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In 1855, Dickinson's daguerreotypist photographed Polaris--the North Star (Rinhart and Rinhart 404).

In the first place you will begin by preparing a room exposed to the sun, the south-east if possible. You will give this room the form of a truncated pyramid, lying down, of which the base will be the whole breadth of the window-which you will make as large as possible, and extending from the floor to the ceiling. The floor, the ceiling, and the two sides of the room, should be plastered with the whitest kind of lime plaster. . . . By means of mirrors properly disposed at the window, or in the room, you will concentrate the strongest possible light on the person, and will considerably augment that of the chamber, which has already been made as clear as possible. If the sun should be too brilliant, and the patient is not able to comfortably bear the reflection of it, use may be made of the blue glass, recommended by M. Daguerre.

Having covered your plate well with the coating of iodine, you will fix the sitter. His head should be placed on a semi-circle of iron, fitted to the back of the chair. His arms may be arranged at pleasure. He should fix his eyes on some well defined object in any direction which he may prefer-the focus of the camera obscura must be regulated and provided with a good Meniscus.

- M. Gouraud

In a language recalling that of the early photographers, Roland Barthes explores three practices that result in the photographic image. They are expressed by the infinitives "to do," which engages the Operator or photographer; "to look," which involves the viewer or "Spectator"; and "to undergo," which absorbs the "target," the thing or person photographed (Barthes 9). Moreover, both Gouraud's description of the photographer's operating room--a pyramid-shaped room designed according to the principles of Renaissance perspective--and Barthes' analysis of "what. . . my body knows about Photography" (9) implies a hierarchical perceptual relationship between the photographer and his object, a pyramid of sight in which the photographer's eyes are the apex and the object is the base.

In the mid-nineteenth century, to photograph was to capture by exposure. . . The "target" of North's camera/gaze even before she had reached the age of consent, Emily Dickinson may be said to "undergo" photography. North's image of her--an image of a young woman gazing quietly out into space--is an image carefully composed by the Operator. The props North employed--a bunch of flowers, a book, possibly a Bible, resting on the table beside the seated figure--belong to a cultural field of objects instantly familiar to the genteel Victorian viewer. Moreover, the final presentation format of the image--a sixth plate portrait, under glass, set in a velvet-lined leather case bearing a clasp--embodies in material form the ideals of bourgeois existence and gender politics in mid-19th-century America: the young woman gazing out into space is first miniaturized and then withdrawn from the public sphere, enclosed in the family home that would soon become the scene for an emerging interior life. Indeed, North's image of Emily Dickinson is so highly stylized, so conventionally coded, that its interest may lie almost entirely in that element of the photograph Barthes identifies as its studium: ". . . the extension of a field, which I perceive quite familiarly as a consequence of my culture. . . a kind of education (knowledge and civility, 'politeness') which allows me to discover the Operator, to experience the intentions which establish and animate his practices. . . .to read the Photographer's myths in the Photograph" (28).

Almost. For in the photograph--in this photograph--several strange attractors constitute what Barthes calls the punctum--the "sting," "speck," "cut," "little hole," "part object" that, "lightning-like," punctures the studium to reveal the contingency (accident, emergency, eventuality) inherent in the photograph (27). The punctum, Barthes claims, has nothing to do with the photographer's artifice or even his intentions; it is, precisely, what he is blind to, what he cannot see because it is without codes, and what we receive-in a flash-"on our developed Eyes" (MB I 122). Two details in the Dickinson daguerreotype in particular penetrate the studium; these details/flashes, moreover, are not incidental, but, rather, indispensable for figuring the writer at work: hands and eyes.