A Rupture in the Field of Representation: Animals, Photography and Affect

This review essay explores the sociality of photographic affect through an analysis of animal photography. It offers a social reading of Barthes's concept of the punctum by examining the importance of animality to the concept's formulation. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's work on animality as a key question in Western thought, the paper argues that Barthes's engagement with animality is not arbitrary and that thinking in terms of animality helps us to understand photographic affect as necessarily social.