visual media… or how it applies to camera less or abstract work, for example. But it is worth pointing out that AI will never be able to produce punctum.
I asked ChatGPT, what is your interpretation of the (André Kertész) photo.
"I read the photograph as a moment about survival and passage.
At the center is the violinist—moving, playing, working at the same time. The music isn’t entertainment in the usual sense; it feels like labor. The violin becomes a tool for earning a living as he walks through the village road.
Beside him is the boy. He feels both assistant and witness. The cloth he carries could be for collecting coins, or simply part of their daily routine. Either way, the pairing suggests a small traveling unit: one plays, one accompanies. There’s a quiet suggestion of inheritance or apprenticeship, though nothing in the picture confirms it.
Then there’s the smaller child behind them. That figure introduces distance and perspective. The child is not participating—just watching. That watching turns the moment into a kind of public scene, something happening within the life of the village rather than outside it.
The road itself matters. It is rough, muddy, unfinished. The figures are literally passing through space that feels unstable and temporary. Nothing about the setting suggests permanence.
So the photograph holds a few tensions at once:
• music vs. hardship
• movement vs. rootedness
• performance vs. everyday life
What I find most striking is that the violinist looks directly toward the camera. It interrupts the flow of movement. For a split second the traveling world meets the photographer’s world.
The result is not sentimental. It’s more observational than emotional. The photograph feels like a fragment of a larger journey, caught mid-stride—music continuing, the road continuing, the photographer briefly crossing paths with it.
If you want, we could also look at what makes this photograph unusually modern for 1921—there are two small visual decisions in it that were quite radical for the time."
I then asked about punctom
Ah—nice word to bring into this.
The idea of punctum comes from Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida.
Barthes described punctum as the detail in a photograph that “pricks” or wounds the viewer—something small, often unintended, that pierces the general reading of the image.
The rest of the image—the cultural meaning, the subject matter, the readable context—is what he called studium. The punctum is different: personal, accidental, and emotionally sharp.
I asked about the punctum.
For many viewers, the punctum might be:
The violinist’s eyes.
They look directly toward the camera while everything else is moving forward. The music continues, the boy continues walking, the road stretches away—but the gaze suddenly stops the moment. It creates a brief awareness that the photographer is present.
Another possible punctum:
The barefoot boy.
His feet in the mud are almost painfully concrete. They pull the photograph out of the poetic idea of “a wandering musician” and drop it into physical reality—cold ground, rough life, childhood inside labor.
Or this small detail:
The cloth in the boy’s hands.
It hints at the economy of the situation—something to hold coins, perhaps, or simply part of the musician’s kit. That tiny object quietly tells you the performance is not romantic; it’s a way to survive.
What’s interesting about punctum
Barthes insisted that punctum cannot be fixed. Different viewers feel it in different places. What pierces one person may not pierce another.
In this photograph the punctum could be:
• the eyes
• the bare feet
• the bow in motion
• the child watching in the background
Each of those details can suddenly make the photograph feel alive and fragile rather than simply descriptive.
And the funny thing about punctum is that photographers rarely plan it.
It usually appears after the fact, in the strange chemistry between the image and whoever is looking at it.
—
I’m curious (and this is the real Barthes question):
Where does the punctum land for you in this photograph?
While I worry about ai in creation, the ability to see and interpret is unsettling and dangerous.
I'll admit, I opened this ready to roll my eyes at what I feared would be another tired apples and oranges defense of AIG imagery vs Human made/captured imagery, a necessary modern distinction whose very existence I find extremely depressing. So very delighted to be wrong. This is a really great piece of writing and puts a nice cherry on a lot of my feelings towards AI. There is just something off that I can't get into beyond a passing novelty, even when it sits next to a work created or pieced together in photoshop or CGI. Artificial indeed.
I was also surprised to read about the negativity towards photography, which I didn't realized was a thing. I couldn't help but smile. The unfortunate job of the critic is to look for the faults and strengths in their area of expertise, and boy do they love to lean in to the former.
Some of it is in the framing to add a little tension. A lot of it is in letting things stay on set once discarded or leaving tags or creases in clothes. These are things I feel humanizes the image and creates an experience for the viewer.
I've given this a lot of thought over the last year as a somatic photographer using an AI to help me work on articulating my work and finding my voice for it. My reality is that I came to photography directly from the corporate world so I do not have any history with the history or language for articulation about my art.
What I have come to believe about AI is that what it actually does is automate a procedural type of mental labor. At the same time, I have sensed that "art" is actually the process and not so much the artifact that gets produced. The photographic process has had the biggest cognitive impact on me.
Thus, photography (or any art for that matter) where the "art" is in the making, using a machine to automate the labor of the art is skipping the most crucial phase of making art. Using AI for this phase makes it procedural when art is meant to be a bit more ethereal in first order.
Thank you for this very stimulating text. I only stumbled over one sentence, which struck me as a little too categorical, even somewhat sentimental: “The AI-generated image that looks like a photograph is intrinsically deceptive; it has nothing good to tell us.”
An image may be questionable in its genesis and still reveal something, because the punctum may not reside in the image itself, but in the encounter with the person who looks at it. With AI, it does not necessarily disappear; perhaps it shifts toward the one who recognizes, among several images, the one that touches them.
Thanks for your comment. It sparks a few questions in me - perhaps even prompts for more writing.
What I mean is that an AI image that looks like a photographs is generated to deceive. If it is not, it would not present as something it isn’t. Most uses we see right now center around propaganda or commercial use - not something I can defend the intentions of.
Certainly, there is a sentimentality embedded in my approach here. While I understand the dangers in overdoing it, I think a certain level of sentimentality about what distinguishes the human from the machine to be important. Perhaps sentimentality - or maybe I’d say here humanism - has gotten a bit of a bad reputation. I do not hear it as an obvious negative, even though I’ve heard it used in such a way ad nauseam.
It’s hard for me to imagine your scenario with a punctum an AI, but I accept its possibility.
For me, and obviously this is personal - provenance is important (the medium is the message) - and even a compelling AI image that may seem to have a punctum cannot because the moment I learn the provenance of the image, all of what was compelling is lost. Part of what makes photographic images strong is that they are a record of sorts, even the most constructed ones. Images that look like photographs but are not must be held to a standard appropriate for the medium, and photographic looking AI is not photography.
This piece resonates deeply with my own perspective, I believe the fundamental line between authentic photography and AI imagery lies exactly where Roland Barthes placed it: in the 'that-has-been' (ça-a-été). A photograph is, first and foremost, a fossilized trace of a presence, the physical certainty that real photons once touched a subject before eventually reaching us. When this bond is severed, as it is with AI, the "magic" vanishes. The punctum cannot be manufactured or sought out as a mere compositional exercise; it must strike you on its own. There is an even more intimate layer to this: we often talk about the punctum as if it were a detail sitting on the surface of the paper, but I’ve come to realize that the punctum is actually within us. It is not an object or a detail, but the emotion that erupts when the external world aligns perfectly with our own 'invisible baggage' (to recall Ansel Adams, the books read, music heard, and people loved that we carry with us). The punctum is the smell of a place or the specific silence of an afternoon from our past that are recalled by the photograph. A photograph is an "open work" that requires our own life experience to be completed. AI can mimic the surface, and it can certainly produce aesthetic perfection, but it can never generate that friction between the real and our inner invisible baggage. Without it the image leaves us cold because it is a silence that has nothing to say to our present.
100% agree
Punctum might be the right term to describe what I'm sensing as a newer photographer participating in review salons at CPW for the past year.
I notice how myself and most other salon mates bring new work and might struggle with explaining "Why." This has become a leading area of inquiry I have held for many months after these observations.
I realized the punctum for me is back in the moment of creation. It's all back there. Often, I don't even know what it was, but that is still valid. So when we bring work to share and describe, or we submit to a call for work, the punctum is already in the image. It's not in the thoughts and words about it. There's a sense of being pushed to describe something that already possesses the description.
Punctum. I had to look that up. I've so often wondered if there was a word for the thing in an image that makes us stop scrolling. Sometimes it's hands drawn up in the coat. Sometimes is a barely noticeable but still very noticeable immodest show of skin. In the latter, the punctum is so often overplayed.
On the other hand, a lot of the time, I feel it is best to not attempt to define magic. I’ll look at something that transcends all the organized thoughts and I just let it go. Like listening to a great moment in a piece of music. Today we are living in such a hyper institutionalized world, it feels great to erase my mind and just let my passions go crazy both as an artist and as an observer. A recent Lorna Simpson exhibit at the Met Museum had that effect. I didn’t need to self explain or figure it out. The work enveloped me, full stop.
John Berger is one of my favorite critics because he avoids this overly negative view of photography as always exploitative. There's even a discussion between him and Susan Sontag on YouTube that's worth a listen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoHCR8nshe8
I am an enormous Berger fan and looking forward to watching this video. Thank you, Lucas!
I read On Photography in college and it had exactly the effect you suggested. I put down my camera, as I couldn't reconcile how I used it to mediate my experience and the inherent "exploitation" of harvesting images from the world. I turned to printmaking, litho and intaglio, a way of making images whose content is mostly about the artifacts that the image making process creates. I soon returned to photography with an ethic of how the act of making a photograph is a joint contract of connection and consent, and how it can be expansive for both of us. That served me well in my long career as a commercial photographer, where the whole point is to create an image with a purpose and a function.
Beautiful piece. I’m part of a Photography Studies club, and we just discussed Camera Lucia’s. Haven’t read it in over a decade. It was interesting to try to navigate the notion of punctum in a world where photography has evolved so drastically since when Barthes published his book. In many ways, it’s no longer applicable… the idea that punctum is only assigned to photography, and excluding video and other visual media… or how it applies to camera less or abstract work, for example. But it is worth pointing out that AI will never be able to produce punctum.
I asked ChatGPT, what is your interpretation of the (André Kertész) photo.
"I read the photograph as a moment about survival and passage.
At the center is the violinist—moving, playing, working at the same time. The music isn’t entertainment in the usual sense; it feels like labor. The violin becomes a tool for earning a living as he walks through the village road.
Beside him is the boy. He feels both assistant and witness. The cloth he carries could be for collecting coins, or simply part of their daily routine. Either way, the pairing suggests a small traveling unit: one plays, one accompanies. There’s a quiet suggestion of inheritance or apprenticeship, though nothing in the picture confirms it.
Then there’s the smaller child behind them. That figure introduces distance and perspective. The child is not participating—just watching. That watching turns the moment into a kind of public scene, something happening within the life of the village rather than outside it.
The road itself matters. It is rough, muddy, unfinished. The figures are literally passing through space that feels unstable and temporary. Nothing about the setting suggests permanence.
So the photograph holds a few tensions at once:
• music vs. hardship
• movement vs. rootedness
• performance vs. everyday life
What I find most striking is that the violinist looks directly toward the camera. It interrupts the flow of movement. For a split second the traveling world meets the photographer’s world.
The result is not sentimental. It’s more observational than emotional. The photograph feels like a fragment of a larger journey, caught mid-stride—music continuing, the road continuing, the photographer briefly crossing paths with it.
If you want, we could also look at what makes this photograph unusually modern for 1921—there are two small visual decisions in it that were quite radical for the time."
I then asked about punctom
Ah—nice word to bring into this.
The idea of punctum comes from Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida.
Barthes described punctum as the detail in a photograph that “pricks” or wounds the viewer—something small, often unintended, that pierces the general reading of the image.
The rest of the image—the cultural meaning, the subject matter, the readable context—is what he called studium. The punctum is different: personal, accidental, and emotionally sharp.
I asked about the punctum.
For many viewers, the punctum might be:
The violinist’s eyes.
They look directly toward the camera while everything else is moving forward. The music continues, the boy continues walking, the road stretches away—but the gaze suddenly stops the moment. It creates a brief awareness that the photographer is present.
Another possible punctum:
The barefoot boy.
His feet in the mud are almost painfully concrete. They pull the photograph out of the poetic idea of “a wandering musician” and drop it into physical reality—cold ground, rough life, childhood inside labor.
Or this small detail:
The cloth in the boy’s hands.
It hints at the economy of the situation—something to hold coins, perhaps, or simply part of the musician’s kit. That tiny object quietly tells you the performance is not romantic; it’s a way to survive.
What’s interesting about punctum
Barthes insisted that punctum cannot be fixed. Different viewers feel it in different places. What pierces one person may not pierce another.
In this photograph the punctum could be:
• the eyes
• the bare feet
• the bow in motion
• the child watching in the background
Each of those details can suddenly make the photograph feel alive and fragile rather than simply descriptive.
And the funny thing about punctum is that photographers rarely plan it.
It usually appears after the fact, in the strange chemistry between the image and whoever is looking at it.
—
I’m curious (and this is the real Barthes question):
Where does the punctum land for you in this photograph?
While I worry about ai in creation, the ability to see and interpret is unsettling and dangerous.
Pardon my French, but fuckin’ awesome read. Almost like being back in Trachtenberg’s seminar. Thanks Andy and Peter.
I'll admit, I opened this ready to roll my eyes at what I feared would be another tired apples and oranges defense of AIG imagery vs Human made/captured imagery, a necessary modern distinction whose very existence I find extremely depressing. So very delighted to be wrong. This is a really great piece of writing and puts a nice cherry on a lot of my feelings towards AI. There is just something off that I can't get into beyond a passing novelty, even when it sits next to a work created or pieced together in photoshop or CGI. Artificial indeed.
I was also surprised to read about the negativity towards photography, which I didn't realized was a thing. I couldn't help but smile. The unfortunate job of the critic is to look for the faults and strengths in their area of expertise, and boy do they love to lean in to the former.
Excellent read! Makes me look at my own work and the intentional flaws in a new light!!
Can you expand on the notion of “intentional flaws”?
Some of it is in the framing to add a little tension. A lot of it is in letting things stay on set once discarded or leaving tags or creases in clothes. These are things I feel humanizes the image and creates an experience for the viewer.
I've given this a lot of thought over the last year as a somatic photographer using an AI to help me work on articulating my work and finding my voice for it. My reality is that I came to photography directly from the corporate world so I do not have any history with the history or language for articulation about my art.
What I have come to believe about AI is that what it actually does is automate a procedural type of mental labor. At the same time, I have sensed that "art" is actually the process and not so much the artifact that gets produced. The photographic process has had the biggest cognitive impact on me.
Thus, photography (or any art for that matter) where the "art" is in the making, using a machine to automate the labor of the art is skipping the most crucial phase of making art. Using AI for this phase makes it procedural when art is meant to be a bit more ethereal in first order.
Loved this article. And You beautifully laid out in words my feelings about photography and AI
Thank you for this very stimulating text. I only stumbled over one sentence, which struck me as a little too categorical, even somewhat sentimental: “The AI-generated image that looks like a photograph is intrinsically deceptive; it has nothing good to tell us.”
An image may be questionable in its genesis and still reveal something, because the punctum may not reside in the image itself, but in the encounter with the person who looks at it. With AI, it does not necessarily disappear; perhaps it shifts toward the one who recognizes, among several images, the one that touches them.
Thanks for your comment. It sparks a few questions in me - perhaps even prompts for more writing.
What I mean is that an AI image that looks like a photographs is generated to deceive. If it is not, it would not present as something it isn’t. Most uses we see right now center around propaganda or commercial use - not something I can defend the intentions of.
Certainly, there is a sentimentality embedded in my approach here. While I understand the dangers in overdoing it, I think a certain level of sentimentality about what distinguishes the human from the machine to be important. Perhaps sentimentality - or maybe I’d say here humanism - has gotten a bit of a bad reputation. I do not hear it as an obvious negative, even though I’ve heard it used in such a way ad nauseam.
It’s hard for me to imagine your scenario with a punctum an AI, but I accept its possibility.
For me, and obviously this is personal - provenance is important (the medium is the message) - and even a compelling AI image that may seem to have a punctum cannot because the moment I learn the provenance of the image, all of what was compelling is lost. Part of what makes photographic images strong is that they are a record of sorts, even the most constructed ones. Images that look like photographs but are not must be held to a standard appropriate for the medium, and photographic looking AI is not photography.
What a wonderful essay, brilliantly written. Thanks!
Always looking for the punctum when cruising with my camera. Good essay.
Just the perfect follow-on from your AI piece. Great writing on an intriguing topic. I am going looking for punctum now in all my photographs!
Tremendous!