Beautiful Assassin

I am often looking at these photos of Lewis Payne, taken in April, 1865, perhaps on board the USS Montauk, by Alexander Gardner. They show the boy, just 21 years old, three months before he was hanged as one of the Lincoln assassin conspirators.

Of these images, Roland Barthes said,

In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W.H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. (Camera Lucida)