Once the punctum occurs, we fixate on something that provokes us, a single detail in a photograph that holds our gaze without condescending to mere meaning or beauty. Barthes provides us with this example in the photograph of a well-dressed African-American family taken by James van der Zee in 1926. According to Barthes, the punctum in this photo is the strappy pumps on the feet of a woman in a photograph of these shoes whose style seems too young for the age of the woman wearing them. This "arouses great sympathy" in Barthes, "almost a kind of tenderness", although he later shifts, when the image "works" on the author, to her gold necklace. Necklace that reminds him of his unmarried aunt who lived a rather sad and sad life. Once again he was emotionally fixated by that tiny, touching detail. Here we see Barthes influenced by what is already familiar to him, something personal and recognizable. Zee's photograph, which was not at all typical for the time, gives him a punctum, a fixation of something already familiar to him, a necklace similar to the one he had already seen in his real life