Word: punctum
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...French writer Roland Barthes used to argue that every truly moving photograph has a single absorbing spot, a place that calls forth feeling. He called it the punctum, Latin for puncture or point. It could be something as simple as the little smudge that is the comet Hale-Bopp, which was for a while the world's most celebrated dot. Since it was an ancient dot, and one that got around a lot, it shed an astral glamour wherever it appeared. Like the President or Sharon Stone, it made everything, even whole mountain ranges, look more consequential beside...
Keep in mind that some photographs are punctum free but still haunting. One landscape we'll remember is nothing more than a plain littered with rocks. It's fascinating because it happens to be on Mars. Maybe it's just a trick of the light, but the pictures that NASA's Mars Sojourner sent home were some of the most emotionally complicated of the year. The scenery may not be much, but as we know from photographs of the Old West, which Pathfinder's greatly resemble, no-man's-land has always been America's fallback version of paradise...
...then there is Diana, the woman who was, all by herself, the punctum of the late 20th century. She was, for one thing, the princess and the pauper, the improbably lustrous creature who also carried her (our?) mere humanity into the throne room. Sometimes the grief at her death seemed out of proportion, but only if you forgot the real question it presented: If the most luminous woman in the world can die, what hope is there for the rest...
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