I am looking at a picture, or rather I was looking at a picture that I now write about. This image, this photograph could be any photograph for the viewer (reader) you or me and the writer you or me. This photograph can write, or you can write its story—its context—just as satisfactorily as I could.

It is an unremarkable image of a rural scene with a dam in the foreground surrounded by signs of pasture land accompanied by some trees and shrubbery. Towards the background lies another smaller dam to which the one in the foreground seems to flow, perhaps when the larger one is full. There are some small trees either side of the picture that one presumes are meant to act as a framing device. There are some hills in the distance.

A thoroughly uncompelling picture that Buvelot would find without interest—no livestock or ‘natives’. I do not refer to the painted surface which must signify a certain mythologising and idealisation, rather to the subject matter of this photograph which has basic studium, but seemingly no punctum. There are no cows in this image, only the muddy signs of their regular intrusion. This image is in fact so ordinary that one wonders why the photographer chose to take it, process the negative, print it out to approximately 60x40cm and mount it on a 8mm piece of MDF with bevelled front edges. What was this photographer thinking? Why did he or she select this image? Why this image over millions of others that speak the same language with the same generalised signifiers?

Yet this is what gives me a discomforting prod; this is what makes me cringe in the click of saturated signs; the discomfort of Buvelot’s romanticism being replaced by photography’s uncoded noeme, by the amateur photographers’ repeated, copied, replicated, simulated language. Worn out signifieds for a pastoral composure, an idyllic landscape that looks more like the back blocks of the next suburban housing estate. If pastoral beauty is the intended referent of this image, speaking something about serenity and man’s productive use of the land, it now looks like a dirty dam ready to be bulldozed for new development. A faded notion of what an idyllic pastoral landscape never looked like.

This reality once existed, so the photograph proclaims, yet it manages to disturb its reading advertently and inadvertently. Its ordinariness is disturbed, its banality is confronted beyond the photographer’s intention (and knowledge). A fading photograph—the colours becoming subdued and yellowed—this image pierces precisely because it is so in the past, doubly signified in its choice of subject matter and its faded surface. This photograph’s punctum is a kind of regret and disturbance of values that can no longer offer solace or affirmation. I am disturbed by its crude brutality in consort with a fractured surface, which for me, could never have been.