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Youngin Chung | Phoenix Staff

Valerie Clark peruses the final result of the Polaroid Project at the Kitao Gallery.

BY TIFFANY LIAO

In print | Published October 30, 2008

A fresher, more collective-oriented approach to art is being brought to the Swarthmore community this fall as Pun/ctum, a new magazine devoted solely to photography, arrives on the scene amidst the typical spate of campus literary magazines.

Back in Fall 2007, current Pun/ctum Editor-in-Chief Cheryl Tse ’09 and alumni Eve Lampenfeld ’08, Linda Huang ’08 and Meagan Hu ’08 first came up with the idea of a photography magazine when the budding photographers decided that a proper platform for photography didn’t exist on campus.

“We didn’t like the quality of images printed on existing campus publications, that the images were primarily used to break up the text [or] that images selected were a bit lackluster,” Tse said.

A year later, Pun/ctum magazine was born. Tse was inspired to christen the magazine with its unique bifurcated moniker when she came across the term “punctum” in Roland Barthes’ “Camera Lucida.”
In the novel, Barthes adopts the term punctum, which technically is the corner of your eye where tears drain out, to describe a “moment that is purely personal to the individual and in which you are pierced by an image,” Tse said.

In addition to Tse, the Pun/ctum board is made up of Linda Wang ’09, Maria Khim ’10, Abe Bae ’11, Blaine O’Neill ’11, Val Clark ’11 and Matt Goodman ’11.

According to Tse, the core principle of Pun/ctum is “really to provide a means for Swarthmore students of past, present, and future to present their perspectives through photography.”

Keeping in line with this broader vision, Pun/ctum recently held the successful Polaroid Project in order to announce the inception of their magazine and to promote their agenda of shared art.

According to Assistant Layout Editor Maria Khim ’11, the Polaroid Project really sought to “include the whole campus and go for a more collaborative approach.”

On Oct. 25, students were invited to borrow Polaroid cameras and to snap three photos each. Slots for renting out the cameras quickly filled up and in total, 80 students contributed their photography. The resulting photos were incorporated into a larger art exhibit that was displayed at the Kitao Gallery this past Sunday, Oct. 26.

Emphasizing the communal nature behind this project and behind Pun/ctum, the Polaroid pictures were left anonymous. The pictures were displayed in batches that were disparate and yet still appeared loosely unified. The intended message, Tse said, was that “it’s not just about the photographer and their perspective. It’s how each image is read by the collective community.”

The message was not lost on gallery viewers such as Xiaoxia Zhuang ’10, also a Polaroid Project participant.

“I liked the idea that students from all different academic and artistic backgrounds could participate and contribute to form a collective piece of art,” Zhuang said, “From Engineering to English majors, the Polaroid Project showed that everyone has a unique perspective.”

Jumping off from the popularity of the Polaroid Project, Pun/ctum plans to do more projects in order to continue fostering this creativity through the photographic medium, such as Polaroid transfers.

Currently Pun/ctum exists only as an online magazine, with the print edition in production. The online magazine is hosted at www.pun-ctum.squarespace.com. As a way of making the magazine a collaborative venture among students, Punc/tum is designed to be open-source. Students are invited to submit photographs either via the group Flickr feed or through e-mail at pun.ctum.mag@gmail.com. The idea is for the site to be user-generated but with evidence of an editorial voice.

“We’d like to have the magazine be as inclusive or egalitarian as possible, but without compromising the integrity of the medium,” Tse said.

Pun/ctum will be published in print biannually under a new general theme each semester. This semester, inspired by the movement of images in this modern digital age, the theme will be “mobility.”

For the inaugural print issue of Pun/ctum, the board hopes to change the existing format for exhibiting photographs. The size of the magazine will be between that of small literary magazines and that of commercial magazines. Images will be variably aligned page by page so that the viewer is encouraged to hold the magazine differently to view each of the images “correctly.”

“As I personally often just flip through pages, we’d like our viewers to engage more with the material,” Tse said, “My interest in the format mostly lies in dismantling normative ways of looking, or offering a different viewing experience, but for others it might be as simple as having it fit better in their pockets.”

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