On photographs, haiku and aesthetics:

In Camera Lucida, Barthes assigns two qualities to a photograph. The first is ‘studium’ . . . which he explains as “meanings that are nameable”, “cultural meanings that we understand at once”, “for it is culturally that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the setting, the actions”. The second is ‘punctum’ . . . explained as “this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow and pierces me”, “that accident which pricks me (is poignant to me)” . . .