W. Eugene Smith, Waiting for Survivors: The Andrea Doria Sinking, 1956.
has passed away. (Beneath Barthes' taut analysis of his
own family photographs and classic nineteenth century
portraits is a lament for his own loss—the death of his
mother.) Barthes asserts that in every photograph there
is a punctum, a mysterious zone of focus, often quite
remote from whatever we might assume the actual
subject of the photograph to be. The punctum is an
often unassuming detail that authenticates the whole,
that lends the image its poignancy.
The human hand, whether severed by the Surrealists
or wielded by the powerful, is the sine qua non of the
photographic punctum. The most telling anecdote in this
catalogue recounts how Buhl came to form this collection.
He had been advised by his mentor Howard Greenberg
HYLAND
