Exposing Wounds: Traces of Trauma in Post-War Polish Photography

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namely the Real: “....in short, what Lacan calls Tuché, the Occasion, the Encounter, the 
Real, in its indefatigable expression.”
55
 
For Lacan, the Imaginary register is intended to veil the subject from the Real, for to get 
too close to the Real would be “equivalent to psychic death.”
56
 Removing this veil 
entirely would be too painful, but Barthes suggests that there are moments when the Real 
ruptures the veil of the Imaginary and erupts in traumatic returns. Barthes defines this as 
the punctum, a tiny detail lurking within the image that takes the viewer by surprise and 
alters his understanding of the image. The viewer does not seek out the punctum, but 
rather this detail, Barthes suggests, is an “element which rises from the scene; shoots out 
of it like an arrow, and pierces me.”
57
 Bursting through the photograph, this detail breaks 
up the illusion of coherence within the frame. Significantly the terms used by Barthes to 
describe this all suggest their relation to lack: prick, tear, wound, hole.  
Beksiński’s Veil resonates with the image Barthes selected for the frontispiece of Camera 
Lucida, a colour photograph by the French photographer Daniel Boudinet, Polaroid 
(1979), which shows curtain fabrics drawn against bright light. This melancholic image 
consolidates a number of ideas in Barthes’s text. First, it suggests the idea of the 
photograph as a screen that mediates between the viewing subject and the Real, obscuring 
the Real that lies behind it. Boudinet’s image also seems to make visible a moment of 
rupture; a small gap at the bottom of the curtains that allows a chink of light to erupt into 
the image. At the start of Barthes’s book then, the punctum is visualised for the reader as 
a piercing of the veil that allows the Real to intrude. Beksiński’s photograph appears to 
suggest something similar. His piece of fabric is quite literally torn through, making 
visible the idea of puncturing and tearing, bringing together notions of screen, Real and 
punctum. The fabric is riddled with multiple holes, saturated to the extent that the 
integrity of the material is compromised. The bleached white sky that lies behind the 
cloth speaks of the searing quality of the Real, and the pain involved in any attempt to 
directly look upon it. Hal Foster identified moments in recent art making when artists 
                                                      
55
 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 4. See also Margaret Iversen, “What is a Photograph?” Art History 17 no. 3 
(September 1994). 
56
 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: the avant-garde at the end of the century, (Cambridge: MIT, 1996), 
138-141. 
57
 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26. 

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have invoked these notions and attempted to deliberately puncture the screen, in order “to 
look upon the impossible real.”
58
  
Iversen has suggested that after Camera Lucida a change can be discerned in artistic 
practice. Lacan’s analysis of Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1533) leads her 
to identify a new paradigm, namely that “art, the beautiful illusion, contains within it a 
seed of its own dissolution.”
59
 At the bottom of his painting, Holbein includes a shadowy 
entity that cannot be seen or understood, “a blind spot in conscious perception,” and 
which only becomes clearly visible when the painting is looked at from an angle different 
to that of classical renaissance perspective.
60
  It is only in walking away from the 
painting, and renouncing a position of visual mastery, that the viewer realises this 
shadowy stain is in fact a skull. Set again the transparency and fullness of vision 
associated with the Imaginary register, “this stain or spot must be approached indirectly, 
viewed awry, glancingly, without conscious deliberation.”
61
 Iversen uses this example to 
suggest a shift in art making, whereby “the work of art based on the figure of the mirror 
was replaced by a model that invokes the anamorphic image, the stain, and the blind 
spot.”
62
 In a circuitous way, Iversen’s analysis takes me back to my thesis and my stated 
intention to make visible the moments of traumatic return in post-war Polish photographs, 
moments when the Real can be understood to puncture the veil, or create a blind spot or 
stain. I am interested in the ways that photographs can be understood to communicate 
these traumas indirectly, belatedly and obliquely. Rather than just analysing the works 
that  present on an Imaginary plane – that is to say, the coherent images presented on the 
surface of the photographic paper – I intend to ‘view awry’, to push aside the veil, and to 
make visible the stains and blind spots that disrupt the visual field and gesture towards the 
unassimilated traumas that lie beyond. 
                                                      
58
 Hal Foster, "Obscene, Abject, Traumatic," October 78 (1996): 109.  See also Foster, The Return of the 
Real, 138-141. 
59
 Iversen, Beyond Pleasure, 11. 
60
 Ibid., 7. 
61
 Iversen, “What is a Photograph?” 457. On the link between stain and punctum, Iversen says that, “There 
is, then, a blind spot in the orthodox perceptual field which Lacan calls the stain (la tache), defined, like the 
gaze, as that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in 
imagining itself as consciousness.” (Iversen, ibid.) 
62
 Iversen, Beyond Pleasure, 6. Lacan introduced this figure in 
The Four Fundamental Concepts,
 where 
he used the distorted skull floating in the foreground of Hans Holbein’s 
The Ambassadors
 (1533) to 
figure the blind spot in conscious perception. See 
Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of 
Psychoanalysis
, 1964. 

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