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On November 3, 2025, my wife ran the New York City Marathon. 59,226 runners took to the streets that morning, pushing through 26.2 miles across all five boroughs. Two million spectators lined the route, creating a human corridor of noise and support that could be heard blocks away.

My son and I waited at mile eight in Brooklyn. He held a sign he’d made himself, his handwriting and an internal family joke (Emezinho Dentinho). I held my Voigtländer, a film camera that requires manual winding after each frame. My friend Brian stood beside us with his Leica Monochrome, camera set to burst mode.

We tracked her on the marathon app. The crowd around us swelled with other families, other signs, other cameras. For fifteen minutes, we watched strangers run past, each one searching the sidelines for familiar faces.

Then she appeared.

Brian’s camera captured what happened next in a sequence of frames, each one separated by fractions of a second. But one photograph stands above the rest. In it, you can see a true exhibition of studium and punctum.

Understanding studium and punctum in photography

Roland Barthes published Camera Lucida - Reflections on Photography in 1980, just months before his death. The book explores photography through two concepts: studium and punctum.

Studium refers to the cultural and contextual elements of a photograph. It’s what the image documents and communicates. When you look at a photograph and understand the setting, the circumstances, the technical choices, you’re engaging with its studium. It’s the education the photograph provides, the story it tells through visible facts.

Punctum is different. It pierces. The Latin word means “wound” or “mark left by a pointed instrument.” Barthes describes it as the detail that shoots out from the photograph like an arrow. You can’t always name it. It touches something deeper than cultural understanding. It’s personal, emotional, sometimes unexpected.

Great photographs contain both, like the photograph from mile eight contains both, in extraordinary measure.

The studium in this shot

Brian chose 1/125th of a second for his shutter speed. This decision matters. At 1/250th or faster, he would have frozen the background runners completely. The photograph would lose its sense of motion. At 1/60th or slower, we would have been blurred too, our frozen moment lost to the flow of time.

Instead, 1/125th creates perfect motion separation. The runners behind us blur into streaks of motion. The world races past. But my family stands sharp and clear, suspended in our own timeline. We are delaying the racer. We are stealing twenty seconds from her marathon for ourselves.

Brian set his aperture to f/16. The background runners remain visible despite the motion blur. You can see the crowd, the urban landscape of Brooklyn, the scale of the event. The ISO sat at 4000, which the Leica Monochrome handles without visible degradation.

But look closer at the content itself.

There’s her face as she sees us. The joy of recognition after running eight miles. Her wedding ring visible on her hand reaching toward our son. The AirPods in her ears. The race bib pinned to her chest.

There’s my son with the sign he created. His perfect small hands gripping the white board. His headphones protecting his ears from the cowbells and air horns. The toys attached to his backpack. Everything that makes him himself.

There’s me with my camera, doing what I always do for my family. Photographing. Documenting. Creating the archive of our lives together. The Voigtlander at my eye, the winder trigger in my hand.

There’s the “emezhino” reference on the sign, an inside joke from our family that no one else would understand.

And there, in the middle background, perfectly placed, another runner races past. The marathon continues. Time moves forward for everyone except us.

This is studium. The photograph tells you where this happened, when it happened, why it matters. It documents a specific moment in a specific place with specific people. You can read the photograph. You can understand it.

The punctum. What pierced me.

Here’s what makes me cry when I look at this photograph.

It’s my wife’s face. The exact expression as she recognizes her family on the sidelines. That specific smile. The way her eyes find our son. The happiness of this connection in the middle of her hardest physical challenge.

That’s my punctum right there.

I didn’t see it when Brian was shooting. I was busy with my own camera, trying to capture the moment on film. Brian’s digital burst mode was capturing frames I wasn’t aware of. Later, looking through the sequence, this frame stopped me.

The punctum cannot be forced. Barthes says that if the photographer’s intention becomes too obvious, if the detail is deliberately staged, it loses its power to pierce. What I can name cannot really prick me, he wrote. The punctum in this show works because Brian captured something genuine. He didn’t stage anything. She wasn’t performing for the camera. She was living through a real moment, and the photograph preserved something ineffable about it.

Your punctum might be different from mine. Perhaps you notice the contrast between my son’s small hands and the adult world of marathon runners. Perhaps the wedding ring catches your attention. Perhaps it’s the runner blurred in the background, unknowingly becoming part of our family story.

Barthes believed that punctum arrives through details the photographer doesn’t fully control. The photograph captures more than the photographer intends. Something in the frame pierces the viewer later, sometimes long after the image was made.

Film emulation with DxO FilmPack 8

The photograph came from Brian’s Leica Monochrome. I exported it as a TIFF file and opened it in DxO FilmPack 8. The software offers numerous film simulations, but I chose Kodak Tri-X, which made a great emulation job.

The grain structure simulation is also very precise, with random grain, and adjustable knobs to select grain size, type, and intensity.

Tri-X carries specific associations for photographers. It’s the film of photojournalism, of street photography, of documentary work. The grain structure, the contrast curve, the way it renders tonality: these characteristics evoke a particular aesthetic tradition, and DxO FilmPack 8 emulated it with perfection.

Printing

Printing came next. I use a Canon image PROGRAF PRO-300. The printer uses ten inks, with three dedicated specifically to black tones. For monochrome prints, this matters enormously. The tonal gradation from pure black through mid-grays to white requires subtle ink mixing.

The paper was Canon’s Premium Fine Art Smooth. A3+ size with 25mm margins. The printer takes approximately five minutes for a print this large at this quality. The ink saturation is substantial. After the print emerges, I let it rest for forty seconds before handling it.

The physical print reveals details the screen obscures. The grain becomes tactile. The tonal relationships shift. There’s a permanence to the print that the digital file doesn’t possess, and I am now happy this moment will be hanging on my living room’s wall. Thank you, Brian!

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