Point-and-Shoot Cameras x The Punctum
To make sense of the recent resurgence in point-and-shoot cameras, we’re returning to French philosopher and cultural theorist Roland Barthes! We begin with a conversation about the major technological shifts that have occurred in photography between 1980 (when Barthes published Camera Lucida) and today. Hannah then leads us in a theory section all about "the Punctum." Together, she and Marcelle parse Barthes' understanding of what makes photography distinct from other mediums and how Time is entangled with our emotional relationship to snapshots captured on camera. If you've never heard of "the Punctum," let this episode be your introduction to one of Barthes' more moving contributions to our theory tool belt!
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Happy holidays from the Material Girls team! We'll be back next week with an Hour-Long All-Team Material Concerns episode! To learn more about the show, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca (you can also find transcripts here!).
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Works Cited:
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Cooke, Alex. “The Rise and Fall of the Point-and-Shoot Camera.” FStoppers 6 November 2025. https://fstoppers.com/historical/rise-and-fall-point-and-shoot-camera-715387.
McLennan, Tara. “Hashtag ‘Sunset’: Smartphone Photography and the Punctum of Time.” The International Journal of the Image 7.1 (2016): 33-43. https://doi.org/10.18848/2154-8560/CGP/v07i01/33-43
Murashima, Claire. “Why Gen Z loves the digital compact cameras that millennials used to covet.” NPR 10 December 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/12/09/nx-s1-5209770/gen-z-digital-compact-cameras-millennials-trendy.
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To learn more about Material Girls, head to our Instagram at instagram.com/ohwitchplease! Or check out our website ohwitchplease.ca. We'll be back next week with a Material Concerns episode, but until then, go check out all the other content we have on our Patreon at Patreon.com/ohwitchplease! Patreon is how we produce the show and pay our team! Thanks again to all of you who have already made the leap to join us there!
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Material Girls is a show that makes sense of the zeitgeist through materialist critique* and critical theory! Each episode looks at a unique object of study (something popular now or from back in the day) and over the course of three distinct segments, Hannah and Marcelle apply their academic expertise to the topic at hand.
*Materialist Critique is, at its simplest possible level, a form of cultural critique – that is, scholarly engagement with a cultural text of some kind – that is interested in modes of production, moments of reception, and the historical and ideological contexts for both. Materialist critique is interested in the question of why a particular cultural work or practice emerged at a particular moment.
Music Credits:
“Shopping Mall”: by Jay Arner and Jessica Delisle ©2020
Used by permission. All rights reserved. As recorded by Auto Syndicate on the album “Bongo Dance”.
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