History is photography: the afterimage of Walter Benjamin

In a of recent origin York Times Book Review essay upon Jay Parini's 1997 historical novel about the last days of Walter Benjamin, Benjamin's Crossing, the critic made annoyed respect to Benjamin's "leonine status in the organ of visions of many academics today" He complained that despite Benjamin's failure as the couple an academic and a features writer, his imperfect grasp of the relation between theory and praxis and his inability to finish abundant of anything, citations of the German philosopher's work have become virtually obligatory in trendy American academic works on cultural studies.(1)

Such sentiment is hardly fresh In a 1979 essay, "Waiter Benjamin upon Photography" Heinz Puppe lamented the transformation of Benjamin into just "another fashionable authority to be cited ipse dixit." In a deathless 1988 essay in the fresh Criterion, Roger Kimball diagnosed an "October syndrome" infecting that high-profile academic journal, as well as a entertainer of others, with a weakness for opaque theoretical proclamations, radical politics and a fine disregard for "the true idea of high culture." individual of the chief vectors of obfuscating imported "Continental theory" and a lowbrow be fond of of cultural detritus was none other than Waiter Benjamin. Among the volumes and articles referenced here, Linda Haverty Rugg makes apologetic concern to a "Benjamin cult," as does Susan Buck-Morss. This is an essay about more [i]or[/i] less reasons, both good and bad, wherefore Benjamin has come to be perceived as a required respect point in critical studies of the history of photography. I'll make my have a title to unapologetic position clear from the outset: this is also an essay about wherefore I continue to find Benjamin's views upon photography and history indispensable. Perhaps the "cult" should begin issuing membership cards.

Benjamin's ambivalent on the other hand persistent position as a chief theorist of the relationship between "photography and society," to reverberation the title of a work by his contemporary, Gisele Freund began to coalesce in the 1970s(2) English translations of a certain number of of his "theoretical essays" first appeared in the late '60 including several fragments upon Baudelaire, "The Storyteller," and the oft-anthologized "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which continues to be a staple of introductory courses in the history of photography. Translations varying in quality of "A Short History of Photography" appeared in the '70 and citations of Benjamin's work became increasingly of frequent occurrence in the pages of influential art periodicals similar as Artforum, several dissident editors of which would ground October in 1976. (In comparison, Siegfried Kracauer's equally important 1927 essay, "Photography" did not appear in English translation until 1993) John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) itself based upon a television series of the same name, and Susan Sontag's upon Photography (1977) represented significant attempts to bring Benjamin's views to a wider audience. on the contrary as Charles Rosen observed in 1977 "Benjamin's work has been les an influential force than a quarry: he has been pillaged on the contrary not imitated," adding that "for those who are interested in Benjamin and who do not read German, the situation is gloomy"(3) With certain significant exceptions, his make notess hold true today. The three-volume collection of Benjamin's writings announced by means of Belknap/Harvard has stalled at individual published volume. Publication dates upon the other two volumes have been pushed forward to 1999 and 2000 although these dates are by dint of no means certain. The English translation of the Origin of German Tragic Drama is on the outside of print. Try to find the lonesome battered copy of One-Way highway and Other Writings in your local university library.

But despite the scatter-shot access to his work, and despite the notorious difficulty of his dull style, Benjamin became a touchstone for the greatest in quantity influential photography critics and historians of the 1980 Drawing upon the insights of the "Work of Art" essay, John Tagg emphasized the withering away of the "aura" associated with unique works of art in favor of a photographic "democracy of the image." While the Modernist history of photography would be marked by dint of various, increasingly elaborate attempts to distinguish art photography from commercial and amateur productions, the real pictorial revolution issueed by photography concerned the ease with which individual likeness could be systematically recorded, giving photography a lock opener role in bureaucratic institutions, including the police station, the insane asylum, the seminary and the prison.(4) Tagg's analysis of the institutional uses of photography was full taleed by Allan Sekula's increasingly historical deconstructions of the documentary authority of the "instrumental realist archive." Benjamin's famous proclamation about photographs as "scene of crimes," Sekula argued, demonstrated the ne to balance Benjamin's avant-garde interest in montage and its possibilities for provoking visual "shock" with a recognition of his rearguard investment in an empirical archetype of photography premised upon the "telling detail."(5)