IMAGES

By Richard Lacayo

The French writer Roland Barthes used to argue that every truly moving photograph has a single absorbing spot, a place that calls forth feeling. He called it the punctum, Latin for puncture or point. It could be something as simple as the little smudge that is the comet Hale-Bopp, which was for a while the world's most celebrated dot. Since it was an ancient dot, and one that got around a lot, it shed an astral glamour wherever it appeared. Like the President or Sharon Stone, it made everything, even whole mountain ranges, look more consequential beside it. So we nominate Hale-Bopp as Punctum of the Year, a year in which matters large and small left people unexpectedly moved.

Keep in mind that some photographs are punctum free but still haunting. One landscape we'll remember is nothing more than a plain littered with rocks. It's fascinating because it happens to be on Mars. Maybe it's just a trick of the light, but the pictures that NASA's Mars Sojourner sent home were some of the most emotionally complicated of the year. The scenery may not be much, but as we know from photographs of the Old West, which Pathfinder's greatly resemble, no-man's-land has always been America's fallback version of paradise--if not Eden, at least a new proving ground. So those Martian postcards may show nothing in particular, but for the imagination operating in forward thrust they are plausible glimpses of heaven.

And then there is Diana, the woman who was, all by herself, the punctum of the late 20th century. She was, for one thing, the princess and the pauper, the improbably lustrous creature who also carried her (our?) mere humanity into the throne room. Sometimes the grief at her death seemed out of proportion, but only if you forgot the real question it presented: If the most luminous woman in the world can die, what hope is there for the rest of us?

We may look back someday and decide that the great portrait of 1997 was Dolly the cloned sheep. In her anonymous face our misgivings about science are perfectly duplicated, mostly because she's our best picture of the assembly-line production of life. (Unless you count the McCaughey septuplets.) Dolly is also our sphinx in the manger. Somewhere in the black dots of her eyes there's a message, something about how hard it is to micromanage the most subtle departments of creation. Lamb of God, lamb of man--when we look at her, is that our future we see? Maybe it's just a trick of the light.

--By Richard Lacayo