("Work of Art" 226). Why? Because, like the Barthesian puncta, theyhy stir the viewer;

he feels challenged by them in a new way" ("Work of Art" 226). In "A Short History of

Photography," he linked this visual challenge unambiguously to the indexicality of the

photographic image. And it is photography's capacity to accidentally (and mechanically)

signify in excess of its context that stirs the viewer.

 No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject,
 the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of
 contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the
 subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-
 forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may
 rediscover it. (243)

The appropriate way to respond to this irresistible urge would be through distraction,

"much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion"

("Work of Art" 240).12 Barthes's punctum offers a similar distraction. In an Andre

Kertesz's portrait of Tristan Tzara, he notices "Tzara's hand resting on the door frame: a

large hand whose nails are anything but clean" (Camera Lucida 45). In a James Van der

Zee photograph of an African American family, Barthes fixates on the strapped pumps

worn by the sister (or daughter) in it. In other words, the focus is never on the central

subject of the image. To find thepunctum, the viewer looks at the photograph

distractedly, until a tiny, marginal detail pricks him.

 Kaja Silverman also writes about this mode of viewership, which she links to the

desire for "visual alterity." She argues that Barthes's is "a wayward or eccentric look, one

not easily stabilized or assigned to preexisting loci, and whose functioning is

consequently resistant to visual standardization" (183). Silverman further connects this

method of looking to the process of remembering, which is sparked by the punctum. This

kind of looking-that-sparks-memory, she argues, points to "the resistance which such a