History is photography: the afterimage of Walter Benjamin
Posted by on Monday, April 5, 2010
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But despite the scatter-shot access to his work, and despite the notorious difficulty of his prose style, Benjamin became a touchstone for the most influential photography critics and historians of the 1980s. Drawing on 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 various, increasingly elaborate attempts to distinguish art photography from commercial and amateur productions, the real pictorial revolution effected by photography concerned the ease with which individual likeness could be systematically recorded, giving photography a key role in bureaucratic institutions, including the police station, the insane asylum, the school and the prison.(4) Tagg's analysis of the institutional uses of photography was complemented by Allan Sekula's increasingly historical deconstructions of the documentary authority of the "instrumental realist archive." Benjamin's famous proclamation about photographs as "scenes of crimes," Sekula argued, demonstrated the need 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 model of photography premised upon the "telling detail."(5)
But despite the scatter-shot access to his work, and despite the notorious difficulty of his prose style, Benjamin became a touchstone for the most influential photography critics and historians of the 1980s. Drawing on 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 various, increasingly elaborate attempts to distinguish art photography from commercial and amateur productions, the real pictorial revolution effected by photography concerned the ease with which individual likeness could be systematically recorded, giving photography a key role in bureaucratic institutions, including the police station, the insane asylum, the school and the prison.(4) Tagg's analysis of the institutional uses of photography was complemented by Allan Sekula's increasingly historical deconstructions of the documentary authority of the "instrumental realist archive." Benjamin's famous proclamation about photographs as "scenes of crimes," Sekula argued, demonstrated the need 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 model of photography premised upon the "telling detail."(5)
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History is photography: the afterimage of Walter Benjamin
Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 1998 by Jeannene M. PrzyblyskiIn a New York Times Book Review essay on Jay Parini's 1997 historical novel about the last days of Walter Benjamin, Benjamin's Crossing, the critic made annoyed reference to Benjamin's "leonine status in the eyes of many academics today" He complained that despite Benjamin's failure as both an academic and a features writer, his imperfect grasp of the relation between theory and praxis and his inability to finish much of anything, citations of the German philosopher's work have become virtually obligatory in trendy American academic books on cultural studies.(1)
Such sentiment is hardly new. In a 1979 essay, "Waiter Benjamin on 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 New Criterion, Roger Kimball diagnosed an "October syndrome" infecting that high-profile academic journal, as well as a host of others, with a weakness for opaque theoretical proclamations, radical politics and a fine disregard for "the very idea of high culture." One of the chief vectors of obfuscating imported "Continental theory" and a lowbrow love of cultural detritus was none other than Waiter Benjamin. Among the books and articles referenced here, Linda Haverty Rugg makes apologetic reference to a "Benjamin cult," as does Susan Buck-Morss. This is an essay about some reasons, both good and bad, why Benjamin has come to be perceived as a required reference point in critical studies of the history of photography. I'll make my own, unapologetic position clear from the outset: this is also an essay about why I continue to find Benjamin's views on photography and history indispensable. Perhaps the "cult" should begin issuing membership cards.Benjamin's ambivalent but persistent position as a chief theorist of the relationship between "photography and society," to echo the title of a book by his contemporary, Gisele Freund, began to coalesce in the 1970s.(2) English translations of some of his "theoretical essays" first appeared in the late '60s, including several fragments on 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 '70s, and citations of Benjamin's work became increasingly frequent in the pages of influential art periodicals such as Artforum, several dissident editors of which would found 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 on a television series of the same name, and Susan Sontag's On Photography (1977) represented significant attempts to bring Benjamin's views to a wider audience. But as Charles Rosen observed in 1977, "Benjamin's work has been less an influential force than a quarry: he has been pillaged but 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 comments hold true today. The three-volume collection of Benjamin's writings announced by Belknap/Harvard has stalled at one published volume. Publication dates on the other two volumes have been pushed forward to 1999 and 2000, although these dates are by no means certain. The English translation of the Origin of German Tragic Drama is out of print. Try to find the lone battered copy of One-Way Street, and Other Writings in your local university library.
But despite the scatter-shot access to his work, and despite the notorious difficulty of his prose style, Benjamin became a touchstone for the most influential photography critics and historians of the 1980s. Drawing on 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 various, increasingly elaborate attempts to distinguish art photography from commercial and amateur productions, the real pictorial revolution effected by photography concerned the ease with which individual likeness could be systematically recorded, giving photography a key role in bureaucratic institutions, including the police station, the insane asylum, the school and the prison.(4) Tagg's analysis of the institutional uses of photography was complemented by Allan Sekula's increasingly historical deconstructions of the documentary authority of the "instrumental realist archive." Benjamin's famous proclamation about photographs as "scenes of crimes," Sekula argued, demonstrated the need 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 model of photography premised upon the "telling detail."(5)
But despite the scatter-shot access to his work, and despite the notorious difficulty of his prose style, Benjamin became a touchstone for the most influential photography critics and historians of the 1980s. Drawing on 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 various, increasingly elaborate attempts to distinguish art photography from commercial and amateur productions, the real pictorial revolution effected by photography concerned the ease with which individual likeness could be systematically recorded, giving photography a key role in bureaucratic institutions, including the police station, the insane asylum, the school and the prison.(4) Tagg's analysis of the institutional uses of photography was complemented by Allan Sekula's increasingly historical deconstructions of the documentary authority of the "instrumental realist archive." Benjamin's famous proclamation about photographs as "scenes of crimes," Sekula argued, demonstrated the need 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 model of photography premised upon the "telling detail."(5)
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