Reflections on a Photo of Two Young Punks

Debbie Juvenile and Tracie  O'Keefe
(Seditionaries 1977) 

There are two reasons why I like this photograph ...

Firstly, there are the clothes: McLaren and Westwood's idiosyncratic designs looked fucking amazing back then and they look even more astonishing now. One forgets just how romantic and swashbuckling punk fashion was - and just how queer (using that word in its fullest sense, to mean strange and outlandish as well as sexually deviant in some manner). It was never really a style that came from the streets; it came, rather, from the extraordinary imaginations of Malcolm and Vivienne and made very little sense outside of the world of 430, Kings Road. Clothes for heroes - and clothes for weirdos.         

Secondly, there are the two girls: Debbie Juvenile and Tracie O'Keefe.* They seem unable to contain their pride and joy at looking so fabulous as they pose for the camera lens and actively transform themselves into an image. The fact that each is smiling - such a rare thing for a punk to do - provides the picture with a warmth and a charm that makes me love it and love them.   

If they look so young, it's because they were so young. And their youth - the freshness of faces, the whiteness of hands - also illuminates the image and arouses great affection in me (almost a kind of tenderness). But what gives it a special poignancy is the distressing knowledge that both girls are no longer living.

I look at this photo and see two lovely - if unconventional - young women, dressed in their punk finery; they would appear to have their whole lives ahead of them. But in the back of my mind is the thought: they are going to die ... This, of course, is the challenge and the scandal of every photo. Indeed, it might even be said death is the very essence of photography; that every snap is to some degree or other mortifying: A second of your life ruined for life.

However, as Roland Barthes points out, the photograph also powerfully attests to presence and to the reality of lives that have been. It doesn't merely remind us of the past, or preserve what was abolished by the passing of time. It forms an actual bridge between ourselves and the dead. Thus, you look at Debbie and Tracie and - although they are no longer physically with us - they manage nevertheless to affect those of us who are still here in the flesh; not as ghosts, but as tiny suns that continue to shine long after they have burned out.

To paraphrase Susan Sontag, the presence of the absent being touches me like the delayed rays of a fading star.


Notes

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (Hill and Wang, 1981).

*Both girls were early fans of the Sex Pistols and part of the so-called Bromley Contingent; both worked as sales assistants at Seditionaries; and both were arrested during the Sex Pistols' Jubilee gig on a Thames riverboat. Tracie, however, was the only one to be given a prison sentence (for assaulting a policeman), although she was later acquitted on appeal. Shockingy, she died the following year, from cancer, aged 18.

As for Debbie, she embodied the look and spirit of punk: it was Debbie who sold programmes on the Anarchy in the UK tour and it was Debbie who can be seen singing backing vocals on stage with the Sex Pistols auditioning for a new frontman in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. Post-punk, she apparently drifted into the world of vice. Then she simply disappeared and is presumed dead.  

Miley Cyrus Meets Roland Barthes

Miley Cyrus by Cheyne Thomas / V Magazine 

I'm not a great fan of the 22 year-old American performer Miley Cyrus, but I am very much taken with this snapshot of her in a bathtub currently doing the rounds on social media. 

Why? Because, in Barthesian terms, it strikes me as a genuinely erotic photograph which produces the key element for disturbing the more general field of interest or studium. That is to say, the picture affords that which projects out of the image like an arrow and pierces me as viewer with a certain poignant fascination or delight. This is what Barthes terms the punctum. He writes:

"Many photographs are, alas, inert under my gaze. But even among those which have some existence in my eyes, most provoke only a general and, so to speak, polite interest: they have no punctum in them: they please or displease me without pricking me: they are invested with no more than studium." [27]

I know exactly what he means: when one glances casually at the many images of Miss Cyrus available online, one feels at most a rather flaccid degree of vague desire; she's alright, but, in or out of her clothes, it makes very little difference. There's no real surprise or delight; I might like the pictures or find them interesting, but I do not love them.  

This, in fact, is very often the problem with pornographic images; they are too homogeneous or unary. That is to say, they transform reality without making it vacillate. The erotic photograph, on the other hand, is a pornographic image that has been fissured and which gives us troubling details and untimely objects to distract our attention from the otherwise banal and exclusive presentation of sex. 

These supplements are what seduce us and they are often contained in the picture purely by accident (they attest neither to the photographer's intent nor technical ability). Often, we cannot even say what it is that arrests our gaze and constitutes a punctum: "What I can name cannot really prick me", says Barthes [51].

And so - returning to the above photo of Miss Cyrus - I'm not entirely sure what it is I find so captivating and loveable about the picture; is it her eyes, the position of her arms, the towel on her head, the bracelet, the smallness of her breasts, the stick-out ears, or is it the soap bubbles?

"The effect is certain but unlocatable, it does not find its sign, its name; it is sharp and yet lands in a vague zone of myself; it is acute yet muffled, it cries out in silence. ... Nothing surprising, then, if sometimes, despite its clarity, the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it. I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss its point of effect, the punctum." [51-3]

Miley looks so lovely and fresh-faced, so innocent and defiant in her nakedness, that it's distressing to realise at last that there exists another type of punctum - one not of form, but of intensity and which is related to time. For no matter how young and vital the subject, every photograph tells the same story: she is going to die. 

That's the final challenge of every photograph: however brilliantly they seem to capture the moment and the excited world of the living, each picture contains the imperious sign and certainty of future death. They excite our fascination and our desire, but, ultimately, they make us want to cry ...      

 

See: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (Vintage, 2000).

Reflections on Photography and Ethnoelephantology

Photo taken at London Zoo (Getty Images, 1971)   

I love this photograph: taken when girls wore hot-pants and were encouraged to pose provocatively with great beasts; when a trip to the Zoo was an opportunity for laughter and excitement rather than learning about conservation projects.

But it might be asked what it is about this photograph that so fascinates and moves me, apart from the obvious elements already mentioned (i.e. the nostalgia for times and fashions gone by and the none-too-subtle suggestion of eroticism as a crucial component of human-animal relations).

Well, firstly, I am struck by the fact that this photograph captures a real and unique moment which it faithfully reproduces to infinity. In other words, whilst the photograph mechanically repeats what can never be repeated existentially, the event itself is "never transcended for the sake of something else" [4].

Secondly, I am charmed by the posed element in the picture; that is to say the manner in which both girl and elephant invent new bodies and voluntarily transform themselves in advance into images, thereby lending themselves to the game of selfhood and representation. Today, in this digital age of smart phones, selfies and social networks, it's no big deal for people to be able to produce, manipulate and circulate their own image. But back in the early-1970s, when this picture was taken, there was still a great deal of nervous joy about having a photo taken and seeing the results (becoming the object of one's own gaze). And I think we see something of this innocence in this picture.
      
But still this isn't what makes me love the photo: there is still something else in it that provokes and seduces; something that Roland Barthes refers to in Camera Lucida as the punctum. For Barthes, the punctum is that element within the photo which produces an agitation of some kind and sends the viewer off on an imaginary adventure. It punctuates the conventional cultural elements that make up the photo's composition and which serve to produce a polite and predictable effect upon those who see it, reinforcing their views and tastes and beliefs about the world. And so, in this way, the punctum also pricks the viewer.

What pricks me then about this photo of an elephant and a girl and ultimately makes me love it so? There has to be some small detail which is there to be seen, but which initially escapes notice. Is it the bird flying overhead? No, it isn't that. Is it the lovely shape of the elephant's trunk as it embraces the young woman? No, it isn't that either. Nor is it the amusing look on her face, the fabric of her shorts, or the manner in which she knowingly grabs the elephant's tusk (described as an ivory reach around by my friend Z who has a talent for this kind of thing - providing apt descriptions that is, not symbolically jerking off elephants).  

No, the punctum is provided by the fact that the photographer has managed to catch the model's left hand at just the right degree of openness and happy abandonment; a few millimetres more or less and her body would no longer have been offered to the viewer, as to the beast, with benevolence and generosity.

It is doubtful that the photographer intended to do this. For as Barthes explains, the detail which pricks us is never strictly intentional and probably must not be so; "it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily attest to the photographer's art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object" [47].    

The punctum, then, is the unintended and unscripted detail; the off-centre element that disrupts the unary space of the photograph generated by what Barthes terms the studium and transports us as viewers into the realm of bliss (where objective interest gives way to that which is individually affecting).    


See: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (Vintage, 2000).