The childhood photographs of Benjamin and Kafka: from sacrifice to gesture in the World Theatre (original) (raw)

Shedding the veils, making room: on some photographic motives in Walter Benjamin

SOPHIA Crossing Borders, Shifting Boundaries – The Aura of the Image , 2016

This article analyses two photographic motives in Walter Benjamin's work. The first one, encompassed by the expression " shedding veils " , concerns Blossfeldt's photographs as well as the links they establish with a broader philosophical and aesthetical tradition. A first development of this motive focuses on " Little History of Photography " (1931) and on the relation between technology and magic. On the other hand, " News about flowers " , a review of Blossfeldt's work written three years before, establishes a connection with morphological questions. Therefore, the optical unconscious points explicitly to the uncovering of analogies and forms, and implicitly to a " cosmos of similarity " which can be said to be at the core of Benjamin's theory of mimesis. The historical tensions brought forth by technology gain a new meaning when read against this mimetic background. The second motive addresses the fundamental role Atget plays on Benjamin's historical reading of photography and, consequently, on the relation between photography and the representation of the city. In this context, and without avoiding the complex and often misread question of the aura, it is important to understand how Atget's photographs are creating the conditions for a further development of the photographic technique and at the same time transforming our perception. The expression " making room " , which covers a wide range of meanings spanning from the literal/technological to the metaphorical one, belongs to a spatial dimension of Benjamin's thought presupposing a movement of destruction-construction. At the same time, it is related to the fertility of the concept of Spielraum, room for manoeuvre/play. Bringing closer such texts as " The destructive character " , " The Work of Art " essay or the texts on Naples and Ibiza, this article is also a reading of the critical tasks set in motion by Benjamin's thought.

“... The optical unconscious”: about art and technique in Walter Benjamin’s writings on photography

Problemata, 2022

The aim of this paper is to claim with Benjamin the importance of photography as a philosophical object. Therefore, this analysis requires the treatment of three basic questions: (1ist) why photography constitutes for Benjamin such an essentially new method of reproduction that it cannot be compared to any previous artistic procedure; (2nd) how the very possibility of photography is linked to the recognition of its antagonism with the work of art; and (3rd), in which terms the impact of photography on the worlds of art and politics should be interpreted. With this analysis, we intend to make visible the reasons that still determine its novelty in a century that some are quick to describe as post-photographic.

Film, Distraction, and Walter Benjamin's "Dialectical Image"

In this essay, I will discuss Walter Benjamin’s appropriation of the philosophical “Idea” in The Origin of German Tragic Drama with a view to explicating his later concept of the “dialectical image” and what he thinks it offers to politically-oriented historical materialism. For Benjamin, the shock that is needed to break the subdued collective consciousness of historical progress is the presentation of something radically other than a closed historical totality. The creation of something that could not exist without the destruction of reified elements is helpfully explicated—and concretized—when one considers what Benjamin thinks photography offers the human eye in his essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” There he says that the camera presents the viewer with the opportunity to experience the world from an altered perspective in the form of the picture (Martin Jay tells us that “Dialectical images are more indebted to photo collage than to Kandinsky”). That film speeds up this process and presents these images to the viewer in a state of distraction is additionally indicative of Benjamin’s conception of the dialectical image and how it possesses the power to show the contemporary subject what is excluded in standard historical narratives. In the “Work of Art” essay, the camera has a kind of purity in its divorce from human consciousness, and that it claims to present mankind with a picture of reality but really embodies the process of estrangement in reification is powerfully suggestive of what the injection of history into the Idea creates in the dialectical image: “The position of earthly things ‘before the machine’ has now become as absolute as the religious position ‘before God’ used to be.”

Photography's Weimar Proliferation and Walter Benjamin's Optical Unconscious

Photography and the Optical Unconscious, 2017

This book chapter explores the historical context behind Benjamin's formation of the the optical unconscious. It suggests that the increasingly dire diagnosis of photography's ill effect on human consciousness, particularly in the medium's mass-proliferation, was something that Benjamin wrestled with before devising the more positive notion of a photographic optical unconscious.

Walter Benjamin on Photography and Fantasy

A reading of Benjamin’s review of Karl Blossfeldt's Urformen der Kunst . I suggest how Benjamin positions Blossfeldt’s plant photography in relation to Goethean science as well as to his understanding of the manifestations of fantasy. Forthcoming in October 2017 issue of Critical Horizons, edited by Alison Ross

Pictures of the past: Benjamin and Barthes on photography and history

European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2002

This paper explores the key moments in Benjamin's and Barthes's analyses of the cultural significance of the photograph. For Benjamin these are; the optical unconscious, the transmission of aura, the representation of cultural and political decay and proto-surrealist political commentary. For Barthes they are; the techniques of the photographer, the studium, the punctum and the ecstasy of the image. These rather different approaches to photography reveal a common concern with history. Both authors have written about the nature of historical understanding and photography has provided both with a powerful metaphor. What emerges from their analyses of photographs is that each evokes a double moment of historical awareness; of being both in the present and in the past. For Benjamin this is the 'spark of contingency' with which the aura of past existence shines in the present. For Barthes it is the 'ça-a-été', the emotional stab of awareness that what is present and visible in the photograph is irretrievably lost in the past.

Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography

Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography, 2012

Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography presents two of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century in a new comparative light. Pursuing hitherto unexplored aspects of Benjamin's and Barthes's engagement with photography, it provides new interpretations of familiar texts and analyzes material which has only recently become available. It argues that despite the different historical, philosophical and cultural contexts of their work, Benjamin and Barthes engage with similar issues and problems that photography uniquely poses, including the relationship between the photograph and its beholder as a confrontation between self and other, and the dynamic relation between time, subjectivity, memory and loss. Each writer emphasizes the singular event of the photograph's apprehension and its ethical and existential aspects rooted in the power and poignancy of photographic images. Mapping the complex relationship between photographic history and th...

Walter Benjamin and Douglas Crimp: Theory and Critique of the Photographic Modernity

Dissonância: Revista de Teoria Crítica, 2021

This article aims to reconstruct the principal aspects of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Little History of Photography” and its North American reception in the 1970s. To do so, I will turn to the work of Douglas Crimp and to the controversies concerning photography and Clement Greenberg’s modernist paradigm, paying special attention to the role Benjamin played in them. Furthermore, I will argue that the debates on the photographic and contemporary art theory can benefit from an interconnected reading of Benjamin and Crimp

Benjamin's Baudelaire: Time and Timeless Photography

Walter Benjamin’s accounts and imaginings of Baudelaire are multiple and extensive. Baudelaire’s method and manner of dealing with the world for Benjamin allows him to reveal the structures and mechanisms that constitute modern society. By linking Baudelaire’s way of working to the process of photography, I explore how Benjamin constructs a relationship between Baudelaire, time and photography, and how these ideas are revealing themselves in modern photography, particularly in networked environments.