In arts, as in life, we praise symmetry for obvious reasons.
But in photography, as a hasty traveller, you can rarely obtain that perfect symmetry Barthes was confining within the punctum theory of photography.
What Barthes was saying was that there are two kinds of photographs: the punctum ones were those closed pictures where the viewer adds no meaning or contributes not to the meaning making process - because everything is already there -, while the studium photographs are more open to interpretation, as the photographer didn't imposed his very orderly vision onto the reality he photographed.
In his view, the two photographs above are perfect illustration of punctum.
