6 ideas
Studium is the general, polite interest a viewer takes in a photograph through shared cultural codes: its historical information, its composition, and the photographer's evident intentions. It engages the viewer as an educated consumer who can read and like the image, but it never disturbs them. Most photographs produce only studium.
Punctum is a detail in a photograph that pricks or bruises a particular viewer, breaking through the studium; Barthes treats it as largely unintended by the photographer and personal, so what touches one viewer may leave another untouched. He suggests that what he can name cannot really prick him, yet he himself points to particular puncta, such as a necklace that recalls his aunt.
The noeme of photography is that the referent was necessarily present before the lens. Unlike painting or language, a photograph cannot fake the existence of its object, so its core force is certification of past presence rather than representation or art. The photograph is a literal emanation of the referent, carried by light.
Every photograph carries a temporal punctum: it shows someone alive who is going to die and, by now, often has. The viewer experiences an anterior future, 'this will be and this has been', so each portrait becomes a small catastrophe already accomplished. Seeing photographs this way turns every image into a memento mori.
Searching through photographs after his mother's death, Barthes finds her true essence only in one image of her aged five in a winter garden. He refuses to reproduce it because for any other viewer it would be mere studium, an ordinary old picture, while for him it is pure wound. The case shows that the most important photographic truth is untransferable.
Photography involves three practices: the Operator who takes the picture, the Spectator who looks at it, and the Spectrum, the person or thing photographed and returned as a kind of spectre. Barthes deliberately studies photography from the Spectator's and Spectrum's positions, including the experience of posing and feeling oneself turned into an image, into an object and a small death.