Cara George

'Ultimately – or at the limit – in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. "The necessary condition for an image is sight", Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes." ' 

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida.

Roland Barthes’ punctum is the moment a photograph moves us, often surprisingly and deeply; a ‘prick, little hole, little spot, little cut’. Memories will be stirred and personal histories tapped into. A punctum disrupts or reveals something about the ways we structure our sense of self and the world.

What does a punctum look like? This question is the focus of the work and is explored through collage, scanning, photocopying, cropping and printing. Materials are simply paper and steel. The raw photographic material has been collected over a period of half a year and documents three encounters with three brothers.

The finished works are punctured with steel pins. The point that the image is pierced and the pin re-emerges is crucial because the puncturing gesture is the physical realisation of the punctum, which is a wound. The pin pierces and connects, so the gesture is both violent and binding.