Alienation

“Visible inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar.” Martin Heidegger’s words (in Vorträge und Aufsätze [Lectures and Essays], p. 195) are echoed by Roland Barthes (in Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography), who calls such alienating inclusions in the photo the “punctum”. This refers to an initially inconspicuous marginal detail that suddenly attracts our attention as a “sting” (Barthes p. 27) and “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow” (p. 26). The punctum is that “accident” in the photo, which was not planned by the photographer but “which pricks me” (p. 27), i.e. unexpectedly hits me and continues to captivate me.

I myself envision a photography in which the inconspicuous is not really present in the photo but rather only comes from the situational interaction of the individual elements of the whole. The alien and disconcerting here would not be some existent something but the inconspicuous event of visibility itself that takes place in relations: the ‘between’, which would be on track to a “phenomenology of the between”.

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