John Moore and the 'Punctum'

Below is a transcript of some jottings I made back in June (2nd), which I scribbled in a pad that I had available:

It has been a rather enlightening evening. I am travelling home after attending a photographic lecture by John Moore at The Frontline Club in London. He is the senior photographer for Getty Images, based in Islamabad in Pakistan and was the only photojournalist to capture the assassination of Benazir Bhutto (for which he won a World Press Photo Award). As fascinating as Moore's discussion was, what struck me more was the concept of 'punctum' within the images he showed.

Whilst travelling to the lecture, I read several passages from Roland Barthes's 'Camera Lucida'. in which he discusses the concepts of studium and punctum; a rather fortuitous read, considering the nature of the lecture. What came across through the images - despite many of them being very grainy and almost unrecognisable - was the sense of 'sting' within the image. Its very being was as much at one end (the greater end) of a continuum as the lack of composition was at the other end, especially in its uniqueness, with regard to no other photographers being present. The richness and power of the image material far outweighed the compositional element of the image itself and made me realise just what Robert Capa meant when he said, 'if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough' (interestingly, Moore also received the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for these images).

Another (anonymous to me) photojournalist once commented on his craft that to get the right images it was a case of 'f8 and be there', which is not to belittle compositional elements of an image, but more to emphasize the importance of being in the right place at the right time, and being intuitive enough to anticipate the 'moment' unfolding.

What also interested me, however, was that without Moore's explanation, some of the images' punctum would have been missed; rather, the punctum was individual and only truly existed in its truest sense, or certainly much more acutely, for Moore himself (not unlike Barthes's Winter Garden images (quoted within both Barthes and Marjorie Perloff's What Has Occurred Only Once essay).

This is an area that I intend to study in more depth as it has real meaning and application to me. For example, I shot a wedding a few month's ago and produced a variety of images for the couple to choose from for their album. I was surprised at some of the images they had chosen over others (which I would have regarded as superior in terms of both composition and quality). What to me was mere studium, and included in the overall choice merely becaise I had taken them so 'why not show them', turned out to be interpreted quite differently by the couple; a punctum was established, whether in an unknown (to me) facial expression, or a feeling that they associated with the time that the photograph was taken.

Whilst my intention, at times, is to lead the viewer to a photograph's interpretation, it has taught me that where high emotions play a role there is always great flexibility with the image and its associations to the individual.