Say you have a photo of someone you’ve lost. Which bit of it would get you? The face, you’d guess.
Probably not. More often it’s something at the edge of the frame: a watch strap, a chipped mug, a collar sitting slightly crooked. You’d steeled yourself for the face. Nobody steels themselves for a mug.
The ache
It’s a Tuesday, 11:20. You’re scrolling between a parcel notification and a work thread, and the phone offers you a memory from six years ago. A hand on a steering wheel. A cardigan you had forgotten existed.
Your chest tightens and you rearrange your face before anyone at the next desk looks up. You’d thought this was finished with. The people around you seem to have finished theirs.
A photo can floor you six years on because you weren’t looking for it. You were just scrolling.
Embarrassment turns up a second after the grief. It’s only a picture, you tell yourself, and put the phone down.
What Barthes noticed
Roland Barthes was a French critic who spent much of his career taking apart how ordinary things carry meaning. After his mother died in 1977, he turned to photographs, and the result was Camera Lucida, published in 1980. It’s short and odd: part theory, part a grown son going through a box of his mother’s photographs.
He gave us two words. The first is studium, the general, polite interest a photograph holds for you: who is in it, where, when, what it says about its era.
The second is punctum, from the Latin for a prick or a sting: the small detail that leaves the picture and pierces you personally.
The one he wouldn’t print
Now the part I didn’t expect. Barthes went through his mother’s photographs after she died, and for a long while none of them was her. They looked like her, he said, and did nothing for him.
Then he found one of her as a small child, standing in a glass conservatory with her brother. It is called the Winter Garden photograph. In it he recognised something of her that the others had missed.
And he did not put it in the book.
He explained why. To any other reader it would be a faded picture of a child, all studium and no sting. The wound existed only for him, and printing it would have turned it into an exhibit.
The photograph that hurt Barthes most isn’t in Camera Lucida. He seems to have known you can’t hand a sting to someone else.
How it works in your day
Take your own version. Say it’s a photo of a kitchen. To a stranger it’s a kitchen, with a kettle and a window. That’s the studium: readable, and nothing more.
But behind the kettle there’s a biscuit tin with the lid off, the way she always left it. That is the punctum. You didn’t pick it out. It picked you.
Barthes also thought a photograph does something a painting can’t. It testifies that this thing was really there once. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the sting: the tin was there, and so was she.
So the sting isn’t a glitch. A real person stood in front of a real lens, and some part of you knows it.
One thing to keep
You don’t have to count the ambush as proof you’re healing badly.
Barthes also kept a private notebook after his mother’s death, later published as Mourning Diary. It doesn’t move in a straight line. Some days are steady, and some days are the first week again for no stated reason.
Grief that comes back on a date or a photograph isn’t a setback. It’s the love still running, on a clock only you can hear.
Try this tomorrow
The next time an image catches you, don’t swipe it away in the first second. Look for the detail. Which one is it? The sleeve, the tin, the slant of the handwriting?
Name it, in your head or out loud. That’s all, ten seconds. The pain tends to have a location, and a located pain is easier to carry than fog.
On Wednesday, the paid audio looks at why grief keeps its own calendar, and what to do when the date comes round. If that’s for you, Get 25% off for 1 year.
If this named something you’ve been carrying, restack it for someone who’d know what you mean.
