The paper attempts to study ‘studium’ and ‘punctum’ proposed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida with reference to the prominent photographers, Steve McCurry and Raghu Rai. It deals with the orientalist and occidentalist photographic gaze that primarily investigates the imaging of India. Steve McCurry delves on the intersubjective cultural spaces that diffract from the reciprocal exchange of images and Derridian notion of ‘interiority/exteriority’. For McCurry, photography is not a technological miracle, rather it is an extension that is evoked from the consensual relationship between the photographer and the photographic subject. Raghu Rai on the other side chooses to acknowledge reflections of the societal attitude that transform the art of living. He depicts the subject’s expression that explores the objective view of images. Hence, the paper focuses on the cultural longing and intricate relationship between cultural paradigms of the referential signs of the photographic image.
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