Monday 7th April

Lecture theatre 2 @ 10.00am - we will look at 'The Bus' by Daniel Meadows


Don't laugh - people still look like this in Australia

Here's Daniel Meadows' official 'Bus project' website. Please take a look - there's a huge amount of information and some great ideas. The project is still very much alive.

French Philosopher Roland Barthes uses two terms to describe photographs:

Studium - is the surface impression of an image - it's technical quality or 'competence'
(Whether the image is ok - not bad - alright)

Punctum - is the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the image
(The bit that grabs us)

These concepts first appeared in Barthes's Camera Lucida (published in 1980)

Barthes's influence is greater than you might think, even in commercial design and photography circles

There's even a Punctum group on flickr

So anyway, back to these two muppets... it's the 1970s - they're wearing tartan - they must be Bay City Roller fans...
WRONG!

See the records he's carrying

Well, the top one is Deep Purple (manly Heavy Metal to you) - not cissy pop music for girls.

Before iPods and walkmans, young men used to take records round to their friends' houses to listen to - protected from the weather in a polythene bag.

And the scarf:

...is a Manchester United scarf. One of the few bits of merchandising fans could buy in an age before the commercialism of football started to fleece fans for replica shirts and official socks, underpants, bed linen and matching curtains...

These two young men are wearing tartan jackets to associate themselves with Manchester United and their Scottish manager (at the time...) - Tommy "The Doc" Docherty.

"The 'punctum' for me in this picture (and many of Daniel Meadows 1970s Bus portraits) is how I feel when I see the jackets, and haircuts, and imagine the smell of two young men who only bathed once a fortnight (if that).

I never had a jacket like that - my Mum wouldn't let me - and I would have been frightened if I walked down the street towards 'big kids' like them. They were the sort of lawless hooligans who would "kick yer 'ed in".

Now I see them and smile at how harmless, innocent, naive and comical they really were.

I also feel touched at the sight of the records - and remember that I often used to listen to music intently with friends. We would sit in each others' bedrooms and pore over every inch of the gatefold sleeves, devouring the lyrics and looking for mysterious messages scratched into the run-out groove.

People don't do that anymore.
I don't do that anymore.

But this picture transports me - like falling through a hole in the fabric of time and space, back to an age when things were simple - people ate meat and two veg everyday and knew their neighbours.

The punctum isn't necessarily a flaw, or a hole or a specific item - it best describes our emotional response to images (and perhaps people, music, places, tastes) - not something that everyone shares or understands - but matters indvidually to us.