On Photography

On
Photography
Walter Benjamin
Edited and translated
by Esther Leslie

reaktion books
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First published 2015

Introduction, introductory texts and

glossaries copyright © Esther Leslie 2015
Translations of texts by Walter Benjamin
copyright © Esther Leslie 2015

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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without the prior permission of the publishers

Printed and bound in Great Britain

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the

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isbn 978 1 78023 525 7

 Contents

Introduction: Walter Benjamin

and the Birth of Photography 7
Esther Leslie

Small History of Photography (1931) 59

Nothing Wrong with the Illustrated Press! (1925) 109

Letter to Grete Cohn (16 October 1927) 115

New Things about Flowers (1928) 123

Paris, the City in the Mirror:

Declarations of Love by Poets and Artists
to the ‘Capital of the World’ (1929) 133

The Wall (c. 1932–4) 145

Review of Gisèle Freund’s La Photographie en

France au dix-neuvième siècle. Essai de sociologie
et d’esthétique (1938) 149

Acknowledgements 153
Photo Acknowledgements 155
Benjamin as a child, c. 1897, photographed by the Selle & Kuntze
studio.
 Introduction: Walter Benjamin
and the Birth of Photography

Walter Benjamin was born into a world in which photog-

raphy was becoming commonplace. In 1892, in Berlin, the
year and place of his birth, photography wove its way into
many people’s lives through the ritual visit of the bourgeois
family to the studio to have portraits taken, an experience
that Benjamin reflected on several times in his writings. In
autobiographical reflections from the early 1930s, he relates
how when as a child he was photographed in a studio with
a crudely painted backdrop of the Alps, brandishing a
kidskin hat, he felt that the screens and pedestals ‘craved
my image much as the shades of Hades craved the blood
of the sacrificial animal’. e photographic studio presented
itself to him as a hybrid of boudoir and torture chamber.1
And there exists a photograph of him, at the age of five,
standing alone, surrounded by a fuzzy oval, holding a sword
and a flag and dressed up as a soldier. Studio photography
compelled the subject, he noted, to adopt awkward poses,
dress in clothes that are nothing but costumes, and gaze
out from among a clutter of fake and random objects that
engulf the fragile human body. Indeed, the imposturous
and miserable but also simultaneously widespread nature
of this experience is covertly publicized when Benjamin
describes an image of Kafka that was in his possession. It
is of Kafka as a boy, yet Benjamin describes it as if it were
of himself:
7
 I am standing there bareheaded, my left hand holding
a giant sombrero which I dangle with studied grace. My
right hand is occupied with a walking stick, whose
curved handle can be seen in the foreground, while its
tip remains hidden in a bunch of flowers spilling from a
garden table.2

In Benjamin’s interpretation, mechanical reproduction, or

photography in this case and at this moment, assaults
humanity and provides legible images of the dysfunctional
relationship of technology, nature and social world by which
humans increasingly become mere props – an experience
not reserved solely for the working-class ‘appendage of the
machine’, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described it
in 1848 in e Communist Manifesto. is is how Benjamin
saw a world of commercial photography designed to pro-
vide confidence-boosting photographs for well-heeled
families to place inside heavy albums that rest as dust traps
on dark sideboards in cluttered living rooms.
ere were also more public encounters with photog-
raphy in Benjamin’s childhood. e time of his growing
up was the time of the emergence of the illustrated press,
which was dependent on the rapid technical innovations
in the field. In his year of birth, for example, the Berlin Illus-
trirte Zeitung3 (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper) first appeared,
placing its speciality attention-grabbing pictures on its
front cover. Engravings were soon replaced by photographs
and, from 1901, photographs were printed inside the news-
paper. Here was the start of photojournalism, and with it
the professions of photojournalist and photo librarian were
established.
As Benjamin grew, so too did access to making photo-
graphs. Processes simplified – cheaper cameras were made
and roll film was invented. In February 1900, Eastman
Kodak Co. introduced to the u.s. market the Brownie cam-
era, designed and manufactured for the company by Frank
8
Brownell of Rochester, New York; the name ‘Brownie’ was
a reference to the pixie-like characters from Palmer Cox’s
popular children’s books, and illustrations of them appeared
on the cameras’ early packaging. e young camera was,
after all, designed for children. e new photography was
to be a hobby for children, for the apparatus could be ‘oper-
ated by any school boy or girl’, as an advertisement from the
Youth’s Companion put it in May 1900. In the event, much
larger sections of the population adopted it. With the
Brownie, the notion of the snapshot was inaugurated. Rap-
idly other companies started making similar cameras and
they came into the hands of Europeans too. Moments of
daily life, or at least its exhilarated moments – at the beach,
on the town, in the garden – were recorded for posterity.
e invention in Germany of the Leica camera proto-
type, by a microscope designer on the eve of the First World
War, contributed further to the pervasion of the world by
photography. Once the war was over and the prototype
improved, the Leica revealed itself to be a versatile, eye-level,
daylight loadable compact camera that could snap precise
shots in magnificent detail, using 35 mm motion picture
film, which enabled it to shoot up to 36 rapid sequential
exposures. Fast-paced modern life could be framed and
captured by this device. During Benjamin’s passage from
baby to adult, photography had developed: it had become
faster, more capable and yet, in some regards, less demand-
ing of skill on the part of the photographer.
Private and public, collective and individual, active and
passive, productive and consumerist engagements with pho-
tography were all possible in the world in which Benjamin
grew up. Photography had entwined itself in the mediation
of the world. It had become not just a mediator of history
but by the 1920s also had its own rich history and assured
future. Benjamin reflected on all this in his scattered writings
and jottings on photography. His thoughts encompass
production, reproduction, sitter, viewer, temporality in the
9
photograph, the economic situation of the photographer
and this vis-à-vis the painter, the status of art and craft in
relation to photography, the relationship of his curious cat-
egory of ‘aura’ to photography, the relation of photography
and memory, and photography’s potentials for knowledge
and pedagogy.
Benjamin was aware of some of the debates around and
practices of photography, not just as a bystander but as a
discussant. In the course of his life, he came to know several
professional photographers, including Sasha Stone, Gisèle
Freund and Germaine Krull, and he made the acquaintance
of John Heartfield.4 He met László Moholy-Nagy through
Arthur Müller-Lehning, the Dutch anarchist who was the
publisher of the Dutch International Revue i 10, a journal for
which Moholy-Nagy was photography and film editor from
1927 to 1929. A letter from Benjamin to Gershom Scholem
from 14 February 1929 mentions meeting Moholy-Nagy:
‘A thoroughly delightful physiognomy – but perhaps I have
written this before – is Moholy-Nagy, the former teacher
of photography at the Bauhaus.’5 Some of Benjamin’s ideas
on photography coincide with aspects of Moholy-Nagy’s
Malerei Photographie Film (Painting Photography Film),
published in 1925 as a contribution to the Bauhaus book
series, with a second edition in 1927 (where the occurrences
of ‘ph’ in Photographie were replaced by the more modern-
sounding ‘f’ form. In this book, Moholy-Nagy argues that
a ‘culture of light’, drawn from ‘the new vision’ that is
produced by the camera as it extends the eye, will adopt
the mantle of innovation from painting and provide the
expressive means of the future.6

Photography in Weimar Germany

Walter Benjamin was not alone in turning to photography
as a fount of interest. e Weimar Republic of Germany,
in which he lived and studied until 1933 and where (having
10
Sasha Stone, The East, 1920s, published in Schünemanns
Monatshefte (August 1929).
failed to secure an academic post) he became a reviewer and
essay writer, housed a lively photographic culture. In 1929
the much-publicized ‘Film und Foto’ exhibition opened
in Stuttgart, organized for the Deutscher Werkbund by
Gustav Stotz in order to ‘bring together as comprehensively
as possible works of all those who were the first to recognize
that the camera is the most appropriate composition medium
of our time and have worked with it’.7 Around 1,200 works
were on view, selected from across Europe and the United
States, and the show, in reduced form, toured for two years
through Zurich, Berlin, Vienna, Danzig, Zagreb and
Munich, and also went to Japan. ‘Film und Foto’ was a bold
statement, phrased in Germany, about the importance of
technological culture. e exhibition sampled some of the
tendencies of photography in Europe of recent years. ese
tendencies, some of which were represented in the exhib-
ition and all of which were practised in Germany, ranged
from commercial photography to reportage photo-essays,
art photography, avant-garde photobooks and political
photomontage. Even within art photography, photographic
trends ranged, within just a few years, from the quirky fram-
ings and high contrast of the Neues Sehen (New Vision),
to the documentary precision and hyperrealism of Neue
Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity, or ‘Straight Photography’
as it was called in the u.s.), to Dada and Surrealist approaches
to the image.
Photography was embraced by a panoply of users. Its
origins in a mechanical device were overcome in its diversion
into a bona fide art form; provided the basis for its rhetoric
of objectivity, precision and truthfulness, which allowed it
to be used as an investigative tool capable of capturing,
assessing and retransmitting the contours of modern life;
and allowed it to forward anti-art and post-art arguments
among an avant-garde that rejected the association of art
with individual creativity, originality and authorship.
Numerous volumes of experimental photography were
12
published in the 1920s, such as Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika:
Bilderbuch eines Architekten (America: Picture Book of an
Architect, 1926), with its captioned day and night shots,
reviewed favourably by El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko
and Bertolt Brecht; Werner Graeff’s Es kommt der neuer
Fotograf! (e New Photograph is Coming, 1929); and Jan
Tschichold and Franz Roh’s foto-auge / oeil et photo / photo
eye, published in 1929.8 ese collections were polemical. In
foto-auge, a response to ‘Film und Foto’, Roh, eschewing
the upper case, established the following context for the
volume that conveyed a ‘new vision’:

for a long time we had photographers who clad everything

in twilight (imitators of Rembrandt in velvet cap, or all
softening impressionist minds). today everything is
brought out clearly.9

It contained 76 photographs by Eugène Atget, Andreas

Feininger, George Grosz, Max Burchartz, Man Ray, Max
Ernst, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Edward Weston
and others. e cover illustration was a photomontage by
El Lissitzky. But as well as photographs by named prac-
titioners experimenting with montage, photograms, multiple
exposures, negative prints and collage, in addition to photog-
raphy combined with graphic, painterly or typographical
elements, it contained anonymous photographs from news-
papers, picture agencies and advertising, aerial photography,
X-ray images and the results of other scientific uses of the
camera. ese were all jumbled together and without captions.
Juxtaposition was one of foto auge’s modes of communica-
tion; for example, ‘Files’, a photograph by Sasha Stone of
alphabetized index cards in a filing cabinet, was placed next
to an image owned by the chemical concern ig Farben, of
people relaxing on a beach. e meanings of each – work,
leisure, mass society, loss of individuality, public, private,
surveillance, bureaucracy – were modulated by the other.
13
Achievements of Mechanics, published in Variétés (15 January 1930).

Periodically living in Paris, Benjamin also had at least an

inkling of what was of interest among the francophone
scene. He was aware of journals that dealt with modern
photography and film, mentioning in particular the French
journal Bifur and the Belgian Variétés, both of which had
relationships with Surrealist photographers. To give a sense
of the material on show in such a forum as Bifur, some of
the contents of issue 5 from 1930 will suffice: photos by
Claude Cahun and Tina Modotti and film stills from Sergei
Eisenstein and Joris Ivens. Variétés made heavy use of
photography too in its issues, under the influence of the
Dada-Surrealist E.L.T. Mesens, who produced collages
for the journal and published images by contemporary
photographers, including Germaine Krull.10
In Europe in the 1920s, how photographs looked and
how they could be made was a topic for excited debate.
Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray experimented with direct pho-
tography and darkroom trickery. In the post-revolutionary
Soviet Union, Aleksandr Rodchenko insisted on breaking
with straight-ahead views and used the new lightweight
cameras to take tilted shots, their perspectival shifts designed
14
to signify the shift in political perspectives. John Heartfield
and Hannah Höch snipped images from illustrated maga-
zines, transforming the seemingly ordinary signs that they
found into warning signals of oppressions to come. Neue
Sachlichkeit rebuffed photomontage’s fractures with
smooth, glossy images whose framing and tones oozed a
cool attitude rather than the heat of the struggle. Some con-
temporaries – Benjamin among them – dismissed it as the
photography of political impotence attuned to a period of
stabilization. In 1924, Benjamin evoked the polar opposite
of ‘objective’ photography in translating into German –
with ‘awe-inspiring vim’11 – a short piece entitled ‘Inside-
out Photography’, for the June 1924 issue of G: Zeitschrift
für elementare Gestaltung (G: Magazine for Elementary
Form), journal of the ‘G’ group. e article was Tristan
Tzara’s 1922 preface to Man Ray’s photograph album Les
Champs délicieux, devoted to his Rayographs, which were
photographs taken without the use of a camera. Tzara wrote:

When everything that called itself art was well and truly
riddled with rheumatism, the photographer lit the lamp
of a thousand candles and step by step the light-sensitive
paper absorbed the blackness of several objects of use.
He had discovered the momentousness of a tender and
unspoilt flash of lightning, which was more important
than all the constellations designed to bedazzle our eyes.
Precise, unique and correct mechanical deformation is
fixed, smooth and filtered like a head of hair through a
comb of light. Is it a spiral of water, or the tragic gleam
of a revolver, an egg, a glittering arc or a sluice gate of
reason, a subtle ear with a mineral whistle or a turbine
of algebraical formulae? As the mirror effortlessly throws
back the image, and the echo the voice, without asking
us why, the beauty of matter belongs to no one, for hence-
forth it is a physico-chemical product.12

15
For the Dadaist Tzara, chemistry, physics and technology
return the object to experience. e flare of light, intrinsic
to flash photography – in the magnesium explosion or the
ready-made flash bulb – parallels the act of perception, and
it constitutes an illumination more intense than the wan
mimicry of art. is process provides the chemical imprint
of matter in all its new and revolutionary beauty. Matter
has come to voice, and it speaks of itself. The most pre-
cise mechanical act produces something quite magical,
just as it is material, physical and real, and, furthermore,
it is owned by no one. is is not property. It is an art of
‘luminous values’ in ‘passionate progress’ that no modern
art, no painting, can halt.
is progressive art of light and shade passed from the
Dadaists to the Surrealists, who combined the poetry of
matter – the indexical relationship between photography
and visible world, which imprints its traces, as in Man Ray’s
Rayographs – with the workings of chance. Such innova-
tions of Dada and Surrealism stimulated Benjamin, though
he was critical, in 1929, of the Surrealist stress on mysticism,
occultism and spiritualism, their fascination with seances,
hypnosis and trance-like states.13 Indeed, such criticism is
voiced by him precisely in relation to the Surrealist use of
photography in 1936, when discussing Louis Aragon’s
description of Surrealist procedures – such as cutting a
locomotive out of a rose, or embellishing photographs with
drawings. Collage invigorated painting and photography in
1930, but by 1936, Benjamin was dismayed. e Surreal-
ists had succumbed to aestheticized photography in trying
to ‘master photography by artistic means’:

ey failed to recognize the social impact of photography,

and therefore the importance of inscription – the fuse
guiding the critical spark to the image mass (as is seen
best in Heartfield).14

16
 Supervening styles and modes of photography in the
interwar years had manifestos, supporters and detractors.15
As these fashions superimposed on each other, or battled for
the same Weimar photojournal pages, theorists polemicized
the different politics of form of the various photographic
trends. Photography mattered. Photography introduced
new perspectives, and perspective was a political question
in this period. In a radio lecture for children from 1930,
Benjamin demonstrates what the aerial perspective, which
photography might adopt, can reveal:

More telling than standing in front of the houses is

looking at photos taken from a bird’s-eye view, as if you
were peering down on the premises. At first you see how
grim, severe, gloomy, and military the rental barracks
look in comparison to the peaceful houses of the garden
plots, which are so amicably juxtaposed with one
another. And you understand why Adolf Behne, who
has done so much for this new Berlin, calls the rental
barracks the last of the castle fortresses. Because, he says,
they arose from a few landowners’ egotistical, brutal
struggle over the land that they would dismember and
divide among themselves. And this is why rental barracks
have the shape of fortified and warlike castles, with their
walled-in courtyards. As the owners are locked together
in hostile confrontation, so too are the residents living
in the hundreds of apartments that usually make up these
city blocks.16

Seen from above and encompassed within the photograph,

the actuality of the rental barracks comes into view, as a
modern castle and as a site of historical and social process
and conflict.
He goes on to discuss photos from the journal Uhu, for
which he wrote and which carried photographs by the likes
of Moholy-Nagy, Martin Munkácsi, Albert Renger-Patzsch,
17
Sasha Stone, Umbo (Otto Umbehr), Erich Salomon and
Yva (Else Neuländer-Simon). e photos that drew his eye
are of new housing developments, a ‘completely new form
of American skyscraper’ that were ‘either set on their short
end so that they project upward, or . . . lay on their broad
side to make long rows of houses’. What the image tells
him is grounds for optimism:

e rental barracks are on the way out: through the

abolition of the somber and monumental stone build-
ing that has stood still, immovable, and unchanged for
centuries. e stone is replaced by a narrow frame of
concrete and steel, the compact and impenetrable
façades by giant glass plates, and the four blank walls by
deep-set and exposed stairs, platforms and roof gardens.
e many people that will live in such buildings will
gradually be transformed by them. ey will be freer, less
anxious, and also less belligerent. is future image of
the city will inspire people at least as much as airships,
automobiles, and ocean liners do today.17

e aerial perspective that is possible in photography

spreads to the built form, making all inhabitants of the
clouds possessors of the overview.
In his commitment to understanding photography in
a many-faceted way, Benjamin was moving truly with his
times and place. Benjamin monitored the various moves
in photography and analysed them for their social and
aesthetic meanings. He took to heart the prediction of
Moholy-Nagy that the illiterate of the future would not be
the person unable to read or write, but the person ignor-
ant of how photography signifies.18 He proposed his own
canon of contemporary photographic ‘masters’: it included
Eugène Atget, Karl Blossfeldt and August Sander, Gisèle
Freund and John Heartfield. He argued that the historic
work of Atget should be venerated as inaugurating a modern
18
vision that looked for the unremarked, the forgotten and
cast adrift. In the process, Atget cleansed the atmosphere
of traditional portrait photography, expunging the person
and making of the photographic scene a Tatort, a crime
scene, or less hyperbolically, a place of action. Photography
is, for Benjamin, for Atget or for Benjamin reading Atget,
the site where evidence might be found. Indeed, forensic
photography was, in any case, already an established field,
which had developed contemporaneously with Benjamin’s
appearance in the world and was used for documenting,
for analysis and to convict. Alphonse Bertillon, the French
police officer who set out instructions for obtaining the
mug shot photo in 1890, was also a pioneer in methodic-
ally photographing crime scenes: the scattered objects, the
victims’ bodies, the weapons and so on, from ground
level and the ‘God’s-eye-view’; these would subsequently
be made available to the press. Benjamin’s interest in crime
scene photography had less to do with monitoring con-
ventional criminal behaviour and more with the place of
social evidence – places made available for the detection
of social truths and untruths, as exposed in what Benjamin
terms the ‘optical unconscious’ in his ‘Small History of
Photography’ (1931).
Photography captures a moment in time, but what it
captures exceeds the intention of the photographer. Photog-
raphy, for Benjamin, accesses a differently constituted
reality, with layers unseeable by the naked eye and made
perceptible only by technological means. A spark of con-
tingency finds its way onto the photographic image. In this
splinter of space and time, in its margins or previously unseen
elements, history rests, awaiting rediscovery. is echoed
something from Benjamin’s earliest writings. In ‘e Life
of Students’, published in 1915, he wrote of how ‘history
rests concentrated, as in a focal point, something seen from
time immemorial in the utopian images of thinkers’.19 e
focal point is a matter for cameras and photographs, though
19
its etymology stems – as is clearer in the German word
Brennpunkt – from the hearth, the point of burning, the
place that never fails to draw the eye and in which endless
forms are seen.

Benjamin’s Photographs
Benjamin did not take photographs but he was, like many,
a photographic subject. He also collected photos and
commissioned others to make them, as for example when,
staying in Moscow in 1926–7, he visited the Kustarny
Museum for regional art, which held a collection of old
Russian toys. Benjamin arranged for some of them to be
photographed and the pictures, retouched, appeared in
his newspaper article on ‘Russian Toys’, published in the
southwest German radio listings magazine.20 He wrote
captions on their backs: the toys’ names, their region and
time of manufacture, their mode of production, their ma-
terials, size and other features such as sound effects, as well
as odd things that struck him about their physiognomy –
their cultic remnants, their social fragility, their demotic
simplicity.21
Benjamin also held onto photographs of Paris taken
by his acquaintance Germaine Krull in 1928. Benjamin’s
archive holds thirteen images of Paris by Krull. ese are
photographs of the Paris arcades, shop windows and shop
fronts. Benjamin also kept or collected four images by her
of bleaker scenes: a run-down courtyard, crumbling walls,
a grey street populated by a few lonely individuals.
Benjamin’s friend Sasha Stone (born Aleksandr Serge
Steinsapir) gave him three photographs of a bourgeois in-
terior, taken from different perspectives, which he kept. Stone
(who also photographed his portrait bust, sculpted by Jula
Radt, in 1926) produced the design for the dust jacket of
Benjamin’s book One-way Street (1928), a dynamic photo-
montage of street signs, lamp posts, a shopping street and
20
a dog. The cover was described by Benjamin as ‘one of
the most effective there has ever been’.22 Inside the book
is a vignette titled ‘Manorially Furnished Ten-room Apart-
ment’. In words, Benjamin describes elements of Stone’s
photographs of a cluttered and cushioned room in which
there are ‘knickknacks, knickknacks everywhere’.23 Benjamin
held on to these photographs and others, and used them to
think and explore the world. at is to say, he read photog-
raphy, in Moholy-Nagy’s sense, and made it legible.
Benjamin was also an avid collector of postcards – the
first polychrome picture postcard, manufactured according
to a photographic template, was just three years younger
than him. Just as he returned to his own childhood in his
memoirs and in the choice of childhood as a topic for essays,
he was also drawn to the early days, or ‘childhood’, of photo-
graphic postcards. Indeed, in a letter he once described
‘antiquarian postcards’ as ‘my speciality’.24 In some writings
on childhood, he revealed the origin and the aim of such
collecting:

ere are people who think they find the key to their
destinies in heredity, others in horoscopes, others again
in education. For my part, I believe that I would gain
numerous insights into my later life from my collection
of picture postcards, if I were to leaf through it again
today. e main contributor to this collection was my
maternal grandmother, a decidedly enterprising lady,
from whom I believe I have inherited two things: my
delight in giving presents and my love of travel. If it is
unclear what the Christmas holidays – which cannot
be thought of without the Berlin of my childhood –
meant for the first of these passions, it is certain that
none of my boys’ adventure books kindled my love of
travel as did the postcards with which she supplied me
in abundance from her far-flung travels. And because the
longing we feel for a place determines it as much as
21
 does its outward image, I shall say something about
these postcards.25

His childhood collection of picture postcards were stored

in three collector’s albums, alongside other valuables, in a
small ‘locker hidden beneath the seat’ of the desk by the
window, his favourite spot.26 He did not stop collecting and
his many journeys to San Gimignano, Volterra, Siena, Ibiza,
Palma de Mallorca, Moscow and elsewhere all yielded much
booty. As he wrote in Moscow Diary (1926–7):

It was also today that I discovered some fabulous post-

cards, the kind I had long been looking for, old white
elephants from the czarist days, primarily colored pictures
on pressed cardboard, also views of Siberia.27

In the mid-1920s, Benjamin intended to write a study of the

‘Aesthetics of the Picture Postcard’.28 It came to nothing,
but in June 1926 he was still able to remark to his friend
Siegfried Kracauer, who wrote his own study of photog-
raphy in 1927,29

If you pursue further the skewed bits of the petty bour-

geois stage of dreams and desires, then I think you will
come across wonderful discoveries and perhaps we will
meet each other at a point which I have been gauging
with all my energy for a year without being able to hit
it in the centre: the picture postcard. You may perhaps
one day write that salvation of the stamp collection for
which I have been waiting for so long without wanting
to chance it.30

Composing a History
Benjamin’s article ‘Small History of Photography’, pub-
lished in 1931, whizzed through the history of photography
22
in a few pages, ending with his own preferences among
contemporary practitioners. He sought out the socio-
historical evidence lodged in the very chemicals, in the
papers, in the exposure lengths and in the poses of the sub-
jects across photography’s history. Photography has a
history and it provides a record of history. It plays out in its
forms, hues, stances, props, focus, exposures and everything
else the broader social history of what is photographed, of
the world that brought the photographic technology into
being: its class struggles, its mediations of technology, its
relationships between humanity and nature. And so, accord-
ing to Benjamin, the first photographed generation were
figures who had not yet learned that photography might
serve the purpose of self-glorification, even into the here-
after. ey withdrew shyly into the private space of their
drawing rooms. As an example, Benjamin recalls a photo-
graph of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who was
photographed sunk deep into his chair in the 1850s. ere
is in this image no pompous presentation of self. In the
slowness of exposure, the spaces where these optimistic
bourgeoisie lived – a durable, hope-filled world – arrived
on the photographic plate with them. Benjamin notes
that even the creases on people’s coats possess an air of
permanence.
e late nineteenth-century generation, the one into
which Benjamin was born, were members of an imperial-
ist bourgeoisie, states Benjamin, and they did not inherit
the virtue of coyness. ey used photography to inflate their
self-image, their individuality. ey retouched photographs,
adding haze and painterly effects. And they crammed the
stiff family portraits with props and backdrops, signs of a
more generalized falseness. is amounts to an abuse of the
apparatus. e photographer and the apparatus of photog-
raphy no longer stand on a par with each other. e images
produced are awkward and untrue, and yet, to a skilled
reader such as Benjamin, they reveal the grim social truth.
23
 But then came an epoch of social revolts, and the
Russian Revolution presented the opportunity to put before
the camera people who had no use for their photos. And
so the photography of the era approached its subjects and
was approached by them differently. e inhabitants of
this new world were anonymous, notes Benjamin – just as
were the worker-actors of Eisenstein’s films.31 Not con-
cerned with self-promotion, they were curious before the
camera and keen to test it out. A social shift in relations of
production impelled a change in modes of reproduction.
Effects were felt beyond Russia’s borders. ese new types
of human imaging were not portraits in any conventional
sense. ey were not depictions of individuals selling their
personalities or their uniqueness. ey were impressions of
anonymous physiognomy. To work with this is the work
of the modern portrait photographer, a photographer of
collectives, masses, types – in short, of modern people.

e Lure of Objectivity
A photograph has been labelled an objective record, evading
the subjective embellishments of the painter or the failures
and idiosyncrasies of the drawing hand. As a technical pro-
cedure, the photograph has some sort of direct, reflective
relationship to the world. It promises its viewers objectivity
– the word ‘lens’ in various European languages is some
form of the Latin word objectus, thrown, or put before or
against – in German, Objektive, in French, objectif, in Ital-
ian, obiettivo. is ‘objectivity’, a technological by-product,
acts as a guarantor of historical faithfulness, or fidelity to a
moment or location. e photographer Wolfgang Born
wrote in 1929:

e discovery of reality is the mission of photography.

It is not incidental that the very process of taking a pho-
tograph involves the use of technology. e nature of this
24
 medium is intrinsically adapted to the structure of the
contemporary worldview; its objective way of register-
ing facts corresponds to the thinking of a generation of
engineers. Today the camera can unfold its finest virtue
– truthfulness – without hindrance.32

But such objectivity might become nothing more than a

decoy. For Benjamin, photography has its limits in terms
of its ability to convey social actuality or truth. It conveys
truth at some moments. At other moments, it exposes false-
hood. But sometimes, it simply fails to register anything
meaningful about the subject. Technically, photography
possesses the capacity to adhere to a surface that may be
itself deceptive or hermetic. Benjamin expresses this by draw-
ing on this passage from Brecht’s book e reepenny Trial
(1931), on the question of what photographic, naturalistic
depiction can and cannot do:

For the situation is complicated by the fact that less

than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality
tell us anything about reality. A photograph of the
Krupps works or gec yields almost nothing about these
institutions. Reality proper has slipped into the func-
tional. e reification of human relationships, signalled
by the factory, can no longer be revealed by the photo-
graph. erefore something has actually to be constructed,
something artificial, something set up. For this reason,
art is indeed necessary. But the old concept of art, the
one that rests on experience, is superseded. For whoever
represents that which is experienceable in reality also
fails to capture it. Reality is no longer experienceable in
its totality.33

This passage casts doubt on the cognitive content of

photography and film, those reproductive media that seem
to sample the real. Less than at any other time, then, in the
25
Weimar Republic, Brecht notes, can this selection from
the skin of reality divulge anything about the reality por-
trayed. e social formation that is modern industrial
capitalism possesses a complexity that is a result of obscured
relations between people, machines and nature, as gener-
ated by the organization of production in capitalism.
Commodity fetishism and the process of production make
the structure of reality only difficult to decipher. No single
photograph can disclose the peculiar process of the extrac-
tion of surplus value or the way in which relationships
between people have transformed into relations between
things, while things are fetishized and caper with each other
as though they had souls or passions. Something artificial
– an artwork, so to speak – needs to be built up, put together
in parts, in order to render some of this complexity. is
artwork would be made of fragments and it would not con-
ceal its fragmented form. It would make its partiality clear,
where it is partial, and it would make its composition, or
composite nature, obvious. Benjamin takes this to be an
indication of the legitimacy of the photomontage, which
is a form of photograph that works with and against
words, with captions and one-liners, to anchor the image.
At the same time, these elements detonate ‘reality’, break-
ing apart its functional reification, by uncovering what the
relations between its alienated parts are. As he put it in a
lecture, ‘e Author as Producer’ (1934), written to deliver
to a communist circle at the Institute for the Study of
Fascism in Paris: ‘What we require of the photographer is
the ability to give his picture the caption that wrenches it
from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary use
value.’34 Photography is annexed to insurgency and given
revolutionary use-value by the introduction of the word, or
caption, which cuts into the surface gleam that it provides,
in the process making it unusable for commodity ends
that aim to sell the dream of social repletion or to persuade
consumers that ‘the world is beautiful’.
26
 Benjamin may have developed his idea of the captioned
photograph on the basis of Kurt Tucholsky’s thoughts.
Tucholsky was a satirical social critic active in the Inde-
pendent Social Democratic Party and a writer for various
Weimar progressive journals. In 1929 he collaborated with
John Heartfield on a word and image lampoon titled
‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’. In Die Weltbühne in
May 1930, writing under the pseudonym Peter Panter,
Tucholsky observed that photography had to be used in a
new way,

as the underlining of a text, as humorous juxtaposition,

as ornament and as corroboration – the image must no
longer be an end in itself. e reader must be trained to
see with our eyes, and the photo will not only speak: it
will scream.35

For Benjamin, photography is, as he puts it in ‘e

Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproduci-
bility’, first drafted in 1935, ‘the first truly revolutionary
means of reproduction’, arising simultaneously with social-
ism.36 But it is photomontage that is the visual form of
a post-revolutionary world – that is to say, one that comes
after the revolution of 1917 in Russia, as well as one in
which revolution seems defeated, as in Germany of the
1920s, when fascism gained the upper hand. This was the
messy terrain into which John Heartfield threw his work.
For example, in 1928 he published an image titled ‘Italy
in Chains’. e image shows Mussolini’s face. His death’s
head is beginning to take over his features. Mussolini’s
face and jutting chin is stripped of its epidermis. His
skull pushes forward. Bone is surfacing. e caption reads:
‘The face of fascism’. Using the techniques of photo-
montage, the depth within is revealed on the surface in the
image of the man’s head. e implication of the image is
that the surface, in itself, tells us little. e surface might
27
actually be quite deceptive. It is, at least, not a place to seek
enlightenment or clarification about motive forces. e
surface reveals nothing of importance. In the case of the
face, the surface might actually be cultivated to present
itself as better than it really is, or as indecipherable, as
indicated in the phrases ‘saving face’ or ‘to put on a brave
face’. Which is the true face of fascism – the one that does
not reveal itself immediately on the surface? The face of
fascism is a death’s head.
Heartfield was to use this iconography of fascism and
Nazism several times in the 1920s and ’30s. Fascism is a
deadly rule, a rule of death, of war, of violence. Behind the
dictator – in another deployment of depth versus surface
– Heartfield shows the motive forces of fascism, its backers.
There is capital and the Church, a few faces, a few individ-
uals, and also in view are fascism’s victims, the many faces of
soldiers on their way to almost certain mass graves, and the
corpses, their faces obscured, their deaths anonymous. At
the bottom of the image, the caption repeats a sentence from
Mussolini: ‘In the next 15 years I will change the face of Italy
such that no one will recognize her.’ Restated in this context,
Mussolini’s line reveals the truth that it obscured when the
dictator himself expressed it as part of a glorifying, propa-
gandistic boast about modernization and rationalization.
Ostensibly the alterations will bring progress, light and
unity to a country mired in tradition, obscure relations and
unevenness. In actuality, as the lines betray, set in this new
context, the new face of Italy will be a result of capital’s vio-
lent exertions, its devouring of human energy and life. Such
devouring does not lead to an ever more robust Mussolini,
leader of an ever stronger Italy, but rather his vampiric,
cadaverous inner self, his core, fascism’s kernel, pushing itself
to the fore ever more. Fascism is death and it brings death.
It tries to make everything in its own image.
Dispersing the image, breaking up the self-evidential rela-
tionships between image and reality, image and caption,
28
caption and world, is Heartfield’s artistic strategy, adapted by
him into a distinct strategy for political revelation. At work
here is the aesthetic procedure – montage – deployed against
the cosmetic procedure – deceptive surfaces. Photomontage
is an art of contradiction in its most literal sense.
e signs, the words, the images that seem to be saying
one thing, because of photography’s self-evidential force or
because of the deceptive labels images have been given, are
redirected, détourned, sent on a diversion by counterpoint,
by other labels, ones directed towards unmasking. Heartfield
employs specific counterpoints that reveal the truth obscured
by the superficial flurries of ideology, most graphically in
times of war and then exacerbated further in the epochs of
fascism. Heartfield used the techniques of anti-art to the
ends of determinate political critique.
Incidentally, Benjamin had his own evidence of the
deceptiveness of photography in relation to Mussolini.
e Italian leader visited Capri in 1924, while Benjamin was
staying there. Benjamin remarked in a letter on the diver-
gence between Mussolini in the flesh and the heartthrob
of the postcards: in reality, he was sluggish and puffed up,
smeared in rancid oil and like a fat grocer’s fist, according
to Benjamin.37

Photography in the Practice of Life

Photography is epochal and unleashes social effects as
much as it is also the result of them. It sends art scuttling
into a theology of l’art pour l’art to justify its continued
existence. It brings new subjects into the field of represen-
tation. It raises questions of realism and reality, surface
and essence. It forces questions of value, monetary and
artistic, as well as entering into new relations with view-
ers, who are incorporated into media and no longer expected
to absorb visual culture in the gallery. Photography is an art
of replication, not one of private possession. Photography
29
weaves into lives that are changing and that could change
more – that is Benjamin’s wager and why he imagines
that photography might have a ‘revolutionary use-value’,
might have a role to play in further social unravelling and
reconstruction. He observed in his various writings on the
nineteenth century how photography had woven itself
into life under industrial capitalist conditions of produc-
tion. It had transported moments into the future, and so
bent time. It had made faraway spaces – the other side
of the world, the moon, the stars, the sun – recordable
and transportable into every bourgeois parlour and, later,
through magazines and postcards, into every home and
circumstance. It had altered the meaning and function of
memory. It had made its mark on the body, calling poses
and postures into being. It had produced new sensations,
such as the shock of the moment of exposure, and new
gestures, such as the photographer bent over his machine
and unleashing his act with a crook of the finger, a small,
sudden flick of the hand or finger that is also mobilized
at the same time by other technologies.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the invention of the

match brought forth a number of innovations which
have one thing in common: a single abrupt movement
of the hand triggers a process of many steps. is develop-
ment is taking place in many areas. A case in point is
the telephone, where the lifting of the receiver has
taken the place of the steady movement that used to
be required to crank the older models. With regard to
countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing,
and the like, the ‘snapping’ by the photographer has
had the greatest consequences. Henceforth a touch of the
finger sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period
of time. e camera gave the moment a posthumous
shock, as it were.38

30
 Shock is the dominant mode of modern existence:
being jostled in the street by crowds, dodging traffic or
being speedily carried along by it, encountering noisy
mechanized labour on the factory production line, the
swift shifts of angle or story of newspapers, magazines and
films. Life is a series of miniature shocks, all fragmentary
and sudden. Time too can be given a shock, in the form of
the camera that punctuates the moment. It is from photog-
raphy’s relationship to time that its power has been assumed
to stem. e strange dialectic of photography consists in
the fact that it is a more or less instantaneous representa-
tion, an imprint of a moment, which immediately begins
to date. Photography’s fate is to be about the latest instant,
only to become a historical document. History overcomes
the instantaneous image of a present. And memory gains a
technical adjunct. In modernity, memory cannot be thought
of without recourse to the technologies that seem to usurp
its role as archivist. But Benjamin’s is not a dismal view of
how celluloid partners memory, replacing it or turning all
towards death. For him the new technologies of image
making have entered into modern lives – meeting viewers
halfway, in a situation determined not by tradition but by
the viewer – and they have made themselves indispensable.
Photographs and film have seized our imaginations, which
is to say they have made themselves part of our internal
worlds.

If photography came into the world and changed every-

thing, if only because he registered this advent, Benjamin’s
own writing could not remain immune. Photography
suffuses his work, not just as a theme that he raises again
and again in his essays and reviews, his Arcades Project, in
his writings on Baudelaire or on Surrealism, but as some-
thing that configures his forms of writing and his
philosophy of history.

31
The poet Charles Baudelaire, photographed by Nadar, Paris, 1839.

Photography in the Practice of Writing

Benjamin cultivated a photographic style of writing.
Benjamin thinks photographically; that is to say, he con-
jures up the workings of self and memory in photographic
terms. e self is remade in photography so intensely that
Benjamin observes how it is said that when a person
dies, it takes over the articulation of a life to the person
who still just about lives, evoking the cliché of the proto-
photographic strip of images of a life whirring through a
dying person’s head. For Benjamin, memories burst up at
32
moments of crisis.39 In his memoirs of childhood, Benjamin
gestures at uncanny moments of temporal removal, such as
are achieved by photography. Twice in Berlin Chronicle,
from 1932, he reflects on the irruption of the forgotten
past into the present. e first reflection describes those
privileged moments when something akin to a magnesium
flare sears indelibly onto memory an image or circum-
stance – in Benjamin’s example, a room – as if memory
were a photographic plate. Some time later that image
flashes into consciousness’s view.40 Another of Benjamin’s
reflections on temporal displacement involves déjà vu –
or what Benjamin prefers to imagine as the ‘already heard’
– noting how some events seem to reach us like an echo
awakened by a call from the past.

It is a word, tapping or a rustling that is endowed with

the magic power to transport us into the cool tomb of
long ago, from which the vault of the present seems to
return only as an echo.41

ese two images of a wayward segue of past and present

lead him in each case into the same anecdote involving an
uncanny knowledge of a repressed past returning in the
present. He reveals how, one night when he was six years
old, his father entered his bedroom to wish him good-
night. His father lingered there to report a relative’s death.
e little boy was indifferent to the news concerning his
older relative. Unable to assimilate the facts his father
relayed about heart attacks, instead, as his father spoke, he
imprinted – photographically – onto his memory all the
details of his room. He did this because he sensed that one
day he would have business there again, in that room, re-
encountering that moment, recovering something forgotten.
is he does, some years later, when he finds out the
repressed (because scandalous) truth: the real cause of his
relative’s death was, in fact, syphilis.
33
 e undiscriminating eyes of memory and cameras
absorb more than is consciously perceived and record it
all for later examination. Memory develops belatedly into
understanding, just as a photograph snatches an image from
time and presents it to the world again only after a process
of development. Memory deposits are shocked tardily into
knowledge, blasted, as Benjamin says elsewhere, into ‘the
now of recognizability’, ‘in which things adopt their true
– surrealistic – face’.42 Echoes of the future are deposited
in the past like time bombs, and Benjamin hunts out the
detonated and detonable mines.
Photography makes portable picture-puzzles, sometimes
miniaturizing, occasionally magnifying. Benjamin hoped
to parallel this trickery verbally in his memoirs, conjuring
intense little vignettes that turn the depiction of reality into
a picture-puzzle. In 1950 eodor Adorno recognized this
aspect of Benjamin’s memoirs in his afterword to the first
German edition of Berlin Childhood around 1900:

ese fairy-photographs of a Berlin childhood are not

only the ruins of a long-departed life seen from an aerial
perspective, but also shots of the airy state, snapped by
an astronaut who persuaded his models to kindly hold
still for a moment.43

His book of memoirs is a rapid succession of images, com-

prising short scenes that have impressed themselves into
memory. But impressed there are not just personal associ-
ations. ese are social scenes with political evidence, just
as he intimates in his reading of André Breton’s photo-text
Nadja (1928). He notes that in this book ‘photography
intervenes in a very strange way’:

It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into

illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obvi-
ousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the
34
 most pristine intensity towards the events described, to
which, as in old chambermaids’ books, word-for-word
quotations with page numbers refer. And all the parts of
Paris that appear here are the places where what is
between these people turns like a revolving door.44

Breton’s chosen photographs depict deserted city spaces,

stripped of the sentiment and heroism that might normally
be mobilized in representation. People are absent, as they
are in Atget’s auraless, melancholic portraits of the city prized
by Benjamin. ese ordinary, indistinct scenes, poorly
reproduced in the book, are not banal, if their contents
might seem to be – Jacques-André Boiffard’s pictures of the
facade of the Hôtel des Grands Hommes or a forsaken Place
Dauphine – but rather, anchored with captions taken from
the text of the novel, which jar with the scenes depicted,
they become strange, reflective and uneasy. ey are scenes
for curious, alienated social and sexual relations, as well as
spaces where bloody historical events have occurred, leav-
ing hallucinogenic traces in Nadja’s disturbed mind but no
visible traces in the present, or in the photographic medi-
ation. What happened is past or submerged, but fulminated
by the captions.

Photographic Uses
Photography was a fact of the world that transformed social
relations, including artistic ones, and it offered much prom-
ise to Benjamin. But nothing was guaranteed, and nothing
prevented photography from slipping out of joint with its
times, communicating uncritically with dominant forces
or, worse, becoming an organ of oppression. In 1928, Albert
Renger-Patzsch put out an assortment of superrealist pho-
tographs called e World is Beautiful, a collection vilified
by Benjamin on a couple of occasions for its serving up of
consumable novelties through its ability to make attractive
35
any rubbish heap in its framing, and via the gloss of the
photographic surface.45 Renger-Patzsch’s volume was orig-
inally to be called ings and juxtaposed natural and
industrial objects to show their inherent beauty and formal
connections. Spurred by its success, the publisher Kurt Wolff
produced another collection the following year, August
Sander’s Face of Our Time. e photographic typage of
Sander’s Face of Our Time – praised by Benjamin in his
‘Small History of Photography’ as a ‘physiognomic gallery’
worthy of an Eisenstein or Pudovkin – appeared to provide,
as part of an immense scientific undertaking, an instruction
manual for navigating contemporary society and its divi-
sion of labour into various roles. e project did not sell
well, for it hit the world as the world hit economic depres-
sion, but it was certainly a critical success. While Benjamin’s
opposition to bourgeois humanism had encouraged him
to favour a ‘new way of seeing’, a bareness, the imaging of
a ‘medicative alienation’, in a photographing of the city’s
deserted streets, its traces of reproduction and massifica-
tion, Sander showed him that it might be unadvised in that
moment to renounce the appearance of people in photo-
graphs. Indeed, there may be social and political uses for
a new type of depiction. Human life is represented as a
botanical garden of fantastic types and specimens, as J. J.
Grandville had achieved more fancifully in the first half of
the nineteenth century in the field of lithographic caricature.
Benjamin observed: ‘e author approached this massive
task not as an intellectual, not advised by theorists of race
or social researchers, but rather, as the publisher states,
“from direct observation”.’ Benjamin’s interest in typage
recognized the way in which Sander’s images gave voice to
accoutrements, to chips of the social world such as clothing,
poses and looks, historical and cultural effects. e photo-
graphs betray how people inhabit their environment, how
they hold their bodies, how they experience their clothes,
how they live with themselves and with others. And, though
36
the photograph is but a miniaturized re-presentation of
actuality, it seems to magnify the details of the world, chal-
lenging the viewer to make meaning from evidence such
as the empty light-bulb box at the feet of the circus people
(c. 1929–30); the watch on the wrist of the Indian with
his manager (c. 1929–30); the bandage-like hat of the
secondary school girl (1928); the upright umbrella of the
Democratic Member of Parliament (1927); and the scars
on the face of the barrister (1931), perhaps from the same
sword as the scars on the face of the Student Corps member
(1925). In his ‘Declaration of Faith in Photography’ (1927)
Sander revealed: ‘Nothing seemed more appropriate to me
than to capture in photography a picture of our time which
is absolutely true to nature.’46
Sander’s portfolio of types collected together images of
peasants, industrial workers, civil servants, intellectuals,
artists, anonymous representatives of every social stratum
and every walk of life. As Alfred Döblin put it in the pro-
ject’s prospectus, ‘Sander starts with the peasants, the
people bound to the earth, and leads the viewer through
all strata and types of professions up to representatives of
the highest civilization and right down again to the idiots.’
He continued:

Men are shaped by their livelihood, the air and light they
move in, the work they do or do not do, and moreover
the special ideology of their class . . . e class structure
is undergoing a revolution, the cities have grown enor-
mously, some originals are still there but new types are
already developing . . . e divisions between youth and
adulthood have become less clear, the dominance of
youth, the urge for rejuvenation and for renewal, which
has even biological effects, has become obvious. Whole
stories could be told about quite a lot of these photo-
graphs; they invite us to tell stories. As subject matter,
they are more stimulating and they yield more than
37
J. J. Grandville, ‘Lily’, from The Flowers Personified (Les Fleurs
animées, 1847).

many newspaper reports. ese are my suggestions. He

who knows how to look will be enlightened more effect-
ively by them than by lectures and theories. rough
these clear and conclusive photographs he will discover
something of himself and others.47

Benjamin was obviously swayed by Döblin’s justification

for the project. Indeed, while Benjamin was critical of the
38
gloss of Neue Sachlichkeit, he may have overlooked how
Sander’s photographs, especially those from the 1920s, are
also affected by commercial photography with its smooth,
hard-finished papers, its quest for maximum detail and its
tonal nuance. eir unfussy simplicity might be read as a
commitment to democratic values. eir sharp focus per-
mits no secrets. ey seem to reveal each crease in cloth,
each hair out of place, each speck of gravel near their sub-
jects’ feet. Each figure is sharply in focus and centred in the
frame. The direct gaze out of the image into the eyes of
the viewer compels an involvement on the part of the
viewer: the path on which the one-legged miner walks in
1928; the huge panelled door that stretches over the court
usher in 1930.

Photographic Abuses
History does not stop. Photographic forms have afterlives.
A few years on, Sander’s photo-materialism was transmuted
by the Nazis into Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s race-based
theory of body types. His book Nordic Beauty from 1937
was a gazette for racially correct spouse-choosing. It relied
on the pseudoscience of physiognomy and insisted that
racially determined characteristics of the soul manifest
themselves on the body – and that photography can evi-
dence it. Nordic bodies are said to exhibit Nordic virtues
of logical clarity and truthful thoughtfulness, in tall, slim
bodies with fine limbs and narrow hips and faces. e
Nordic female breast has chiselled contours and is small
and upright, unlike the bloated breast of East Asians or
the soft, large, formless breasts of ‘mongoloids’, a racial
type that Schultze-Naumburg deemed inferior, illogical
and dissembling.48 Sander’s panoramic sweep of social
types was never intended as a contribution to racial pseudo-
science – despite the inclusion of images of what he termed
‘the last people’, ‘idiots, the sick, the insane and the dying’
39
– and it was certainly not taken that way. It had something
unassimilable in it. The project, designed to comprise
photographs of 600 social archetypes, was terminated
by Hitler. Once the Nazis came to power, the portfolio
of Face of Our Time was banned and the stocks were
destroyed. e Nazis recognized that the organizational
principle of the work, and therefore implicitly of the
social world, was not race but class as it manifests in social
position and the accoutrements of professions. is was
intolerable to them.
But there were other photographic streams powering
the ird Reich, and ones that delineate in bright colours
its ideality. Colour photographers of the ird Reich
framed in Agfacolor the bright blue skies, the blond hair,
the fair skin, the yellow corn in the fields, the smiling
workers, the girls playing in the sunshine, at ease with their
slim Aryan bodies, the flag-draped institutions of the city.
All this comes to be a visible, documentary, multicoloured
‘truth’ of the harmony of this Nazi-German world. Advances
in plastics, responsive papers and vivid chemical colours
gave photography a mission that extended beyond the
present and exceeded the fading hues of memory. is was
the service that the photographic departments of Agfa –
film in Wolfen, cameras in Munich, papers in Leverkusen
– provided, in making cameras and film inexpensive enough
for everyone and simple enough for all to to use. rough
this, the photographic scientists had, in the duplication of
surface appearance, apparently intensified life itself: ‘He
who takes photographs get more out of life’, stated the
anonymous author of parent company ig Farben’s promo-
tional book, Erzeugnisse unserer Arbeit, in 1938.49 e
anonymous copywriter for ig Farben describes the phrase
as a self-evident truth, one that all can comprehend. And
yet it is only, the writer states, an achievement of recent
times, ‘which have made it possible for everyone to access
the divine light that surrounds us as a formational moment
40
of all Volksgenossen [national comrades]’.50 e plastic film
gives access to a new quality of light that is messianic in
its gleam. For the Nazis, to photograph, to structure the
reflections of the ‘real’, is to amplify existence, to participate
in a vitality (which will, of course, come to be unevenly dis-
tributed and withdrawn from some), directed towards the
ideality of the policed state.
If photography was captured by racial science specif-
ically and Nazism more broadly, it was also redeployed in
the same period in photomontage. is occurred most
visibly in John Heartfield’s work, in exile, for the Arbeiter
Illustrierte Zeitung. Here he continued his development of
a media aesthetic of criticism and an ironic undermining
of power’s pomposities, hypocrisy and downright lies – in
photomontage’s combining of word and image to gener-
ate extraordinarily intricate dialogues on the meaning of
contemporary politics. ese had derived inspiration from
the work of photomontagists in the Soviet Union, who
continued to use dynamic configurations of word and
image to serve the cause of the state. But that state was
changing, and photography was one of its vectors for
change.
Using a photographic metaphor, Nikolai Sukhanov,
chronicler of the Russian Revolution, described Stalin’s
activity in 1917 as ‘a gray blur, dimly looming up now and
again but not leaving any trace’.51 Inevitably, Sukhanov, the
recorder, the man who knew the whole story, was arrested
in 1931 and again in 1939, and died in the Gulag in 1940.
In order to carry through the counter-revolution in revo-
lutionary garb, Stalin had to invent a myth-history of himself
as hero and as Lenin’s collaborator and only credible suc-
cessor. In paintings, Stalin’s historic role could be whatever
he liked, and so, for example, Mikhail Sokolov painted a
canvas in the 1930s depicting Lenin’s momentous return to
Russia in April 1917. Lenin was returning to Russia one
month after workers and soldiers had overthrown the Tsar’s
41
regime. He was carrying his ‘April eses’, which argued that
the revolution should be pushed forward, the bourgeois
provisional government overturned and a system of rule by
workers’ and soldiers’ soviets set up. This was to occur in
November, the second revolution of 1917.
Alighting at the Finland Station in Petrograd, Lenin
greets the waiting crowds. Behind and above him, in the
doorway of the train, lurks Stalin, as implausibly there as
the film character Forrest Gump. ough Sokolov drew on
Sukhanov’s eyewitness account of that event, the insertion
of Stalin was pure fiction. Sukhanov’s written record was
not the only one to testify to Stalin’s irrelevance in the most
important years of the revolution: he does not figure in a
photomontage in which more than 60 Bolshevik leaders’
heads gaze out of a photographic album commemorating
the Second Congress of the Communist International in
1920, and in its survey of the years since 1917 there is not
a single reference to the dictator-to-be.52 It was all this
absence that Stalin had to overlay, and while paintings
could make him appear where he was not, photography
lent itself well to taking out those who were there, and
who needed to be purged. As the political purges took off,
today’s truth became tomorrow’s blunder and another
round of retouching and expunging began.
Photomontage was adapted for Stalinism, too. It too
could put Stalin in places where he had never been. Such
photomontages bore little relation to Heartfield’s poly-
valent jokes and multilayered interrogations of represen-
tations, drawn from newspaper materials. Where Heartfield’s
montages frequently foregrounded the act of manipulation,
sometimes showing scissors in the image, thematizing the
act of construction or playing Dadaistically with discrep-
ancies of scale, Stalin’s propagandists set out to smooth over
the edges in order to fabricate a reality. But sometimes the
fraud was too obvious – suggesting perhaps that some
images were to be read symbolically. Photomontages
42
could superimpose a giant Stalin looming over the ranks
of workers. It says: this man is great and the masses are
small. He towers above them. His rule is right.
In the political retouchings, the fakers turn photography
into painting as they airbrush details or fuzz the edges of
figures that have been moved into the image to hide the
traces of others that were once there. e photographs are
turned into soft-focus confections and, conveniently, those
who remain can only benefit from the airbrush’s effect
of gauzy sheen that illuminates their faces. Such images,
half-photo, half-painting, fill album after album of party
history in richly illustrated books with names such as The
History of the Civil War in the ussr or Stalin on Lenin,
and generalizing captions such as ‘How the fall of the
autocracy was greeted at the front’.
It seems as if much of the retouchers’ work was dedi-
cated to cleaning up photographs, ridding them of little
details that get in the way of an unimpeded view of the
great leaders or debase the vista. Litter is cleaned up from
around the feet of party bureaucrats. Clutter is cleaned away.
Actuality, in all its arbitrariness, as the snapshot catches
it, is feared. The split-second of exposure through the
new, fast lenses mugs up the clarity of the story presented.
A souvenir postcard sold during the upheavals of 1917
shows soldiers demonstrating on Liteyny Avenue. Behind
them is a jeweller’s shop. One soldier holds a flag. Another
version of the postcard had turned the jeweller’s signboard
into a slogan, ‘Struggle for your rights’, and the flag had
become a placard that read ‘Down with the monarchy –
Long live the Republic’.53 That act of retouching might
have been a clarification of messy and chaotic actuality.
There were far more consequential retouchings.
e most famous airbrushed photograph is probably
one from a series of Lenin on the wooden podium outside
the Bolshoi eatre in Moscow in May 1920. Lenin is
addressing soldiers who are about to depart for the Polish
43
Front to fight Marshall Piłsudski’s troops, who had invaded
the Ukraine. On the steps of the podium stand Leon
Trotsky and, behind him, Lev Kamenev. Various versions
of the image exclude Trotsky and Kamenev in different
ways. One version crops the image close to eliminate them.
In another version they are blended into the stairs on which
they are standing. A painted version from 1933 substitutes
them with two reporters, an ironic mendacity perhaps on
painter Isaak Brodsky’s part, for the pseudo-recorders of
events record the pseudo-event. e various versions of the
image also reveal something about the contingency of
reality. In the untouched section of the image, the crowd
of soldiers and onlookers are looking in different direc-
tions. Some appear to be looking at the camera itself. In
one of the images a young man and woman seem to be
looking at each other. Some have their mouths open, in
mid-conversation. Not all are directing their gaze and
their attention to the leader of the Russian Revolution.
Brodsky’s painting cannot admit this amount of ordinary
insubordination and unruliness. He makes everyone focus
on Lenin, all rapt. For this is an image society in which the
direction of people’s gaze is all-important and overloaded.
Everyone must be in line, just as the front cover of the
magazine Ogoniok in December 1949 showed Stalin as a
star in the blue firmament as below the masses all gaze, eyes
aligned with his, towards the future, the next decade.
Rodchenko, the former ‘formalist’, who attempted to
rehabilitate himself, took documentary commissions through
this period, recording a peculiar unreality, such as that of
the construction of the 1933 White Sea–Baltic Canal, on
which so many died, with no trace of that horror register-
ing in Rodchenko’s viewfinder. And he ornamented with
bold Constructivist shapes the cover of the report on the
Shakhty Trial of engineers in 1928. Needless to say, the
‘saboteurs’ were scapegoats, the evidence fabricated and
the trial an example of the Stalinist ‘justice’ that was to
44
reign so unchecked in the years to come. So much for
photography’s relation to ‘the fact’.
By the 1930s, under the deadening influence of Stalin-
ism, the feverish debates among avant-gardists were stifled
and artistic groupings closed down. Some artists accom-
modated themselves to this situation. Photographs of
Rodchenko’s studio taken in the 1930s show that it changed,
especially in 1935 – one year after the declaration of the
official doctrine of Socialist Realism. On the walls perspec-
tive photos, posters and Constructivist paintings were no
longer to be seen. Instead, there was an escapist air, with
Rodchenko’s circus paintings, Varvara Stepanova’s pictures
from nature and still-lifes by their daughter.

Photography and Photography

Walter Benjamin repeatedly evoked photography. He was
its critic, in a profound sense, because he tracked it as
something changing, adapting, developing in history. For
Benjamin, photography has a history, a life. It blossomed,
in the early days, under Nadar, Julia Margaret Cameron,
David Octavius Hill, but became sclerotic under the twin
pressures of art and commerce. Still, it rallied, and the
plant continues to yield fruit, capsules that gain in tang the
truer they cleave to the exigencies of the social moment.
Photography can be – and has been – abused, as Benjamin
observed, by those in power and those who hanker too
much after traditional art, and it can be corralled into the
production of ‘ritual values’ and the ‘aestheticization of
politics’, as he put it in the epilogue to ‘e Work of Art in
the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’. It is abused
by politics in the service of propaganda. Photography can
decline. It can slip out of its time or align with the oppres-
sive forces that for the most part abuse it, just as they
abuse the (photographic) subjects. Benjamin’s objective,
through his various writings about and in the orbit of
45
David Octavius Hill, photographed by his chemical assistant
Robert Adamson.
photography, was to educate his readers, panoramically, as
to the potentials and actualities of the medium.

is Book
Presented here are several of Benjamin’s key statements on
photography. ere is a new translation of his essay from
1931 on the history of photography. This is supplemented
with a range of writings – published and unpublished,
some translated now for the first time – from 1925 to 1938,
in which he discusses various aspects of photography,
ranging from the uses of images in popular magazines to
the plant photography of Karl Blossfeldt, the fascination
of postcards and the special relationship of Paris and the
photographic image. Glossaries and contextual introduc-
tions guide the reader through this multifaceted engagement
with the significance of photography.

1 Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Cambridge,

ma, 2006), p. 132. The analogy is also made in ‘Small History
of Photography’.
2 Ibid.
3 Which later altered its spelling to be the more conventional
Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung.
4 See the letter to Alfred Cohn, 18 July 1935, in which
Benjamin relates that he and Heartfield had a good discussion
about photography: Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of
Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940 (Chicago, il, 1994), p. 494.
5 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. iii: 1925–30
(Frankfurt, 1999), p. 441. Benjamin was in error – Walter
Gropius appointed Moholy-Nagy a master at the Staatliches
Bauhaus Weimar, working in typographic design and
experimental film. From 1923 to 1925 he was the director of
the preliminary course and head of the metal workshop in
Weimar, posts which he transferred to the Bauhaus at Dessau
from 1925 to 1928.
6 László Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film [1927], trans.
Janet Seligman (Cambridge, ma, 1969).

47
7 Gustav Stotz, Internationale Ausstellung des Deutschen
Werkbunds: Film und Foto, exh. cat., Deutscher Werkbund,
Stuttgart (1929), p. 12.
8 Benjamin’s apparent lack of reference to numerous
contemporary photographers forms the basis of Herbert
Molderings’s rather critical review of the 1931 history of
photography essay, recently translated as ‘Photographic
History in the Spirit of Constructivism: Reflections on
Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography”’, Art in
Translation, v1/3 (2014), pp. 317–44, from a 2008 German
essay: ‘Fotogeschichte aus dem Geist des Konstruktivismus –
Gedanken zu Walter Benjamins “Kleine Geschichte der
Photographie”’, Die Moderne der Fotografie (Hamburg, 2008),
pp. 155–79. Molderings’s argument is that when it came
to photography, Benjamin’s concern, on account of his
own memoir writings at the same time and his interest in
Surrealism, was constantly drawn away from the present
and back to the first two decades of the twentieth century
and the recently outmoded, which was an aesthetic fixation
of Surrealism.
9 Franz Roh, ‘Mechanism and Expression: The Essence and
Value of Photography’, in Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold,
foto-auge / oeil et photo / photo eye (Stuttgart, 1929).
10 See Catherine De Croës and Paul Lebeer, ‘E.L.T. Mesens:
L’homme des liaisons’, in L’Art en Belgique, Flandre et
Wallonie au xxe siècle, exh. cat., Musée de la Ville de Paris
(1991), p. 301. See also Neil Matheson, ‘E.L.T. Mesens:
Dada Joker in the Surrealist Pack’, Image and Narrative:
Online Journal of the Visual Narrative, xiii (November 2005).
11 See Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, supplement 1
(Frankfurt, 1999), p. 435.
12 Tristan Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries
(London, 1992), p. 100 (translation modified). The reference
to Benjamin’s translation of the text is in Walter Benjamin,
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. v11, Part 1 (Frankfurt, 1991),
p. 481.
13 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, in Selected Writings,
vol. 11, Part 1: 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings,
Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, ma, 1999),
pp. 207–21.
14 Walter Benjamin, ‘Second Letter from Paris’, in Walter
Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical
Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael

48
 W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin, trans.
Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, ma, 2008), p. 305.
15 A selection of these documents can be found in Christopher
Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European
Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940 (New York,
1989). Also of use is the collection of documents in David
Mellor’s Germany: The New Photography, 1927–1933
(London, 1978).
16 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Rental Barracks’, in Radio Benjamin,
ed. Lecia Rosenthal, trans. Jonathan Lutes (London, 2014),
p. 61.
17 Ibid., pp. 61–2.
18 Moholy-Nagy made this claim more than once, in essays such
as ‘Die Photographie in der Reklame’, from Photographische
Korrespondenz, 1x (September 1927), pp. 247–60, and
‘Fotografie ist Lichtgestaltung’, Bauhaus, 11/1 (January 1928),
pp. 2–8.
19 Walter Benjamin, Early Writings: 1910–1917 (Cambridge, ma,
2011), p. 197.
20 ‘Russian Toys’ is included in Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary,
ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, ma,
1986).
21 See Ursula Marx et al., Walter Benjamin’s Archive (London,
2007), pp. 73ff.
22 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. iii: 1925–30, p. 303.
23 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 11, Part 1: 1927–1930,
p. 141.
24 Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. iii: 1925–30, p. 82.
25 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. ii, Part 2: 1931–1934,
ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith
(Cambridge, ma, 1999), pp. 620–21.
26 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. iii: 1935–1938, ed.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, ma,
1999), p. 399.
27 Benjamin, Moscow Diary, p. 76.
28 See Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. vi (Frankfurt, 1991),
p. 694.
29 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’, in The Mass Ornament:
Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, ma,
1995), pp. 47–64.
30 Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. iii: 1925–30, p. 177.
31 Walter Benjamin, ‘Reply to Oskar A. H. Schmitz’ (1927),
in Selected Writings, vol. ii, Part 1: 1927–1930, pp. 16–19.

49
32 Cited in Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era, p. 156.
33 Bertolt Brecht, Schriften i: Grosse Kommentierte Berliner und
Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht et al., vol. xxi (Berlin,
1988), p. 469.
34 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. ii, Part 2: 1931–1934,
p. 775 (translation modified).
35 Peter Panter [Kurt Tucholsky], ‘Auf dem Nachttisch’, Die
Weltbühne, xxi (20 May 1930), p. 770.
36 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. iii: 1935–1938, pp. 105–6.
37 Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vol. ii, p. 480.
38 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. iv: 1938–1940, ed. Howard
Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, ma, 1999),
p. 324.
39 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Aus einer kleinen Rede über Proust,
an meinem vierzigsten Geburtstag gehalten’ [1932], in
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, Part 3 (Frankfurt, 1991),
p. 1064. Benjamin also uses this image in the radio lecture
‘Toy Tour 1’, in Radio Benjamin, pp. 37–43.
40 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. ii, Part 2: 1931–1934,
pp. 632–3.
41 Ibid., p. 634.
42 This phrase appears in the file of notes labelled ‘N’ in
Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge,
ma, 1999), p. 486.
43 T. W. Adorno, ‘Afterword’ to Walter Benjamin, Berliner
Kindheit um neunzehnhundert (Frankfurt, 1950), p. 180.
44 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. ii, Part 1: 1927–1930,
p. 212.
45 See, for example, The Author as Producer, in Benjamin,
Selected Writings, vol. ii, Part 2: 1931–1934, p. 775.
46 August Sander: In Photography there are No Unexplained
Shadows, exh. cat., intro. by Christoph Schreier, National
Portrait Gallery, London (1997), p. 9.
47 From Döblin’s introduction to Sander’s book Face of Our
Time. It is quoted in Dagmar Barnouw, Critical Realism:
History, Photography, and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer
(Baltimore, md, 1994), p. 64.
48 See Annie Richardson, ‘The Nazification of Women in Art’,
in The Nazification of Art, ed. Brandon Taylor and Wilfried
van der Will (Winchester, 1990), p. 66.
49 ig Farben, Erzeugnisse Unserer Arbeit (Frankfurt, 1938),
p. 143.
50 Ibid.

50
51 David King, The Commissar Vanishes (Edinburgh, 1997),
p. 28.
52 Ibid., p. 76.
53 Ibid., p. 26.

51
 Introduction to ‘Small History
of Photography’

Benjamin wrote this essay, his most extended statement

specifically on photography, at some point in 1931. It was
published in three parts in the weekly literary magazine
Die literarische Welt (founded by Ernst Rowohlt and Willy
Haas) on 18 and 25 September and 2 October of that year.
It appeared illustrated by eight photographs, which were
either directly referenced in the essay or were to stand as
examples of the work of photographers mentioned. One
was by and of Karl Dauthendy, two by David Octavius Hill,
two by Germaine Krull and two by August Sander and there
was an anonymous portrait of Friedrich Schelling. Benjamin
drew his research from a number of sources, including the
study of David Octavius Hill by Heinrich Schwarz and the
co-authored volume by Helmut Bossert and Heinrich
Guttmann on the early history of photography. He also
refers to Fritz Matthies-Masuren’s Künstlerische Photographie:
Entwicklung und Einfluss in Deutschland (Artistic Photog-
raphy: Development and Influence in Germany), which
appeared in 1907.
e essay, in its few pages, and perhaps at risk of glossing
detail at points, supplied something that no one else seemed
to have attempted at that date, at least in German. When
Benjamin wrote the essay, there were only a handful of books
in German on the history of photography. A reference
bibliography on Die deutsche Photoliteratur, 1839–1978
53
(German Photo Literature), compiled by Frank Heidtmann,
Hans-Joachim Bresemann and Rolf H. Krauss (Munich,
1980), identifies six entries of this type between 1880 and
1931. e oldest, from 1905, was by the Austrian chemist
Josef Maria Eder, titled Geschichte der Photographie (1905),
published by Knapp in Halle. It is not referred to by
Benjamin. In 1930, the art historian and photographer Franz
Roh made a reference to a recent work of photographic
history. It was a 44-page booklet, written in 1929 and pub-
lished in Berlin, by the collector and historian Erich Stenger
and titled Geschichte der Fotographie. Roh noted that it
provided good factual material but was inadequate in terms
of art historical knowledge. His reference to Stenger was
to indicate that ‘A stylistic history of photography does
not exist’, as he phrased it in the catalogue of the Munich
photography exhibition ‘Das Lichtbild’ (e Photograph),
and he went on to say that he was working on one.1 Benjamin
did not refer in his essay to Stenger or Roh, but it is clear
that he too would observe that it is an inadequate approach
to photography to explore it only as a chronological series
of technical and chemical procedures.
Benjamin’s essay offers a capsule history of photography
from 1839 to Benjamin’s present, passing through differ-
ent technical forms, such as daguerreotypy, the studio box
camera and the snapshot, reliant on faster optics and an eye-
level camera. It also explores different locations – the studio
and the street – and different genres, such as portrait photog-
raphy, commercial photography, art photography and
political photomontage. ese technical forms, locations and
genres are read in relation to social and political themes.
Each manifestation of photography is measured against
the historical context in which it emerges.
Benjamin makes the argument here, drawing on the
theorist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy, that the
illiterate of the future will be the person unable to read
images. In composing this essay, Benjamin shows himself
54
to be extremely literate, in this specific sense. One of the
concerns of the essay is something that Benjamin will
follow up elsewhere: the relation of painting and photog-
raphy. He explores this fraught relationship in the context
of aesthetic, commercial and political value, with the word
‘value’ migrating implicitly across Marx’s categories of use
value and exchange value, as well as evoking notions of
aesthetic worthiness or validity. Photography’s role as a
document is prized, not in a naive sense, but in terms of
its ability – under certain conditions, which are revocable
– to document the specificity of the historical moment in
which its aperture is opened. Eugène Atget, Karl Blossfeldt
and August Sander, to name three examples, prove them-
selves capable, in different ways, of using photography to
document something significant about the first decades of
the twentieth century, in terms of the meaning of cities,
nature and people. Benjamin’s history of photography is as
much about the changing contours of experience, and its
intermeshing with technology, as it is about a visual appear-
ance produced by photography. is is where the nebulous
category of aura comes in – as an effort to explain the
modes of sensory intuition of a political and social world
and how these might be impacted – and communicated –
technologically.
Benjamin wrote in a letter to Gershom Scholem on 28
October 1931 that the essay came about as a ‘prolegomena’
to his Arcades Project, the vast history of nineteenth-century
Paris, or better, the pre-history of twentieth-century Paris.2
He feared – rightly – that the second work would never
come into being, for he needed two years of uninterrupted
work on it; this he never got.

e Essay’s Influence
e essay did not have discernible influence in photographic
circles. is may be because it appeared in a literary journal
55
rather than one aimed at the visual arts. Photographic debates
occurred in specialist photography journals and in design
magazines, such as Die Form or Das neue Frankfurt. ere
was an annual anthology that showcased the latest photog-
raphy, Das Deutsche Lichtbild. is published contributions
by figures that Benjamin discussed, such as Moholy-Nagy
and Albert Renger-Patzsch. Gisèle Freund’s doctoral thesis
‘La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle’ (1936),
which Benjamin later reviewed, contains a rare contempor-
ary citation of the essay.
If the essay sank with little trace at the time, it came back
forcefully in synchrony with the student revolts of the 1960s.
It was published in a small volume put out by Suhrkamp
in 1963. In the same volume was Benjamin’s ‘e Work
of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’
(1935–8). ese works were understood as contributing a
new materialist media theory that was critical of the preten-
sions of art and affirmed the possibility of interventionist
uses of new media to revolutionary ends. At that date, it
met and kindled an interest in the social history of photog-
raphy, a field that, in a sense, might be said to have been
inaugurated by Benjamin.

Translation History
ere have been a few translations of the essay into English
and it has been referred to variously as a small, little, brief
and short history of photography. e essay was published
in the film journal Screen (issue 13) in 1972, in a trans-
lation by Stanley Mitchell. It was published again in 1977
in a new English translation by Phil Patton, in Artforum
(vol. xv, issue 6, February 1977). It appeared in another
translation a year later, in the collection titled One-way
Street and Other Writings, published by New Left Books
in London. e translators were Edmund Jephcott and
Kingsley Shorter. An amended version of this translation
56
found its way into the Harvard-issued Selected Writings of
Walter Benjamin (1999).
One notable impact of the English versions of the essay
– signalled by or resulting from its publication in Artforum,
the influential journal of the u.s. art scene – was in the art
world. Along with the essay ‘e Author as Producer’ (1934)
and ‘e Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Repro-
ducibility’, it gave theoretical backing, in the 1970s and ’80s,
to the use of reproductive media in art making. Benjamin’s
thoughts on aura were taken to mean that this multiply
nebulous quality adhered to painting and sculpture and trad-
itional arts and was a kind of bourgeois stain that needed
elimination through a wholehearted embrace of new media,
specifically photography and film. ese were deemed to
be non-auratic, mass-reproducible art forms that were on a
par with modern life and experience. Douglas Crimp’s essay
‘e Photographic Activity of Postmodernism’, published in
October in 1980, was headed by a citation, in Stanley Mitchell’s
translation, from Benjamin’s ‘Small History of Photography’,
and the body of the essay explored the notion of aura and
its (possible but not necessary) liquidation in the photo-
graphic – or its haunting presence as a critical ghost admon-
ishing and revealing the hanging on of art and the existence
of art as a commodity. To use photography, especially with
the anchoring of the caption, or slogan, was to forward a
critique of the values on which painting relied – creativity,
authenticity, spontaneity, inspiration. ese were qualities
that amounted to traditional art’s aestheticized ‘cult value’
or ‘exhibition value’, as Benjamin phrased it in ‘e Work
of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’. For
those who took guidance along these lines, favoured was the
appropriationist, the non-original, the replicated, copies, and
copies of copies, though what was made, for the most part,
continued in actuality to be underwritten by the authentic
signature – virtual or actual – of the artist (a Sherrie Levine,
a Cindy Sherman, a Barbara Kruger, a Richard Prince).
57
1 Franz Roh, in Das Lichtbild: Internationale Ausstellung,
exh. cat., Münchener Bund und dem Verein Ausstellungspark,
Munich (1930), p. 38.
2 Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin,
1910–1940, ed. and annotated by Gershom Scholem and
Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and
Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago, il, 1994), p. 385.

58
 Small History of Photography
(1931)

The fog that overlies the beginnings of photography

is not quite as thick as that which has settled over
the commencement of book printing; perhaps more
discernibly than in the case of the latter, the hour of
its discovery had arrived, and it was sensed by more
than one person; by men, who, independently from
each other, strove for the same goal: to fix the images
of the camera obscura, a device familiar to Leonardo,
if not to those before him. After about five years’
worth of attempts, Niépce and Daguerre struck lucky
at exactly the same time. The state, taking advantage of
the difficulties relating to patent law that the inventors
came up against, seized control of the matter, with
compensation to the inventors, and made it a public
affair. This laid the ground for its ever-accelerating
development, which precluded for quite some time
any looking back. That is why the historical, or, if one
prefers, philosophical questions that attend the rise and
decline of photography have remained unconsidered
for decades. And if they are now starting to emerge into
consciousness, there is a very precise reason for that.
The most recent literature alights on the striking fact
that the blossoming of photography – the potency of
Hill and Cameron, Hugo and Nadar – occurs in its
first decade. That, however, is the decade prior to its
59
The photographer Karl Dauthendey with his betrothed,
St Petersburg, 1857. Benjamin saw this image in Helmut Theodor
Bossert and Heinrich Guttmann’s book on early photography
(Aus der Frühzeit der Photographie, 1840–1870, 1930).

industrialization. It is not as if, in this early period,

market criers and charlatans did not get hold of this
technology in order to make money: indeed they did
that by the score. But that stood closer to the arts of
the carnival – where, right until today, photography
is at home – than it did to industry. Industry first
conquered the field for itself with shots for visiting
cards, whose first manufacturer, tellingly, became a
millionaire. It would be no surprise if the photographic
60
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Newhaven Fishwife
(Mrs Elizabeth Johnstone Hall), 1843.

practices, which only now, for the first time, direct

our attention back to this preindustrial heyday, stood
in a subterranean connection with the paroxysms of
capitalist industry. However, that does not make it
any easier to utilize the allure of those images, which
have recently appeared in attractive publications of
old photographs,1 to develop genuine insights into its
essence. The attempts to master the matter theoretically
have been extremely rudimentary. And however much
it was discussed in the last century, fundamentally there
61
The poet Victor Hugo
photographed by his son
Charles-Victor Hugo,
Jersey, 1853–5.

was never any abandonment of that laughable formula

with which a chauvinistic rag, the Leipzig Anzeiger,
thought it had to counter the French art of the Devil
right from the start. ‘Wanting to fix fleeting reflections’,
it opines, ‘this is not merely an impossible quest, as
thorough German investigations have established,
but the very wish to do is blasphemous. The human is
created in the image of God and God’s image cannot
be captured by any man-made machine. At best, the
divine artist, rapt with heavenly inspiration, might dare
to reproduce theandric features, in a moment of intense
devotion, at the higher command of his genius, but
without any mechanical aids.’ This is how the philistine
notion of ‘art’ enters the stage, with heavyweight
gaucheness. Foreign to it are any technological
considerations, and yet it senses its impending demise
in the provocative appearance of new techniques.
Nevertheless, it was this fetishistic, fundamentally
anti-technical concept of art that the theorists of
photography argued about for almost a hundred
years, without, of course, getting anywhere at all. For
it undertook nothing other than to legitimize the
photographer in front of the very tribunal that he
62
was overthrowing. A very different air blows through
the exposé which the physicist Arago delivered to
the Chamber of Deputies, as advocate of Daguerre’s
invention, on 3 July 1839. The lovely thing about this
speech is that it makes connections to all aspects of
human activity. The panorama that it constructs is
broad enough to make the dubious legitimation of
photography by painting – which is also included in it
– appear inconsequential, in order all the better to allow
a sense of the genuine consequences of the invention to
unfold. ‘If inventors of a new instrument’, states Arago,
‘use this to observe nature, then their hopes for it are

The actress Ellen Terry photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron,

taken on the Isle of Wight in 1864 when Terry was sixteen years
old, carbon print, c. 1875.

63
trivial compared to the stream of subsequent discoveries,
which have the instrument as their origin.’ In one sweep
this speech ranges across the field of new techniques,
from astrophysics to philology; alongside the prospect
of photographs of the stars is the idea that all of the
Egyptian hieroglyphs might be recorded.
Daguerre’s photographs were iodized silver plates
exposed to light in the camera obscura and they needed
to be turned this way and that, until one was able to
make out on them, under the right kind of illumination,
a pale grey image. ey were one-offs; on average, the
cost, in 1839, was 25 gold francs for one plate. Often

The philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854),

unknown German photographer.

64
David Octavius Hill, The Dumbarton Presbytery, Scotland, 1845. Hill
photographed these four clergymen as the basis of a portrait painting.

they were kept, like jewellery, in cases. In the hands

of a number of painters, though, they transformed
themselves into technical aids. Just as, 70 years later,
Utrillo produced his fascinating views of the houses of
the suburbs of Paris not from life but from postcards,
so too the respected English portrait painter David
Octavius Hill based his fresco of the first General
Synod of the Church of Scotland in 1843 on a large
number of photo portraits. But he took these photographs
himself. And it is these, unassuming as they are, a
vehicle intended for personal use, which have guaranteed
his name a place in history, while he is forgotten as
a painter. Indeed, some of his studies go even further
into the new techniques than this series of face portraits:
images of anonymous figures, not portraits. Such faces
have long been a subject for painting. If they remained in
the possession of the family, now and again people might
enquire about the figure represented. After two or three
65
generations, though, such interest is dampened: the
images, inasmuch as they survive, do so only as evidence
of the artistry of the painter. e photograph, however,
introduces something new and strange: in every fishwife
from Newhaven who gazes at the ground with such
nonchalant, beguiling modesty there remains something
that, as testimony to the artistry of the photographer
Hill, is not completely absorbed, something that cannot
be silenced, obstreperously demanding the name of
she who has lived, who remains real here and will never
consent to enter fully into ‘art’.

And I ask: how did this adorning hair

And this look surround the beings of earlier times!
How did this mouth kiss that of desire
Which curls like smoke without a flame mindlessly!

Or one flips to the image of Dauthendey, the

photographer, father of the poet, from the time of
his engagement to that woman whom he found lying,
one day, with slit wrists, in the bedroom of his house
in Moscow, shortly after the birth of her sixth child.
Here one sees her standing by him; he appears to clasp
her, but her gaze goes past him, tightly riveted to an
inauspicious distance. Were one to sink into such an
image for long enough, one would recognize how
much, here too, the extremes meet: the most precise
technology can lend a magical value to its productions,
such as a painted picture can never again possess for
us. Despite all the skill of the photographer and all the
good planning in the pose of his model, the viewer
feels irresistibly compelled to seek out the tiniest spark
of concurrence, a here and now, in such an image,
with which actuality has seared, so to speak, the
characters in the image. We are compelled to find
the inconspicuous place in which, in the essence of
66
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Robert Bryson,
calotype, c. 1843–8.

that moment which passed long ago, the future nestles

still today, so eloquently that we, looking back, are able
to discover it. It is indeed a different nature that speaks to
the camera than that which speaks to the eye; different
above all in the sense that a space saturated by a
person who is conscious is superseded by one saturated
unconsciously. While it may now be quite usual that,
for example, someone might account for a person’s gait,
even if only roughly, that person would certainly know
67
nothing of the posture in the fraction of a second when the
person ‘takes a stride’. Photography, with its technical
aids – freeze-framing, image enlargement – make this
accessible. One learns of this optical unconscious only
through photography, just as the instinctual unconscious
is discovered in psychoanalysis. e composition of
structures, cellular tissue, all that stuff with which
technology and medicine reckon to deal, is primarily
more related to the camera than is the atmospheric
landscape or the soulful portrait. But at the same time,
photography discloses in this material physiognomic
aspects, image worlds, which inhabit the smallest things,
interpretable and latent enough to have found a bolthole
in daydreams. But now, as they have become enlarged
and articulable, they make manifest how the difference
between technology and magic is a thoroughly historical
variable. In this way, in his astonishing photographs of
plants, Blossfeldt brought out the most ancient column
forms in horsetail, a bishop’s crozier in an ostrich fern,
totem poles in tenfold enlargements of horse chestnut
and maple shoots, Gothic tracery in the Indian teasel.2
For that reason, indeed, Hill’s models were not so far
from the truth, if ‘the phenomenon of photography’
still seemed to them ‘a great and mysterious experience’;
even if that was a product of nothing other than the
consciousness ‘of standing in front of a gadget, which,
in the shortest amount of time, could generate an
image of the visible environment that seemed to be
as lively and real as nature itself’. It was said of Hill’s
camera that it preserved a discreet self-effacement. His
models, for their part, were, however, no less reserved;
they exuded a certain timidity before the camera, and
the maxim of a later photographer, from the golden
age, ‘Do not look at the camera’, could well have been
derived from their attitude. However, that did not
indicate that ‘looking at you’ of animals, people or
68
David Octavius Hill, Greyfriars Kirkyard, 1840s.

babies, which mixes in such a tainted way with the

buyer and which can be countered by nothing better
than the phrase that the old Dauthendey coined in
relation to daguerreotypy: ‘In the early days, people
did not dare’, he reports, ‘to look for very long at the
first pictures [Daguerre] produced. They were startled
by the vividness of the figures and believed that the
tiny little faces of the personages who appeared on the
image could see them too. That is how uncanny an
effect the unaccustomed vividness and lifelikeness of
the first daguerreotype images exerted on everyone.’
69
 The first people who were reproduced stepped
spotless into the image space, or, to put it better, they
were blank. Newspapers were still luxury objects which
one seldom purchased but rather viewed in coffeehouses.
Photographic practices had not yet become their tool
and only a few people saw their names in print. A silence
surrounded the human countenance, and in it the looking
eye reposed. In short, all of the possibilities of this art of
portraiture depended on the fact that the contact between

David Octavius Hill, Master Grierson, titled Scottish Laddie in the

German volume of Hill’s images by Heinrich Schwarz (1931), salt
paper print from calotype negative, c. 1843–7.

70
David Octavius Hill sketching at the Dennistoun Monument in
Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, watched by Patricia and Isabella
Morris, photographed by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson,
dated 1848.

the instant and the photo had not yet kicked in. Many
of Hill’s portraits originated in the Greyfriars cemetery
in Edinburgh – nothing is more illustrative of these
early days, except perhaps for the fact that his models
were so at home there. Indeed this cemetery, according
to one image that Hill made, looks just like an interior,
a cloistered, enclosed space, where tombs, leaning on
firewalls, soar out of the meadow. Hollowed out like
fireplaces, they display lettering on their insides, instead
of the tongues of flames. But this location could never
have had such a great impact had there not been strong
technical reasons for choosing it. The limited light
sensitivity of early plates necessitated a long light
exposure outdoors. is in turn made it seem desirable
to position the recordable subject in as remote as possible
a place, where nothing stands in the way of peaceful
composure. ‘e synthetic expression, compelled by the
71
model’s long period of standing still’, says Orlík of
early photography, ‘is the main reason, alongside their
simplicity, why these photographs, like well-drawn or
well-painted likenesses, exercise a more penetrating and
longer lasting effect on the viewer than more recent
photography.’ e procedure itself caused the model
not to live out of the moment, but rather right into it;
during the long duration of the recording, the model
grew, so to speak, into the image and thereby appeared
in the starkest contrast to those apparitions on a snapshot
who, in turn, fit a transformed world in which, as Kracauer
has remarked so appositely, the exposure’s fraction of
a second determines ‘whether a sportsman becomes
so famous that photographers are tasked with taking
photos of him for the illustrated magazines’. Everything
about these early pictures was set up to last; not only
the incomparable groups in which people convened
– and whose disappearance was certainly one of the
most precise symptoms of what took place socially
in the second half of the century – even the creases
that a garment casts on these images last longer.
Consider Schelling’s dress coat: we can be confident
that it will pass into immortality along with him; the
forms which it adopts on its wearer are not unworthy
of the creases on his face. In short, everything seems to
affirm that Bernard von Brentano was right to suspect
‘that a photographer from 1850 ranks equally with
his instrument’ – for the first time, and for quite a
long period, the last.
Incidentally, in order to fully realize the powerful
effect of daguerreotypy in the epoch of its discovery,
recall that, at that time, plein-air painting had begun to
unlock totally new perspectives for the most advanced
painters. Conscious that precisely in relation to this
matter photography should take over the baton from
painting, Arago, in his historical reflection on the
72
Germaine Krull, Untitled, Paris, 1920s, from Benjamin’s
personal collection.
Hippolyte Bayard (1801–1887), self-portrait.
early attempts of Giambattista della Porta, comments
emphatically: ‘When it comes to the effect that derives
from the deficient transparency of our atmosphere (and
which has been characterized by the loose expression
“atmospheric perspective”), then not even the most
practised painters imagine that the camera obscura’ –
he means the copying of the images that appear in it
– ‘will be of help in recreating this with precision’. At
the point when Daguerre successfully fixed images in
the camera obscura, painters parted company with
technicians. e true victim of photography though
was not landscape painting, but the portrait miniature.
ings developed so quickly that as early as 1840 most of
the countless miniature painters had become professional
photographers, initially just as a side line, but quickly
exclusively so. Here the experiences gained in their original
survival job came in handy, but it was not their artistic
training but their manual one that was to be thanked for
the high standard of their photographic achievements.
is transitional generation disappeared very gradually;
indeed, it seems as if a kind of biblical blessedness
rested on those first photographers: Nadar, Stelzner,
Pierson, Bayard all made it to ninety or a hundred. In
the end, though, businessmen from all over infiltrated
the ranks of the professional photographer, and when,
later on, negative retouching – with which weak painters
took their revenge on photography – became widely
practised, a steep decline in taste set in. That was the
time when photograph albums started to fill themselves
up. ey preferred to site themselves in frosty spots of
the apartments, on console tables or guéridons in the
reception room: leather tomes with forbidding metal
hasps and gilt-edged pages, each a finger thick, on
which are scattered clownishly posed or corsetted figures
– Uncle Alex and Aunt Riekchen, little Trudy when she
was small, Daddy in his first term at university – and
75
finally, in order to compound the shame, we too; as
parlour Tyroleans, yodelling, brandishing our hats in
front of painted snow, or as dapper sailors, leaning on a
polished stanchion, one leg weight-bearing, one free, as
is only proper. e accessories in such portraits, with their
pedestals, balustrades and tiny oval tables, recall now
the time when, because of the long exposure times, the
models needed to have a support, so they might remain
fixed in place. If in the early days one made do with
‘head rests’ or ‘knee clamps’, soon after there followed
‘further accessories, such as appeared in famous paintings,
and therefore were perceived as “artistic”. At first it was
columns and curtains.’ e more capable men turned
against all this flimflam as early as the 1860s. For example,
an English trade gazette noted: ‘In painted pictures the
column is shown with some chance of possibility, but
the way in which it has been used in photography is
ridiculously absurd, it generally being placed on a carpet.
Now everybody must be open to the conviction that
marble or stone pillars are not built on carpets for a
foundation.’ At that time, those studios arrived with
their draperies and palms, Gobelin tapestries and
easels, wavering ambiguously between execution and
representation, torture chamber and throne room and
from which a shocking testimony delivers an early
likeness of Kafka. In it, a lad of around six years old
stands in a tight, somewhat humiliating, child’s suit,
covered in ornamental trimmings, in a kind of winter
garden setting. Palm fronds scowl in the background.
And as if the aim were to make these upholstered tropics
even more stifling and sweltering, the model carries in
his left hand a disproportionately large hat with a wide
brim, such as is worn by Spaniards. It would surely
disappear amid this arrangement, were it not that the
immeasurably sad eyes dominated the landscape in
which they are fated to be.
76
Walter Benjamin as a child, wearing a Tyrolean suit, c. 1900.
Germaine Krull, Untitled, Paris, 1920s, from Benjamin’s
personal collection.
Kafka as a child, 1888. This image was in Benjamin’s possession.

e image, with its boundless sadness, is a counterpart

to those early photographs in which people did not yet
gaze into the world as isolatedly and godforsakenly as
does this lad here. ere was an aura surrounding them,
a medium that lent their gaze, which it suffused, fullness
and certainty. And once again the technological equivalent
is obvious; it obtains in the absolute continuum from the
brightest light to the darkest shadows. Incidentally, this
79
too provides evidence for the rule that later achievements
are foreshadowed in earlier technologies, for old-style
portrait painting was the spur for a sensational florescence
of mezzotint engraving prior to its demise. Of course
this process of mezzotint engraving is a technique of
reproduction that combined only subsequently with
the new photographic technologies. As in the sheets
of mezzotint engravings, in Hill too the light wrests
itself agonizingly from the darkness: Orlík speaks
of the ‘generalized distribution of light’, resulting
from the long exposure time, which lends ‘these early
photographs their grandeur’. And among those who
were contemporaries of the invention, Delaroche
noticed the previously ‘unequalled and delectable’
overall impression, ‘in which nothing troubles the peace
of the whole’. Enough on the technical conditioning of
auratic appearance. Photographs of groups, in particular,
still preserve an animated togetherness that appears for a
short interval on the plate before perishing in the ‘print’.
It is this circle of mist that is sometimes beautifully and
suggestively transcribed in the now old-fashioned oval
form of the excerpted image. It would be, therefore,
a misreading of these incunables of photography to
stress their ‘artistic perfection’ or their ‘tastefulness’.
ese images arose in spaces in which every customer
encountered first of all a technician from the latest
school, while the photographer saw in every customer
a member of a class that found itself on the rise,
possessing an aura that had lodged itself right into the
folds of their bourgeois suit or their lavallière cravats.
For this aura is certainly not a mere by-product of a
primitive camera. Rather, in those early days, object
and technology correspond just as precisely as they
diverge in the following period of decline. at is to
say, advanced optics soon had at its disposal instruments
that could completely overcome the darkness and
80
register appearances in a mirror-like fashion. However,
photographers around 1880 saw their task to be much
more to simulate the aura – which was then being
banished from the image, given the supersession of
darkness by more light-sensitive lenses, just as it was
banished from reality by the increasing degeneration
of an imperialist bourgeoisie. ey saw it as their task
to simulate this aura through practices of retouching,
especially those of so-called gum printing. And thus,
particularly in Art Nouveau, it became fashionable to
have a blurry tone, interspersed with artificial highlights;
in spite of the twilight, a pose became ever more clearly
visible, and its stiffness disclosed the impotence of this
generation in the face of technological progress.
And yet, the crucial thing about photography proves
itself again and again to be the relationship of the
photographer to his technology. Camille Recht caught
it in a handsome image. ‘e violinist’, he says, ‘has to
form the tone first, has to seek it out, find it lightning
quick, while the pianist strikes the key and the sound rings
out. e instrument is at the disposal of the painter just
as it is for the photographer. Sketching and colouring
for the painter are equivalent to forming the tone for
the violinist. e photographer has, like the pianist, the
advantage of something mechanical, which is subordinated
to restrictive laws, such as are by no means imposed on
the violinist. No Paderewski will ever reap the fame, never
wield the almost legendary magic that a Paganini reaps
and wields.’ Continuing with the image, there is a Busoni
of photography, and that is Atget. Both were virtuosos
and, simultaneously, forerunners. Common to both
of them is an unprecedented absorption in their work,
combined with the highest precision. Even their features
bore similarities. Atget was an actor, who, repulsed by
that business, sponged off his mask and then set about
also removing the make-up of reality. He lived in Paris,
81
poor and unknown, flogging off his photographs to
admirers, who can hardly have been less eccentric than
him, and he died not long ago, leaving behind an oeuvre
of over 4,000 photographs. Berenice Abbott from New
York has collected up these sheets and a selection of
them appeared recently in an outstandingly handsome
volume, edited by Camille Recht.3 Contemporary
journalism ‘knew nothing of the man who mostly
wandered with his photographs around the studios,
selling them dirt-cheap for a few pennies, often for no
more than the price of one of those picture postcards,
which depicted such pretty city views around 1900,
plunged into a blue night, with a retouched moon.
He reached the pole of the highest mastery; but with
the embittered modesty of a great expert who always
remains in the shadows, he neglected to plant his flag
there. So others believe that they discovered the pole
that Atget had already reached before them.’ Indeed:
Atget’s Paris photos are forerunners of Surrealist
photography, vanguards of the only really broad
column that Surrealism was able to set in motion. He
was the first to fumigate the stifling atmosphere that
conventional portrait photography of the epoch of
decline had propagated. He cleansed this atmosphere,
indeed purged it: he commenced the liberation of the
object from the aura, which is the most incontestable
service of the recent photographic school. If magazines
of the avant-garde, such as Bifur or Variétés, simply show
a detail – here a piece of balustrade, there a bare treetop
whose branches cut across a gas lantern at various points,
another time a firewall or a candelabra lamp post with
a lifebelt, on which is the name of the town – under the
caption ‘Westminster’, ‘Lille’, ‘Antwerp’ or ‘Breslau’,
then that is nothing more than a literary refinement of
motifs that Atget discovered. He sought all that had
gone missing or was cast off, and in this fashion his
82
Eugène Atget, Shop, avenue des Gobelins, 1925.

images are directed against the exotic, grand, romantic

tone of city names; they suck the aura out of reality like
water from a sinking ship. — What is aura actually? A
peculiar weave of space and time: the singular appearance
only of distance, however close it may be. At rest on a
summer’s afternoon, following a mountain range on
the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the
83
viewer, until the moment or the hour takes part in their
appearance – that is what it means to breathe the aura
of these mountains, this branch. Nowadays ‘bringing
things closer’ to oneself, or rather the masses, is just as
passionate a desire of today’s people as the overcoming
of the singular in every situation through its reproduction.
Every day and more and more irrefutably the need
asserts itself to grab hold of the object up close in an
image, or rather a reproduction. And the reproduction
distinguishes itself unmistakably from the image, as
illustrated newspapers and weekly news attest. Singularity
and permanence are so tightly bound up in the one as
fleetingness and reproducibility are in the other. Stripping
the object of its husk, the disintegration of the aura is
the hallmark of a perception whose inclination towards
similarity in the world has grown such that it even
takes pleasure in the singular by means of reproduction.
Atget nearly always passed by ‘the great sights and the
so-called landmarks’, but he never ignored a long row
of boot trees; never the Paris courtyards where from
evening until morning the handcarts stood in file;
never the cleared tables and dirty dishes, there at the
same hour in their hundreds and thousands; nor the
brothel at no. 5 . . . Street, whose five appears, in
whopping dimensions, on four different spots on the
facade. Remarkably, though, almost all of these images
are empty. The Porte d’Arcueil by the fortifications is
empty, the triumphal steps are empty, the courtyards
are empty, the café terraces are empty, the Place du
Tertre – as it indeed should be – is empty. They are
not lonely, but are without atmosphere. The city in
these images is cleared out like an apartment that has
not yet found a new tenant. It is in these accomplishments
that Surrealist photography prepared a medicative
alienation between environment and person. They
cleared the way for a politically schooled gaze, according
84
to which all intimacies abate in favour of the illumination
of details.
It is clear that this new vision would be least at home
where people had otherwise been allowed to get away
with things: in remunerative, prestigious portrait
photography. By the same token, the renunciation of
people in photographs is the most unenforceable rule
of all. And for those who did not know it, they learned
from the best Russian films that milieu and landscape
too disclose themselves only to those photographers
who know how to interpret them through the nameless
appearance that their countenance shows. However, the
degree to which this is possible is determinted yet again
by who or what is being photographed. e generation
that was not hell-bent on entering the afterworld in
reproduced form, on the contrary, confronted by such
arrangements, withdrew somewhat shyly into their
habitat – like Schopenhauer withdrawing into the
depths of his armchair in the Frankfurt image from
around 1850. For this very reason they allowed their
habitat to get onto the plate with them: this generation
did not pass on its virtues. For the first time in decades,
the Russian feature film gave people who had no use for
their photos the opportunity to appear in front of the
camera. And for a moment the human face appeared on
the plate with a new and immense significance. But it
was not a portrait any longer. What was it? A German
photographer has carried out an exceptional service in
answering this question. August Sander has collated
a row of heads,4 which is in no way inferior to the
powerful physiognomic gallery that an Eisenstein or
Pudovkin has inaugurated, and he has done this from
a scientific viewpoint. ‘His complete work is formed of
seven groups, which correspond to the existing social
order, and is to be published in around 45 folders,
each with twelve photographs.’ So far there exists an
85
 The philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer
(1788–1860), unknown
German photographer.

anthology with 60 reproductions, which offers

inexhaustible material for consideration. ‘Sander
starts with the peasants, the people bound to the earth,
and leads the viewer through all strata and types
of professions up to representatives of the highest
civilization and right down again to the idiots.’
e author approached this massive task not as an
intellectual, not advised by theorists of race or social
researchers, but rather, as the publisher states, ‘from
direct observation’. is observation was certainly
extremely unprejudiced, if bold, yet also at the same
time tender – in the sense, that is, of Goethe’s phrase:
‘ere is a tender empiricism that makes itself utterly
identical with the object, thereby becoming true theory.’
According to this it seems quite right that an observer
such as Döblin has hit precisely on the scientific moment
of this work, noting: ‘Just as there is a comparative
anatomy only through which one reaches a conception
of nature and the history of organs, so too this
photographer has pursued comparative photography
and has in the course of it gained a scientific point
of view beyond the photographer of details.’ It would
be appalling if the economic situation hindered the
86
further publication of this extraordinary corpus. In
addition to this fundamental reassurance, there is
a more precise one that might be imparted to the
publisher. Works like Sander’s can accrue an unexpected
topicality overnight. Shifts in power, such as have
become due in our land, foster training and make the
sharpening of physiognomic perception a vital necessity.
Whether people come from the Left or the Right, they
will have to get used to being inspected for signs of
provenance. And they in turn will have to scrutinize
others. Sander’s work is more than a picture book: it
is an atlas of exercises.

August Sander,
Pastry Cook,
1928, from
People of the
20th Century.

87
 ‘ere is in our period no artwork that is contemplated
so attentively than the portrait photography of one’s own
self, one’s closest relations and friends, one’s beloved’,
wrote Lichtwark as early as 1907, and thereby shifted
the analysis out of the realm of aesthetic distinctions
and into that of social functions. Only from here can it
advance further. It is indeed symptomatic that the debate
has fixated most of all on the question of the aesthetics
of ‘photography as art’ while, for example, the much less
questionable social fact of ‘art as photography’ has merited
barely a glance. And yet the impact of photographic
reproduction on artworks is of much greater significance
for the function of art than the more or less artistic
configuration of a photograph, which turns an event
into ‘camera spoils’. Indeed the amateur who returns
home with numerous artistic prints is no more agreeable
than the hunter who, as befits him, returns with masses
of game that is useless to all but the dealer. And truly
the day appears to be imminent when there will be more
illustrated magazines than game and poultry shops.
So much for ‘snapshotting’. Yet the emphases switch
around if one turns from photography as art to art as
photography. Everyone can observe for themselves how
much easier a picture – in particular, though, a sculpture
and, even more so, architecture – can be comprehended
in photography compared to reality. It is tempting to
attribute this simply to the decline of artistic sensibility,
the failure of our coevals. But this is contradicted by
the recognition that the understanding of great works
transformed around the same time as the development
of reproductive techniques. One can no longer regard
them as the creation of individuals; they have become
collective entities, so powerful that their assimilation
is virtually connected to the requirement that they be
miniaturized. Ultimately, the mechanical methods of
reproduction are a technique of miniaturization and
88
August Sander, Member of Parliament (Democrat), 1927, from People of
the 20th Century.
they help provide people with a degree of mastery over
the works, without which those works would no longer
find any application at all.
If one thing characterizes contemporary relations
between art and photography it is the unresolved friction
that arises between the two through the photographing
of artworks. Many of those who, as photographers,
determine the contemporary face of this technology
come from painting. ey turned their back on painting
after attempts to bring this means of expression closer to
a vivid and explicit connection with contemporary life.
e more astute their sense of the characteristics of the
age, the more problematic their starting point became for
them over time. Once again, just as it did 80 years earlier,
photography has let painting pass it the baton. Moholy-
Nagy says the following: ‘e creative possibilities of the
new are in the main only slowly disclosed by these old
forms, old instruments and fields of creativity which
burst into euphoric flowering when the innovation
which has been in preparation emerges at last. us, for
example, Futurist (static) painting delivered the problem
of simultaneity of movement, the representation of one
moment in time – a clear-cut problem which later
brought about its own destruction; and this was at
a time when the film was already known but by no
means understood . . . We can also regard – with
some caveats – some of the painters working today
vwith representational, objective means (Neoclassicists
and painters of the Verist movement) as pioneers of a
new form of representational optical composition which
will soon employ only mechanical and technical means.’
And Tristan Tzara, 1922: ‘When everything that called
itself art was well and truly riddled with rheumatism,
the photographer lit the lamp of a thousand candles
and step by step the light-sensitive paper absorbed the
blackness of several objects of use. He had discovered
90
the momentousness of a tender and unspoiled flash
of lightning, which was more important than all the
constellations designed to bedazzle our eyes.’ The
photographers who crossed over from fine art to
photography, not out of opportunistic considerations,
not by chance and not out of convenience, now form
the avant-garde among their fellow specialists. is is
because they are safeguarded, given the course of their
development, to a certain extent against the greatest
danger for contemporary photography: a streak of arts
and crafts. ‘Photography as art’, says Sasha Stone, ‘is
a very dangerous territory.’
When photography has removed itself from the
context given it by a Sander, a Germaine Krull, a
Blossfeldt, when it is emancipated from physiognomic,
political, scientific interest, it becomes ‘creative’. e
lens’s concern turns to overviews; the photographic
hack arises. ‘e spirit, having conquered mechanics,
reframes its precise outputs as analogies of life.’ e
more the crisis of contemporary society escalates, and
the more stiffly its individual moments confront each
other as inert polarities, all the more so is creativity
– having revealed itself as in its deepest essence a by-
product, with contradiction its father and imitation its
mother – turned into a fetish, whose features owe their
life only to the shifts in fashionable lighting. What is
creative in photography is this commitment to fashion.
‘e world is beautiful’ – that is precisely its motto. It
reveals the attitude of a photography that can fit any tin
can into the universe but can grasp none of the human
relationships in which it appears, and which thereby,
even in its most dreamlike subjects, is merely a harbinger
of its saleability rather than its recognition. However,
because the true face of this photographic creativity is
the advertising poster or the association, its rightful
counterpart is exposure or construction. ‘For the
91
situation’, says Brecht, is ‘made complicated by the fact
that less than ever does a simple “reproduction of reality”
express something about reality. A photograph of the
Krupp’s factory or aeg reveals next to nothing about
these institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the
functional. e reification of human relations, as in,
for example, the factory, no longer makes these explicit.
Effectively it is necessary “to build something up”,
something “artificial”, “posed”.’ To have trained the
pioneers of such photographical construction is the
contribution of the Surrealists. Russian film denoted
a further stage in this altercation between creative and
constructive photography. It is no exaggeration to say
that the great achievements of its directors were possible
only in a land where photography sets out not to charm
and insinuate but rather to experiment and instruct. In
this sense, and only in this, does the impressive greeting
accorded by Antoine Wiertz, the cloddish painter of
ideas, to photography in 1855 retain a meaning for
today: ‘Some years ago a machine was born – the glory
of our century – which, day after day, amazes our
thoughts and alarms our eyes. Before the century is
over, this machine will be the brush, the palette, colours,
skill, experience, patience, deftness, sureness of aim,
complexion, glaze, prototype, completion, the essence of
painting . . . If one does not believe that daguerreotypy
will kill off art . . . Once daguerreotypy has grown into
this gigantic child, once all its art and strength has
unfurled, then genius will suddenly grab it by the neck
and shout out loud: Come here! You belong to me now!
We will work together.’ How sober, even pessimistic, in
contrast, are the words with which Baudelaire conveyed
the new technology four years later to his readers in his
essay ‘Salon of 1859’. Just like those already cited, these
words cannot be read today without a subtle shift of
emphasis. While they are the opposite of those just
92
quoted, they retain their fine logic as a strident resistance
to usurpation by artistic photography. ‘During this
lamentable period, a new industry arose which
contributed not a little to confirm stupidity in its
faith . . . that Art is, and cannot be other than, the
exact reproduction of Nature . . . A revengeful God
has given ear to the prayers of this multitude. Daguerre
was his Messiah.’ And: ‘If photography is allowed to
supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon
have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to
the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.
It is time, then, for it to return to its true duty, which
is to be the servant of the sciences and arts.’
But one thing was not grasped by either Wiertz
or Baudelaire back then: the directives that reside in
photography’s authenticity. It will not always be possible
to deal with it as reportage, whose clichés have only the
effect of conjuring up linguistic clichés in the viewer.
Cameras are getting smaller and smaller, and ever more
ready to fix fleeting and surreptitious images, whose
shocks bring the viewer’s association mechanism to a
standstill. In its place the caption needs to install itself,
which implicates photography in the literarization
of all the conditions of life and without which all
photographic construction is stalled in vagueness.
Not for nothing have Atget’s shots been compared
with those of a crime scene. But is not every spot of
our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a perpetrator?
Should not every photographer – descendant of the
augurs and the haruspices – expose guilt on his pictures
and identify the guilty? ‘The illiterates of the future
will be those unable to decipher a photograph, not
writing’, someone has observed. But shouldn’t the
photographer who cannot read his own images count
as no less an illiterate? Is the caption not destined to
become the essential component of the shot? Such are
93
Catacombs, Paris, 1861, photo by Nadar.

the questions in which the distance of 90 years, separating

contemporaries from those who made daguerreotypes,
discharges its historical friction. By the illumination
of these sparks the first photographs step forward so
beautifully and unapproachably from the darkness
of our grandfathers’ days.

94
 1 Helmut [eodor] Bossert and Heinrich Guttmann: Aus
der Frühzeit der Photographie, 1840–70. Ein Bildbuch nach
2000 Originalen (Frankfurt, 1930); Heinrich Schwarz, David
Octavius Hill. Der Meister der Photographie, mit 80 Bildtafeln
(Leipzig, 1931).
2 Karl Blossfeldt, Primal Forms of Art: Photographic Images
of Plants, ed. Karl Nierendorf (Berlin, 1928).
3 Eugène Atget, Lichtbilder, intro. Camille Recht (Paris and
Leipzig, 1930).
4 August Sander, Antlitz der Zeit: Sechzig Aufnahmen deutscher
Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts, intro. Alfred Döblin (Munich,
1929).

Glossary
Niépce Nicéphore Niépce, born Joseph Niépce (1765–1833),
made various inventions around 1816 that can be considered
as proto-photographic. In 1822, a process he invented, which he
called heliography, rendered what has been called the world’s first
permanent photographic image. In 1829 he joined forces with
Louis Daguerre.

Daguerre Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) developed

in the 1830s a successful photographic mode known as the
daguerreotype process, which made one-off permanent recorded
images with very fine details.

Hill David Octavius Hill (1802–1870) was a pioneer of

photography in Scotland in the 1840s.

Cameron Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) concentrated on

photography between 1864 and 1875. Benjamin appears to think
her work occurs earlier than this, though in fact prior to this her
involvement with photography was restricted to printing negatives
and photograms, putting together photographic albums as gifts,
staging compositions and posing for photographs.

Hugo Victor Hugo (1802–1885) became interested in photography

while in Jersey in the 1850s. He supervised and directed photographic
sessions.

95
Nadar Nadar is the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon
(1820–1910). He took his first photographs in 1853 and continued to
experiment with photography through the remainder of the century.

Leipzig Advertiser This citation from the Leipziger Anzeiger appears

in Max Dauthendey, Der Geist meines Vaters (Munich, 1912).

Arago Dominique François Jean Arago (1786–1853) was a

mathematician and physicist with an interest in optics, who was
elected a member of the chamber of deputies for the Pyrénées-
Orientales département in 1830. He used his influence to support
scientific projects with funding and to reward inventors.

Utrillo Maurice Utrillo (1883–1955) was a painter of cityscapes,

born in Montmartre, Paris.

Newhaven Newhaven is a district of Edinburgh that housed a

fishing community. It became known for its handsome, strong
fisherwomen, who carried heavy loads up steep streets in all weathers
in their attractive striped costumes.

‘And I ask: how did this adorning hair’ The poem is from Stefan
George, Der Teppich des Lebens und die Lieder von Traum und Tod
(The Carpet of Life and the Songs of Dream and Death, Berlin,
1899).

Dauthendey Karl Dauthendey (1819–1896) was a photographer

working in Leipzig, St Petersburg and Würzburg. The photograph
under discussion has been titled ‘The photographer Karl
Dauthendey with his betrothed Miss Friedrich after their first
attendance at church, 1857’. It has been established that Benjamin
mistakes the woman for Dauthendey’s first wife, who committed
suicide. It actually shows his second wife, from a decade later than
assumed. See Rolf Krauss, Walter Benjamin und der neue Blick auf
die Photographie (Ostfildern, 1998), p. 22.

Blossfeldt Karl Blossfeldt (1865–1932) was a photographer and

teacher. His volume of plant images was a great success, which
arrived late in his career. To achieve the highly detailed prints, he
developed his own cameras. In 1928 Benjamin devoted a review
essay, titled ‘New Things about Flowers’, to his plant studies, a few
words from which are repeated here.

96
the phenomenon of photography the citations in the following
sentences stem from the study of David Octavius Hill by Heinrich
Schwarz.

‘Do not look at the camera’ The line comes from Henry H.
Snelling, the founder and editor of Photographic Art Journal,
an American periodical of the nineteenth century, as quoted by
Heinrich Schwarz.

the phrase that the old Dauthendey coined The passage is taken
from Max Dauthendey, Der Geist meines Vaters (Munich, 1912).

Orlík Emil Orlík (1870–1932) was a painter and teacher who, over
the years, taught Paul Klee and George Grosz. Benjamin cites him
here and below from his essay ‘On Photography’, included in a
collection of essays Orlík published in 1924.

Kracauer Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966) wrote an essay on

photography, from which Benjamin quotes. It was published in
the Frankfurter Zeitung on 28 October 1927. In this essay, Kracauer
explored how the modern world has become quintessentially
photographic. He wrote: ‘For the world itself has taken on a
“photographic face”; it can be photographed because it strives to
be absorbed into the spatial continuum which yields to snapshots.’
The essay is published in English in the collection of Kracauer’s
essays translated and edited by Thomas Y. Levin, titled The Mass
Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, ma, 1995).

Schelling Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) was

a philosopher. The photograph of Schelling that accompanies the
piece is taken from Helmut Bossert and Heinrich Guttmann’s book
on the early history of photography and stems from 1848.

Porta Giambattista della Porta (c. 1535–1615) described the

camera obscura in 1558 in the first edition of his Magiae naturalis.
His descriptions of shutter, hole and screen, of upside-down
images and reversal from left to right, and his observations on
size and its relation to distance, are principles that remained valid
for camera technology. Della Porta noted that the image produced
by the camera obscura could be used as a guide for drawing.
He devised a method for generating images using lenses and
curved mirrors.

97
Stelzner Carl Ferdinand Stelzner (1805–1894) took up
daguerreotype photography in the early 1840s and provided portrait
photography in Germany. He took photographs of Hamburg on fire
in 1842. He lost his eyesight in the 1850s and was completely blind
by 1858.

Pierson Pierre-Louis Pierson (1822–1913) made hand-coloured

daguerreotypes in Paris. He was well known for his photographs
of European royalty.

Bayard Hippolyte Bayard (1801–1887) claimed to be the inventor

of photography and to have held the first public photographic
exhibition on 24 June 1839.

parlour Tyroleans This is a reference to a photograph of Benjamin

as a small boy. He is with his brother and both are dressed in
traditional Tyrolean clothes, with Walter holding a wooden walking
stick, and behind them is a backdrop of the Alps. Benjamin discusses
it in his Berlin Childhood around 1900. Walter Benjamin, Berlin
Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, ma,
2006), p. 132.

‘head rests’ or ‘knee clamps’ Josef Maria Eder’s Geschichte der

Photographie (Halle, 1905) provided the details for this observation.

further accessories This quotation is from Fritz Matthies-Masuren,

Künstlersiche Photographie: Entwicklung und Einfluss in Deutschland
(Leipzig, 1907).

an English trade gazette Benjamin takes this quotation of

the trade gazette from Matthies-Masuren. It is attributed to
the Photographic News, from the year 1856, but the journal was
not published at that date. The author of the sentiment is H. P.
Robinson, who wrote an influential essay titled ‘Pictorial Effect
in Photography, Being Hints on Composition and Chiaroscuro
for Photographers’, published in 1868. A similar paragraph to
the one cited here appears in this essay.

likeness of Kafka This photograph was in Benjamin’s possession,

though it did not appear in the published version of the essay in
the literary journal. It is unclear how he obtained it, though he
may have got hold of it through Kafka’s childhood friend Hugo
Bergmann (1883–1975), who met Gershom Scholem in Bern in

98
1919. It is evoked again in two sketches written around 1933 as part
of the memoir project Berlin Childhood around 1900. In ‘The Lamp’,
Benjamin describes the Kafka photograph, but places himself as the
young boy in the shadow of the potted palm, clutching a large straw
hat. The same forlorn Benjamin-Kafka boy stares out of the boudoir-
cum-torture-chamber-cum-throne-room of the photographic studio
in ‘Mummerehlen’. It is mentioned again in ‘Franz Kafka: On the
Tenth Anniversary of His Death’ (1934). ‘There is a childhood
photograph of Kafka, a supremely touching portrayal of his “poor,
brief childhood”. It was probably made in one of those nineteenth-
century studios whose draperies and palm trees, tapestries and easels,
placed them somewhere between a torture chamber and a throne
room . . . Immensely sad eyes dominate the landscape arranged for
them, and the auricle of a large ear seems to be listening for its
sounds.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary
of His Death’, in Selected Writings, vol. ii: 1927–1934, ed. Michael
W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, ma,
2005), p. 800.

mezzotint engraving This mode of producing portraits, with

a great tonal range from light to dark and relatively speedily,
flourished originally in the seventeenth century. It experienced
a second heyday in England in the middle and later years of the
eighteenth century.

Delaroche Paul Delaroche (1797–1856) was a French painter of

historical scenes. To him is often attributed the line ‘from today,
painting is dead’, a comment uttered supposedly upon seeing the
first daguerreotypes. Whether he ever said this is unclear, but he
did supply reasons to champion photography, which were cited in
Arago’s report to the French government. Benjamin quotes some
of these lines, drawing them from the book by Schwarz.

gum printing gum printing, or gum bichromate printing process,

uses several layers and the physical coating of colours to make
the images, leading to an expressive painterly effect that mobilizes
a soft-tone impressionism.

Camille Recht The quotation is from Recht’s foreword to a German

collection of photographs by Eugène Atget titled Lichtbilder (1930).
Recht was a critic who wrote a study of early photography, Die alte
Photographie, in 1931.

99
Paderewski Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860–1941) was a pianist and
composer as well as a politician in his native Poland.

Paganini Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840) was an Italian violin virtuoso.

Busoni Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) was an Italian pianist and

composer whose works are challenging to perform. He wrote a
controversial manifesto in 1907, ‘Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music’.

Atget Eugène Atget (1857–1927) was a photographer dedicated

to documenting the old streets and buildings of Paris from the
1880s until the early years of the twentieth century. Over nearly
30 years he made approximately 8,500 glass plate negatives,
18 by 24 centimetres in size. His legacy of thousands of
photographs established a topography of those Paris quartiers
populaires that had until then not been deemed worthy
of recording for posterity.

Berenice Abbott Man Ray introduced Atget’s work and the

photographer to his darkroom assistant, Berenice Abbott
(1898–1991), in 1925. She bought work and tried to promote
him. She took a photographic portrait of him in 1927, which
appeared as the frontispiece to the collection of his images that
she collated (the German edition of which Benjamin refers to),
after having managed to acquire, upon his death, a substantial
part of his archive, with the help of the art dealer and gallery
owner Julien Levy.

an outstandingly handsome volume One thousand copies of the

book were published in New York by E. Weyhe and 1,000 in Paris
and Leipzig by Henri Jonquières. It came enveloped in a cardboard
slipcase without any dust jacket and the name Atget was stamped
in gold lettering on the cloth cover. The edition by Weyhe, titled
Photographie de Paris, included an introduction in French by Pierre
Mac Orlan and the Jonquières edition was introduced in German
by Camille Recht.

‘selling them dirt cheap’ This quotation stems from Recht’s

introduction and it indicates the penurious state in which Atget
existed. It has been contradicted by some commentators, who
challenge this picture of a marginalized Atget. It is claimed that
he did not sell predominantly for pennies to a few enthusiasts of
photography, but rather made a good business selling photographic

100
‘documents’ to the city’s artists, as a resource for their work. His
clients included painters, sculptors, illustrators, sign painters,
architects and private collectors. In 1892, an advertisement
appeared in the art journal La Revue des beaux-arts: ‘We recommend
to our readers M. Atget, photographer, 5 Rue de la Pitie (Paris),
who offers artists landscapes, animals, flowers, monuments,
documents, foregrounds for painters, reproduction of paintings.
Will travel. Collections not in public circulation.’ As the century
closed, around 1897, Atget branched out, selling city views to
archives, museums and libraries. Rather than casting a critical eye
on the city, he has been presented more recently as a successful
documenter of a picturesque ‘old Paris’. By 1901, Atget was
well established as a specialist photographer of Paris, and more
specifically, old Paris and its environs. Public concern over
demolition of the historic sights boosted the significance of his
work and made his business commercially viable. He printed
a business card with the following strapline: ‘E. Atget, Creator
and Purveyor of a Collection of Photographic Views of Old Paris’.
See Maria Morris Hambourg, ‘A Biography of Eugène Atget’, in
J. Szarkowski and M. Hambourg, The Work of Atget, vol. ii: The
Art of Old Paris (New York, 1982).

Bifur Bifur was a periodical of the avant-garde, which published

photographs. Its first issue, in May 1929, included work by
Germaine Krull, André Kertész, Eli Lotar, László Moholy-Nagy
and Maurice Tabard.

Variétés Variétés was a journal published by Paul-Gustave van

Hecke in Brussels. It ran from May 1928 to April 1930. Its subtitle
was ‘Illustrated Monthly Journal of the Modern Spirit’ and it
covered art and literature, fashion, jazz, cinema and photography.
It carried photographs from the likes of Man Ray, Lotar, Krull,
Kertész, Bayer, Abbott and Renger-Patzsch. Krull’s shop window
mannequins appeared in Variétés. La Révolution surréaliste had
closed and this served as a proxy journal for some of the Surrealists.
An issue from 1929 was devoted to Surrealist work.

under the caption ‘Westminster’, ‘Lille’, ‘Antwerp’ or ‘Breslau’

Photographs with these captions were published in Variétés
(issue 8, 15 December 1929) under the title ‘Mélancholie des
villes’. The photographers included Krull, Abbott, Bayer and
Lux Feininger.

101
‘the great sights and the so-called landmarks’ The quotation stems
from Recht’s introduction to Atget’s Lichtbilder.

Place du Tertre This is a square in Montmartre, formerly home

at the turn of the twentieth century to Utrillo and Picasso. By
the 1920s, campaigns began against its redevelopment, as the
old village-style buildings were demolished. Nostalgic memoirs
recounted the pre-war bohemian days and the excitements of the
cabarets and dance halls. By the end of the 1920s, cabarets aimed
at provincial ‘Paris-by-Night’ tourists in motor coaches and street
entertainers started to move in. Today is it well known for its artists,
with easels on the square, plying their trade to tourists.

Surrealist photography prepared a medicative alienation

Benjamin regarded Atget as a precursor of Surrealist photography.
Some of his motifs were rediscovered by Surrealists in the 1920s.
For example, Krull’s images of shop windows and mannequins with
unsettling wobbly heads and detached body parts were displayed in
magazines alongside Atget’s images of the same. Man Ray, who had
a studio on the same street as Atget in Montparnasse, discovered his
work in around 1923 and published four of Atget’s photographs in
La Révolution surréaliste in 1926, uncredited at Atget’s insistence.

Schopenhauer The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)

was photographed a few times in the last fifteen years of his life.
The photograph to which Benjamin refers appears in Bossert and
Guttmann’s history of early photography.

Sander August Sander (1876–1964) took up photography at the turn

of the century, after a period as a miner. He founded a studio in 1910
and began the project that would occupy him for 40 years, recording
the faces of people of the twentieth century. Face of Our Time and
Germanmirror appeared in 1929, and provided a glimpse of his
larger intention. Face of Our Time contained 60 plates presenting
a cross-section of German society in stylistically homogeneous
views, mainly full-face or three-quarter views, with the sitter looking
directly into the camera. In the background, the sitters’ customary
accoutrements and setting could be seen. Sander’s archive of more
than 540 portraits was not published until after his death in 1980,
under the title he had chosen: People of the 20th Century.

‘His complete work’ This quotation, along with the next two
describing the strata of types and the method of observation, does

102
not appear in the book of Sander’s photographs, so it is to be assumed
that Benjamin picked them up from some publicity materials.

Goethe’s phrase Goethe referred to his scientific method, an anti-

dualistic combination of seeing and intuition, as ‘zarte Empirie’,
which has been translated as ‘delicate’ or ‘tender’ empiricism.

Döblin Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) was an author, essayist and

doctor. His novel Berlin Alexanderplatz appeared in 1929. His
introduction to Sander’s collection of photographs made an
impression on Benjamin’s interpretation of the material. Döblin
brought out the extent to which Sander worked with a semi-
scientific approach. He drew out the idea of the physiognomy of
social groups and the ways in which historical tensions marked
themselves on the human bodies, making of some of them types,
a modern de-individualized entity, while others seemed relics of a
bygone age, still individual but condemned to extinction. Sander’s
pictures, he insisted, could teach more in their visual directness than
many lectures or written analyses.

Lichtwark Alfred Lichtwark (1852–1914) was an art historian. He

wrote the introduction to Fritz Matthies-Masuren’s Künstlerische
Photographie: Entwicklung und Einfluss in Deutschland, from which
Benjamin quotes here.

Moholy-Nagy László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) was a painter,

photographer and theorist who was involved with the Bauhaus.
Benjamin quotes here from his Painting Photography Film, which
was published in two editions in 1925 and 1927 in the series of
Bauhausbücher. (An edition of the book was translated into English
by Janet Seligman and published by Lund Humphries, London, 1969.)

Tzara Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) was a Dadaist. Benjamin quotes

from his ‘Inside-out Photography’, Tzara’s 1922 preface to Man
Ray’s photograph album of Rayographs, or cameraless photos,
titled Les Champs délicieux. Benjamin translated it into German
for the June 1924 issue of G: Zeitschrift für elementare Gestaltung
(G: A Magazine for Elementary Form), journal of the ‘G’ group;
it was printed in English in Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries
(London, 1992), p. 100.

Stone Sasha Stone (1895–1940), born Aleksander Serge Steinsapir

in St Petersburg, was a photographer and a friend of Benjamin.

103
He had a photographic studio in Berlin in the mid-1920s, which
advertised itself with the strapline ‘Sasha Stone sees even more’.
The citation here is taken from his essay ‘Photo-Kunstgewerbereien’
in Das Kunstblatt in 1928. He died on the run from the Nazis in
Perpignan, France, in August 1940, six weeks before Benjamin’s
same fate in that region.

Krull Germaine Krull published a notable work of photographs

in Paris in 1928. It was titled Métal and was a series of photographs
of factories, bridges, cranes and iron girders on the Eiffel Tower.
Benjamin became acquainted with Krull in 1926 or ’27, but
they became closer in 1937. Benjamin mentions Krull for the
first time in 1930 in a short report on ‘Surrealist Magazines’. See
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. iv, Part 1, pp. 595–6.
Krull photographed the Paris arcades that formed one of Benjamin’s
main areas of study. She drew out of those images the defunct
nature of the arcades: her arcades are deserted or populated by the
odd shadow, the time on their clocks is stilled, their signs shriek at
no one.

‘The world is beautiful’ The line is taken from the title to Albert
Renger-Patzsch’s collection of photographs, Die Welt ist schön:
Einhundert photographische Aufnahmen (The World is Beautiful: One
Hundred Photographic Shots), which was edited and introduced by
Carl Georg Heise in 1928.

‘For the situation’, says Brecht The line is taken from Brecht’s
‘Threepenny Trial’ (1931) on the question of what photographic,
naturalistic depiction can and cannot do. Bertolt Brecht, Schriften i:
Grosse Kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner
Hecht et al., vol. xxi (Berlin, 1988), p. 469.

Wiertz Antoine Wiertz (1806–1865) was a Belgian Romantic

painter and sculptor, supported in the last years of his life by the
Belgian state. The lines Benjamin quotes were written for the June
1855 issue of Le National.

Baudelaire Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), poet and essayist,

expressed his negative sentiments vis-à-vis photography in relation
to the Salon of 1859 in the Révue française, published in Paris, 10
June–20 July 1859. This quotation is taken from its English reprint:
Charles Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art, trans. Jonathan Mayne
(London, 1956), p. 230.

104
crime scene This is Camille Recht’s analogy from the foreword to
Atget’s Lichtbilder.

‘The illiterates of the future will be those unable to decipher a

photograph, not writing’, someone has observed It was Moholy-
Nagy who made this claim, and on several occasions. Benjamin may
have read it in the essay ‘Die Photographie in der Reklame’, from
Photographische Korrespondenz (September 1927) or in the essay
‘Fotografie ist Lichtgestaltung’ (Photography is Creation with Light)
from the 1928 Bauhaus journal (vol. 11, no. 1).

105
 Introduction to ‘Nothing Wrong
with the Illustrated Press!’

Benjamin wrote this in response to an article in Die literarische

Welt by Friedrich Burschell, published on 20 November
1925. Burschell’s article was a commemorative piece on
the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the death of the
writer Jean Paul and it bemoaned, in its final paragraph, the
way in which the anniversary was treated in the popular
press, specifically in relation to the use of imagery. Benjamin
launches a robust defence of the legitimacy of the montagist,
Dada-like sensibility generated by the illustrated press. He
uses the notion of ‘aura’ here. e images, he notes, exude
the ‘aura of their actuality’ in their higgledy-piggledyness,
in their thrusting up and out of the chaos of modern life and
in their acknowledgement of the actual social value of things
– including cultural figures – rather than the one which they
should, apparently, receive from the collective body formed
by technology and capital.

Publication History
e retort was not published in Benjamin’s lifetime and it
is unknown whether it was rejected or whether Benjamin
ever sent it in to the journal.

107
 Nothing Wrong
with the Illustrated Press!
(1925)

In issue 7 of Die Literarische Welt (1925), Friedrich

Burschell dedicates an honorific commemoration to
Jean Paul on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of
his death. In passing, he denounces what seems to him
to be a desecration of the man and his memory. He has
the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung in his sights: in the issue
in question ‘the large photograph on the cover is to the
benefit of youth, with three poets’ children’, among whom
the son of omas Mann is already ‘presented as a poet,
from whom, and across some considerable distance and
in correspondingly miniaturized reproduction, Jean
Paul slunk, though not without being confronted by,
here too, on the last page, the petty bourgeois hero of a
dubious trial, and two tarts all done up in feathers and
furs, as well as two cats and a monkey, and not at all
by, though it could just as well have been, the creatures
that the poet loved with the most touching fondness
– by squirrels, dogs, songbirds or butterflies.’ Which
presumably would not have bothered anyone, not to
mention the question of whether tarts, cats and monkeys
appear more soulful in the camera obscura than even
butterflies and songbirds. — However, what is the point
of all that. And who is not certain that, under the given
circumstances of democratic journalism, nothing better
exists on the west European continent than the Berliner
109
Illustrirte. It is so incomparably ‘interesting’ precisely
because of the rigour with which it concentrates, week
after week, in its concave mirror, the dissolute, distracted
attention of bank clerks, secretaries, assembly workers.
is documentary character is its power and, at the same
time, its legitimation. A large head of Jean Paul on the
title page of the illustrated magazine – what would be
more boring? It is ‘interesting’ only as long as the head
remains small. To show things in the aura of their
actuality is more valuable, is more fruitful, if indirectly,
than crowing on about the ultimately petty bourgeois
idea of educating the general public. If, indeed, the cool,
shade-donating actuality of these pages of images, unlike
the usual and hackneyed ones, is due not to 100 per
cent speculation on the basest instincts, but 50 per cent
speculation on their technical preciseness, then it should
have earned the right to be observed with the most
benevolent neutrality by a literary type, who – God
knows! – is not going to be approached by it for
collaboration.

Glossary
Burschell Friedrich Burschell (1899–1970) was an author who
published in many cultural journals, in Weimar Germany and in
exile, on figures such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Joachim
Winkelmann, Christoph Martin Wieland, Heinrich von Kleist
and Friedrich Schlegel.

Jean Paul Jean Paul (1763–1825, born Johann Paul Friedrich

Richter) wrote novels and stories, which were fragmentary, digressive,
reflexive and humorous.

Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper)

is weekly newspaper appeared in Berlin from 1892 until 1945
and became the first mass-market German weekly publication.
It was sold on the street, in kiosks and in bars. By 1928 it had

110
the largest circulation of any magazine in all of Europe. It embraced
eye-catching and up-to-the-minute photography, though it also
included drawings.

three poets’ children is refers to the cover of the Berliner

Illustrirte Zeitung on 1 November 1925. It was a photograph of
Erika Mann and Klaus Mann, the daughter and son of omas
Mann, and Pamela Wedekind, the daughter of Frank Wedekind, in
the play Anja und Esther (1925) by Klaus Mann as it was performed
in a Hamburg theatre. ere was also a photograph of them in their
usual clothes.

111
 Introduction to ‘Letter to
Grete Cohn’

Benjamin was a prolific letter writer and, in the years of

travel – later exile – he kept up relationships with many of
his friends from his youth. Benjamin had been close to
Grete Radt since 1913. She was his first fiancée and they
were both active in the student movement and studied
together in Munich. He was also friends with her brother
Fritz. Benjamin transferred his affection to Dora Pollak in
1916, and Grete Radt eventually married his friend Alfred
Cohn, whom Benjamin had met at school. Cohn’s sister
Jula was another of Benjamin’s friends as a youth and one
of his great loves in the early 1920s. She married Fritz, the
brother of Grete, in 1925.

113
 Letter to Grete Cohn
(16 October 1927)

Dear Grete,

Well, I am on the move. I am especially pleased to take

with me the images which you took of the view from
here. ank you very much for those. I find that they
yield what one is able to seek in them. Do you know that
photography has become extremely topical overnight.
e Frankfurter Zeitung was full of it recently and a long
essay by Dr Kracauer, who was just here, is to be expected
likewise. At an ‘international photography exhibition’,
which was on show here a few days ago, you could find
people raving enthusiastically over (dubious) photos –
even a selection of old photos of Paris which was on
show there disappointed me. Curiously, old photos of
people seem to signify more than localities, because
fashion in dress is the most effective temporal index.
I showed the images on which I myself appear to
some acquaintances, who found the one with closed
eyes very good.
Many thanks for the provision of the volume numbers
of your Bertuch. I hope to be able to see how my copy
compares in a few days.
Recently I got so sick of all the modern scribbling that
I grabbed Sentimental Education and read both volumes
in a few days. Since then, reeling under this massive
115
impression, I remain lost to the latest French books, am
unable to read anything right through and will, barely
in Berlin, grab another book by Flaubert, if I am able
to bear reading anything at all.
It is a shame that you didn’t get to see this: fourteen
days after you both left a foire took up residence in front
of my hotel. It had to battle with fog and cold. Meanwhile
a few wild-grown summer days have here and there lured
green foliage from the branches. You too will have made
the acquaintance of winter in the meantime. May you
take it peacefully in your stride. I hope you are both in
good health. Loving greetings and my compliments to
the little girls.

Your Walter
16 October 1927
Paris xiv
4 av. du Parc-Montsouris

Glossary
a long essay by Dr Kracauer Benjamin had read Siegfried
Kracauer’s essay ‘Photography’ in draft form. It was published
in the Frankfurter Zeitung on 28 October 1927. A discussion of
outmoded fashions is present in the essay.

Bertuch Benjamin was fascinated by Friedrich Justin Bertuch’s

Bilderbuch für Kinder (Picture-book for Children), published in
twelve volumes in Weimar between 1792 and 1830, with more
than 1,000 coloured and high-quality copperplate illustrations and
countless other images, of subjects from the eruption of Vesuvius
to the patent of an English washing machine. Bertuch wished to
educate people in the burgeoning insights of natural history. He
bemoaned the lack of good images. All education in natural history
must occur via the eye and not the understanding, he noted in Über
die Mittel Naturgeschichte gemeinnütziger zu machen und in das
practische Leben einzuführen (On the Means of Making Natural
History Useful and to Introduce it into Practical Life; Weimar,

116
1799). An uneducated person has to perceive the characteristics
either on the object or on a drawing of the object, so that ‘the soul
receives an imagetic impression of it’ (p. 10). Benjamin and Dora
often showed the illustrated plates to their son, Stefan.

Sentimental Education Benjamin is referring to Gustave Flaubert’s

novel of 1869.

foire fair

little girls These were Marianne (1922–1944) and Lisa Cohn

(1924–1996). Marianne would later work for a Resistance movement
that rescued Jewish children threatened with deportation from France
and conveyed them to Switzerland. She was arrested by the Gestapo in
May 1944, along with around 30 children. Early on 8 July 1944 she
was shot dead by the Gestapo in Ville-la-Grand, Haute-Savoie, and
her corpse buried by the side of the road. Her sister Lisa and their
parents survived the war.

117
 Introduction to ‘New ings
about Flowers’

e essay appeared in Die literarische Welt on 23 November

1928. It was a review of Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst.
Photographische Pflanzenbilder (Primal Forms of Art: Photo-
graphic Images of Plants), which appeared that same year.1
Blossfeldt’s book of photographic plates was developed
out of a successful exhibition of his plant photography in
Berlin, organized by the gallerist and art critic Karl Nieren-
dorf. e volume was a luxury production, with thick papers
and rich inks. e photographs were presented in a large
format. It was reminiscent of much older atlases of botan-
ical specimens and natural curiosities, but at the same time
it also mobilized the latest technologies of representation
and printing. In the form of the book, as in each individual
photograph, according to Benjamin’s reading, old and
ancient forms and structures stood in proximity to mod-
ern architectonic forms of design.
Blossfeldt (1865–1932) photographed flowers, buds,
stems and other elements of plants. His images were taken
in close-up and magnified, and he set his plant subjects
against stark, blank backgrounds. e photographs were
designed to be study aids for art students and to offer inspir-
ation for sculptors, painters and architects. e notion of
the Urform or ‘primal form’ in the book’s title stems from
Goethe’s research into the metamorphosis of plants. Goethe
observed plants closely, through his ‘delicate empiricism’,
119
and saw that they were composed of mutating forms. Each
plant transfigured its forms from leaf to flower, root and
stem. Each plant was also an altered form of other plants,
proving the diversity of natural forms to be the result of
a metamorphosis of a few essential forms. Primal forms,
through close and direct observation and imaginative reason-
ing in relation to plants, show themselves to be at one and
the same time ideal, Platonic entities and empirically verifi-
able facts. In his images, Blossfeldt appears to be proposing
that the plants, when seen through the lens of his camera,
evince a number of essential forms that are situated in nature
but that can find, and have found, cultural and social deploy-
ment too. After the inventions of nature, its combination of
elements to produce a panoply of forms, humans use nature
as a resource and inspiration. ey copy from it the ancient
columns found in horsetail and maples and in the bishop’s
crook of the ostrich fern. ere are totem poles in tenfold
enlargements of horse chestnut and maple shoots. And a
shoot of wolf’s bane will devise a cultural gesture for humans,
a dance move, for it unfolds like the body of a talented
performer. e plant spied through the lens is no longer
symbolic of something else, but engenders form. e plant
made gigantic is a resource from which all form springs.
Blossfeldt’s title also appeared to echo and reverse an earlier,
exquisitely drawn work that likewise revealed a curiously
artefactual sense of nature: the biologist Ernst Haeckel’s
Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature) of 1899–1904.
Blossfeldt’s close-ups of plants, buds, blossoms, stems
and leaves rendered them in as much precise detail as his
long exposure and printing times would allow. Indeed,
this was an art of detail, for Blossfeldt would select areas of
the negative for enlargement, blasting into hypervisibility
one small part – perhaps the tip of a shoot or the joint of
two twigs. is fragment might be enlarged 45 times. Some-
times Blossfeldt cut into the plants he wished to portray,
opening up their seed sacs or stripping back sepals to reveal
120
their contents. The plant becomes a construction and a
revelation. Benjamin proposes in this short review that such
photographic techniques as the close-up and magnification
can make even the most familiar, the most natural, reveal
itself to be transformed and transformable. ough he does
not use the term here, the notion of the optical unconscious
and the new nature that presents itself to the camera is
incipient in Benjamin’s thinking. Nature becomes second
nature through the lens. New worlds arise in that which
we think we know fully when it is mediated. Seeing itself
is reborn.

Translation History
e essay has appeared in two previous translations. One,
titled ‘News about Flowers’, is by Michael Jennings; it
appears in volume 11 of the Harvard University Press
Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin and is also antholo-
gized in Jason Gaiger and Paul Wood’s Art of the Twentieth
Century: A Reader (New Haven, ct, and London, 2003).
e other is by Christian Goodden and appears under
the title ‘A New View of Flowers’ in Taschen’s edition of
Karl Blossfeldt’s photographs, edited by Hans Christian
Adam (Karl Blossfeldt, 1865–1932, Cologne, 1999). Subse-
quent re-editions by Taschen of the collected works of
Blossfeldt did not contain Benjamin’s review.

1 Karl Blossfeldt, Urformen der Kunst. Photographische Pflanzen-

bilder, ed. Karl Nierendorf (Berlin, 1928), 120 photo plates.

121
Karl Blossfeldt, Hogweed Blossom (1930).
 New Things about Flowers
(1928)

Criticism is a convivial art. A healthy reader doesn’t give

a fig for the reviewer’s judgement. But what he really
appreciates is the delightful bad habit of keeping abreast
of things, uninvited, while someone else reads. To flip
open a book in such a way that it beckons like a ready-
laid table, at which we take a seat, along with all our
ideas, questions, convictions, quirks, prejudices and
thoughts, such that the few hundred readers (is it really
so many?) in this society vanish and, on account of that,
we get well fed and watered – that is criticism. At least,
the only sort that makes a reader hungry for a book.
If, for now, we can agree on this, then the 120 plates
in this book are laid out for innumerable observations
and observers. Indeed, we wish this work, which is rich
– spare only in words – as many friends as that. But the
silence of the researcher, who has provided these images,
must be respected. Perhaps his knowledge belongs to
that type which makes one silent the more one possesses
it. And in this case, more important than knowing is
being able. He who brought this collection of plant
photos into being may eat more than bread. In this
great inspection of the inventory of perception, which
will alter our image of the world in ways not yet calculable,
he has given us a lot. He has proven how correct that
pioneer of photography, Moholy-Nagy, was when he said:
123
‘The limits of photography are not foreseeable. Everything
is so new here that even the groping around leads to
creative results. Technology is the self-evident path
breaker for this. Not the person who is unfamiliar with
script, but rather the one unfamiliar with photography
will be the illiterate of the future.’ Whether we accelerate
the growth of a plant with time lapse or show its form in
fortyfold magnification – in both cases there whooshes
up a geyser of new image worlds in spaces of existence
where we might have expected it least.
These photographs disclose a whole unsuspected
treasury of analogies and forms within the plants’ being.
Only photography is able to do this. For it requires a
powerful magnification before these forms are able to cast
off the veil that our inertia has thrown over them. What
can be said about a beholder to whom, even in disguise,
they give out signals? Nothing can better demonstrate
the truly new objectivity of these procedures than
comparison with that formerly unobjective, and yet
so ingenious, procedure by means of which Grandville
– a figure as much cherished as misunderstood – enabled
the entire cosmos to materialize out of the realm of
plants in his The Souls of Flowers. He tackles it from the
opposite end – and God knows, not subtly. On to these
pure children of nature, he stamps the punishing stigma
of the creature, the human face, right in the middle of
the bloom. Like barely anyone else, this great precursor
of the advertising poster mastered one of its fundamental
principles, graphic sadism. Is it not remarkable to see
another principle of advertising here now – magnification
of the plant world to gigantic proportions, gently healing
the wounds which caricature inflicted on it?
‘Primal forms of art’ – indeed. But what else could that
mean other than primal forms of nature? at is to say,
forms that were never a mere prefiguration for art but
rather, from the beginning, were at work as primal forms
124
Karl Blossfeldt, Fuller’s Teasel, leaves dried on the stem, enlarged
four times, 1928.
in all that is created. Besides, even the most sober observer
might have pause for thought at how the magnification
of something already large – for example, the plant or its
bud or the leaf – leads into quite different realms of form
than that of the small, such as the plant cell through a
microscope. And if we think it the case that new painters,
such as Klee and even more so Kandinsky, have long
busied themselves with making us pally with those realms
into which the microscope would like to whisk us
brusquely and forcibly – then what we encounter in these
magnified plants is more like herbal ‘forms of style’. One
senses a Gothic parti pris in the bishop’s crozier that is
represented in an ostrich fern, and in the delphinium
and the bloom of the saxifrage, which lives up to its
name in cathedrals as a rose window, smashing through
the walls. In addition, the oldest forms of columns bob
up in horsetail, and totem poles are in the shoots of the
horse chestnut and the maple, magnified tenfold, and
the shoot of a wolf’s bane unfurls like the body of a highly
gifted female dancer. From each calyx and every leaf,
necessities of the inner image leap out at us, which in all
phases and stages of the begotten have the last word as
metamorphoses. is touches on one of the deepest, least
fathomable forms of creativity: on mutation, which was
always, above all others, the mode of genius of the creative
collective and of nature. It is the most fruitful, dialectical
counterpoint to invention: the old natura non facit saltus.
In a bold assumption, one might like to name it the
feminine, herbal principle of life itself. Mutation is
accommodating and assenting, pliant and something
that finds no end, artful and pervasive.
We observers, though, wander beneath these giant
plants like Lilliputians. It is reserved for fraternal giant
spirits, eyes of the sun, like those of Goethe and Herder,
to suck all the sweetness from these calyxes.

126
Glossary

‘the limits of photography’ Benjamin’s citation from Moholy-Nagy

is to be found in the essay ‘Fotografie ist Lichtgestaltung’
(Photography is Creation with Light), in the first issue of the
Bauhaus journal (vol. ii, no. 1, 1928). e article is richly illustrated
with photograms, a photo negative, an advertising image for
macaroni by Irene Bayer-Hecht, photos by Ulrich Klavun, Erich
Consemüller and Albert Braun and Lotte Beese. Benjamin conveys
the same sentiment in his ‘Small History of Photography’ of 1931.

new objectivity Benjamin makes reference to the New Objectivity

(Neue Sachlichkeit), then a recently fashionable style of
photography, with its cool, sober view of the world and its objects,
seemingly without emotional colouring or expressive gestures and
characterized by sharp focus, high contrast, unexpected perspectives
and a strong sense of materiality.

Grandville J. J. Grandville, born Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard

Grandville (1803–1847), was a caricaturist and illustrator. He
published several collections of works placing flora and animals
in human clothes and situations. Titles include Scènes de la vie
privée et publique des animaux, Cent proverbes and Un autre monde.

e Souls of Flowers Benjamin refers to Grandville’s Les Fleurs

animées. Published in 1847, it was translated as e Flowers
Personified in English and Die Seele der Blumen (e Soul of
Flowers) in German. Grandville imagines the plant world in the
guise of the human world, with pansies and tulips in dresses of the
latest fashions being served by animals and insects. In the picture
book, it transpires that plants are exasperated by their incorporation
into humans’ symbolic worlds. As one states to the Flower Fairy,
who is their queen:

e flowers here present beg you to accept their homage,

and to lend a favourable ear to their humble complaint. For
thousands of years we have supplied mankind with their themes
of comparison; we alone have given them all their metaphors;
indeed, without us poetry could not exist. Men lend to us their
virtues and their vices; their good and their bad qualities; – and
it is time that we should have some experience of what these are.
We are tired of the flower-life. We wish for permission to assume

127
 the human form, and to judge, for ourselves, whether that which
they say above, of our character, is agreeable to truth.

A murmur of approbation follows this speech, we are told, as the

flowers unite in rebellion. e Flower Fairy is shocked and cannot
believe that the flowers desire to exchange the miserable life of
humans for their diamonds of dew and the kisses of butterflies.
e Wild Rose elects to be an author, the Corn Poppy a shepherdess.
Others opt for schoolmaster, trinket vendor, piano teacher and
fortune-teller. Permission granted by the Fairy, she takes her revenge
on those perfidious flowers and, by morning, the garden was a desert,
but for the solitary and perpetually blooming heath plant.

this great precursor of the advertising poster Grandville,

according to Benjamin, is the progenitor of advertising, that high
art of commodity fetishism. In the Arcades Project, he notes how
‘Grandville’s works are the sibylline books of publicité. Everything
that with him has its preliminary form as a joke, or satire, attains its
true unfolding as advertisement.’ Benjamin, Arcades Project, p. 172.
Benjamin specifies what it is that Grandville and Blossfeldt
contribute to the language of advertising: the image as wound –
a violation of nature distorted with a human face – in Grandville;
the image as healing in Blossfeldt, not by the restitution of normal,
unimpeded vision but rather by re-adapting the distorting eye of
advertising, repeating the spell and incorporating its inconsistent
vision into its own. is presents a certain challenge to the smoothly
commodifiable languages of photographic Neue Sachlichkeit.

‘forms of style’ e reference seems to be to the art historian Alois

Riegl’s Stilfragen (Questions of Style) of 1893, a study of ornamental
form from the Stone Age onwards. One chapter focuses on ‘e
Introduction of Vegetal Ornament and the Development of the
Ornamental Tendril’, tracing ornamental forms drawn from plants
from ancient Egyptian art to late Roman art. e acanthus ornament is
shown, however, to be not drawn from nature but rather an adaptation
of a palmette motif and, as such, as result of pure artistic invention.

natura non facit saltus ‘ere are no leaps in nature.’ is phrase is
axiomatic for the philosopher G. W. Leibniz and for Carl Linnaeus’s
Philosophia botanica (1751), but it also stretches back to ancient
philosophy and forwards to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
(1859).

128
 Introduction to ‘Paris, the City
in the Mirror . . .’

The essay appeared in the German edition of Vogue on 30

January 1929. It was authored anonymously and sandwiched
between a glamorous photograph of Marie-Luise, Countess
of Dohna, and an article with photographs of snow-laden
fir trees and fashionable skiers in Garnisch, the German
pretender to Engadin St Moritz, in the Swiss Alps. Vogue
lasted only two years in the Germany of the Weimar years.
It was unable to steal the market share from Die Dame, a life-
style periodical published by Ullstein in Berlin from 1922–
41 for which Benjamin’s wife Dora wrote. Dora Benjamin
was an editor of another fashion magazine from 1926, Die
praktische Berlinerin, and so it was through her that Benjamin
had contacts to the world of fashion publishing. On
Benjamin’s personal copy of the article a note states: ‘The
original version of this article, which is here garbled, may be
seen in the unpublished papers.’ However, this original text
is lost.
The article touches on a theme that finds its way into his
other writings on Paris: the mirror and other smooth, reflect-
ing surfaces, such as the asphalt of the roads, are presented
in his writings as a momentous component of the bourgeois
city and the bourgeois self, especially the female self. These
shiny surfaces reflect the city and its residents in countless
window-panes and mirrors and from sundry angles. City
and residents are fragmented and multiplied, generating
129
feelings of disorientation and loss. This Paris is the one that
had struck Benjamin in his researches into post-French
Revolution Paris. On the way to the café or restaurant, a
stroller of the restoration and bourgeois monarchy would
pass by the new and glittering rows of shops with plate-
glass windows, vitrines, mirrors and lighting (which made
possible the late opening of shops), or they might glide
through the covered arcades flanked by trading outlets – a
development out of the galeries of the Palais-Royal. These
trading precincts slinking through the city contribute to an
alluring cityscape that offers many opportunities for looking
and being looked at. Lived here is an existence concerned with
seeing and being seen. Splendid nineteenth-century Paris
rebounds in myriad passing eyes, transferring on to mobile
crowds the gleaming brilliance of shop windows, lit cafés and
bistros, reflective facades and, after road surfacing, the glassy
smoothness of the asphalt, all performing as screens that mir-
ror subjects back to themselves as objects. Paris is dubbed,
Benjamin informs us, the ‘looking-glass city’, and within its
bounds the crowd turns into a spectacle and the flâneur into
its spectator, and chronicler. One file of the Arcades Project
was devoted to the theme of mirrors;1 some sections of the
present article find another form in the various notes of
the Arcades Project.
Benjamin spent the last thirteen years of his life exploring
the history of Paris. It was inexhaustible. He records in the
Arcades Project: ‘Few things in the history of humanity are as
well known to us as the history of Paris. Tens of thousands
of volumes are dedicated solely to the investigation of this
tiny spot on the earth’s surface.’ As he would also touch
on in the Vogue article, he goes on to observe: ‘Many of
the main thoroughfares have their own special literature,
and we possess written accounts of thousands of the most
inconspicuous houses.’2
The argument of the short article is that Paris has an
intimate relationship to the book. The city is seen through
130
the book. Its monuments are built as if they were made for
the settings of books. But the books that exemplify his
contemporary moment include the photographic volume
and the city map. The book of words has merged with the
photograph and the diagram when it comes to communi-
cating the city. Perhaps Benjamin had André Breton’s photo-
novel Nadja (1928) resonating in his mind. In discussing
Mario von Bucovich’s volume of Paris photographs from
1928, with its images by Bucovich and Krull, he posits pho-
tography as a mirror of the city. The collection by Bucovich
and Krull, he notes, closes with an image of the Seine. It is
a close-up of the surface of the water, agitated, dark and light
with a hint of cloud broken on its ripples. It seems to him
that this reflecting surface is a reflection of photography
itself, which is as rightfully there, in the city of looks and
looking, as the river Seine, which shatters all images, like a
committed montagist, and testifies to the evanescence of
all things.

Translation History
Parts of this article found their way into the various
projects that comprise the Arcades Project.

1 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland

(Cambridge, ma, 1999), pp. 537–42.
2 Ibid., p. 83.

131
 Paris, the City in the Mirror:
Declarations of Love by
Poets and Artists to the
‘Capital of the World’ (1929)

Among all the cities there is none that is more intimately

connected to the book than Paris. If Giraudoux is correct
and it is the highest human feeling of freedom to amble
along the course of a river, then here the most complete
idleness – that is to say, the most fortunate freedom –
leads to the book and into the book. For over the bare
quays of the Seine the ivy of learned books has lain
centuries long: Paris is a vast library hall, through which
flows the Seine.
ere is no monument in this city which has not
inspired a masterpiece of poetry. Notre-Dame – we think
of Victor Hugo’s novel. Eiffel Tower – Cocteau’s e
Wedding Party on the Eiffel Tower and, with Giraudoux’s
Prayer on the Eiffel Tower, we are already on the giddy
heights of the latest literature. e Opera: with Leroux’s
famous detective novel e Phantom of the Opera we are
in the basement of this building and of literature at one
and the same time. e Arc de Triomphe encompasses
the earth with Raynal’s e Unknown Warrior. e city
has sketched itself so indissolubly into literature, because
within it itself a spirit, which is related to books, acts. Did
it not, like an experienced novelist, plan well in advance
the most gripping motifs of its construction? ere are
the large military roads which, in the past, were to secure
access to Paris for the troops from the Porte Maillot, the
133
Porte de Vincennes, the Porte de Versailles. And one
morning, overnight, Paris boasted the best roads for
cars among all the cities of Europe. ere is the Eiffel
Tower – a pure, free monument to technology in a
sporty spirit – and one day overnight, a European radio
station. And the incalculably empty squares – are they
not solemn pages, full picture-plates in the volumes of
world history? In red digits the year 1789 glows on the
Place de Grève. Surrounded by the nooks of roofs on
that Place des Vosges, where he met his death: Henri ii.
An indecipherable script with smudgy outlines on the
Place Maubert, formally the entrance to gloomy Paris.
rough the interplay between city and book, one of
these squares wandered into the libraries: on the famous
Didot printings of the last century the signet is the Place
du Panthéon.
If the literary spectrum of the city is extended out
of polished prismatic understanding, the books look
all the more strange the nearer we get to the edges from
the middle. There is an ultraviolet and an ultra-red
knowledge of this city, which both no longer allow
themselves to be coerced into the form of the book:
photo and city map, the most precise knowledge of the
singular and the whole. From these extreme edges of the
field of vision we possess the loveliest specimens. Whoever
has had to battle, on a corner of a street in a strange city
in bad weather, with one of those large paper maps,
which billow like sails at every gust of wind, rip at the
edges and are in no time nothing more than a little
pile of grubby sheets, with which one tortures oneself,
discovers what a city map can be. And what the city is.
For whole quarters divulge their secrets in their street
names. On the great square in front of the Gare St
Lazare one is surrounded by half of France and half
of Europe. Names like Havre, Anjou, Provence, Rouen,
Londres, Amsterdam, Constantinople run through the
134
grey streets like shimmering ribbons through grey silk.
at is the so-called Europe Quarter. And so one can
traverse one by one the streets on the map, indeed one
can cross the city ‘street by street, house by house’ in the
great works in which, around the middle of the nineteenth
century, Lefeuve, Napoleon iii’s court historiographer,
collected all that it was deemed worthy of knowing. e
work betrays in its title a sense of what whoever approaches
this literature should expect; also those who would try
only to work through the hundred pages contained in
the catalogue of the Imperial Library under the keyword
‘Paris’. But that was concluded by 1867. It would be
a mistake to expect to find there just scientific studies,
archival, topographical or historical things. Not the
smallest portion of this mass of books are declarations of
love to the ‘Capital of the World’. And that they mostly
stem from foreigners is nothing new. Almost always the
most passionate beaus of this city come from outside it.
And its chain stretches around the whole earth. ere is
Nguyen Trong Hiêp, who issued his prize poem to the
French capital in Hanoi in 1897. ere is, to name just
the latest one, the Romanian princess Bibesco, whose
charming Catherine-Paris escapes the Galician castles, the
Polish high aristocracy, her spouse, the Count Leopolski,
in order to reclaim the homeland of her choice. In reality
this Leopolski seems to be Prince Adam Czartoryski.
And in Poland the books found few lovers . . . But not
all worshippers have placed as reverence a novel or a
poem at the feet of the city: only recently Mario von
Bucovich gave beautiful and credible expression to his
affection in photography, and Morand confirmed in
a preface to this album his right to his love.
In a thousand eyes, a thousand lenses the city is
mirrored. For not only sky and atmosphere, not only
neon advertising on the evening boulevards, have made
of Paris the ‘Ville Lumière’. – Paris is the city of mirrors:
135
Mario von Bucovich, The Seine, from Paris (1928), a collection of
photographs by Bucovich and Germaine Krull.

the asphalt of its roads is as sleek as a mirror. In front

of all the bistros are glassed-in partitions: women see
themselves here more readily than anywhere else. e
beauty of the Paris woman emerges from these mirrors.
Before a man glimpses her, ten mirrors have tested her
out. An excess of mirrors also surrounds the man, in
particular in the café (to make it brighter inside and to
lend a pleasant amplitude to all the tiny enclosures and
hutches into which Paris bars are divided). Mirrors are
the spiritual element of this city, its insignia, in which
the emblems of all the schools of poets have always
inscribed themselves.
As mirrors return each reflection promptly, only
symmetrically displaced, so too does the keyword
technique of the comedies of Marivaux: mirrors throw
the animated outside, the street, into the interior of a
café, just as a Hugo, a Vigny loved to capture milieus
and place their stories in front of a ‘historic background’.
e mirrors, which hang in the pubs murkily and
scruffily, are the ideogram of Zola’s Naturalism in the
way they mirror each other in interminable rows,
136
a counterpart to the never-ending memory of memory
into which, under his fountain pen, Marcel Proust’s
own life metamorphosed. at most recent collection
of photographs, Paris, ends with an image of the Seine.
It is the vast and ever-watchful mirror of Paris. Day in,
day out, it throws its solid buildings and cloudy dreams
into this river as images. e river accepts this oblation
graciously and, as a sign of its favour, breaks them into
a thousand pieces.

Glossary
Giraudoux Hippolyte Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944) was a French
novelist, essayist, playwright and diplomat. Giraudoux’s Prayer
on the Eiffel Tower was published in Paris in 1923 and was later
included as a novel-within-a-novel in his Juliette aux Pays des
Hommes in 1924.

Victor Hugo’s novel Benjamin is referring to Notre-Dame de Paris

(1831), known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

Cocteau Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) wrote the libretto for a ballet,

The Wedding Party on the Eiffel Tower, performed in 1921.

Leroux Gaston Leroux (1868–1927) published The Phantom of the

Opera in 1911.

Raynal Paul Raynal (1885–1971) was a French playwright. The title

of his play The Unknown Warrior refers to the Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier, which was laid in 1920 beneath the Arc de Triomphe. The
play premiered in 1924 in Paris.

the Porte Maillot, the Porte de Vincennes, the Porte de Versailles

These are three of the city gates, in the northwest, east and south of
the city, built during the extension of Paris in 1860.

Didot a family firm of printers, punch-cutters and publishers,

established in Paris in the eighteenth century.

137
Whoever has had to battle, on a corner of a street The sentiments
in this passage are repeated in the Arcades Project, in Convolute C,
on ‘Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris’:
Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland
(Cambridge, ma, 1999), p. 85.

On the great square in front of the Gare St Lazare A similar

thought appears in the first sketches, from 1927, of what became
the Arcades Project, titled ‘Paris Arcades’. Benjamin, Arcades Project,
p. 831. The metaphor here is not of silk, but of ‘sweet filling
through a torte’. Perhaps the context of a fashion magazine
suggested to Benjamin an image of fabric.

Lefeuve Charles Lefeuve (1818–1882) was known for his

archaeological and historical studies of Paris of the 1850s to the
1870s. One, to which Benjamin refers here, is titled Histoire de Paris
rue par rue, maison par maison (1875).

Nguyen Trong Hiêp Nguyen Trong Hiêp was a Confucian scholar

and mandarin. Benjamin used some lines from a poem of his of
1897, at the start of his ‘Exposé of 1935’ of the Arcades Project: ‘The
waters are blue, the plants pink; the evening is sweet to look on; /
One goes for a walk; the grandes dames go for a walk; behind them
stroll the petites dames.’

Bibesco Marthe, Princess Bibesco (1886–1973) was a Romanian

writer who moved among the European aristocracy as well as
being acquainted with Marcel Proust, Jean Cocteau, Rainer
Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry and others. She wrote Catherine-Paris
in 1927. Benjamin reviewed the German translation of this novel
in 1928; he observes there that Bibesco is strongly influenced
by Giraudoux, a master of nuance and representative of a new
lyricism. The review is reproduced in Walter Benjamin, Selected
Writings, vol. ii, Part 1: 1927–1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings,
Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, ma, 2005),
pp. 141–3.

Prince Adam Czartoryski Benjamin is presumably referring to

Prince Adam Ludwik Czartoryski (1872–1937), an aristocrat and
patron of the arts.

Bucovich Mario von Bucovich (1884–1947) was a photographer of

Austrian descent. He published photographic volumes on Berlin and

138
Paris in 1928. The volume discussed by Benjamin contained 256
gravure reproductions, 23 of them by Germaine Krull.

Morand Paul Morand (1888–1976), an author close to Dada and

Imagism in the years around the First World War, contributed the
introduction to Bucovich’s 1928 volume of photographs of Paris.

In a thousand eyes, a thousand lenses A similar passage appears in

some notes from 1928 or 1929 on loose sheets of handmade paper,
from when Benjamin was planning to write an essay titled ‘Paris
Arcades: A Dialectical Fairyland’; they are reproduced in the Arcades
Project, p. 877.

Marivaux Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688–1763)

was a playwright.

Vigny Alfred Victor de Vigny (1797–1863) was a poet, playwright

and novelist.

Proust Marcel Proust (1871–1922), about whom Benjamin wrote

on several occasions and whose work he translated, made a literature
of memory in his multi-volume In Search of Lost Time, published
from 1913 to 1927.

That most recent collection of photographs, Paris Benjamin is

referring to Bucovich’s 1928 volume.

139
Domingo Viñets, Islote de Verde, Ibiza, 1920s.
 Introduction to ‘The Wall’

This short story comes from a collection of three stories

gathered under the title Tales from Loneliness, written
around 1932–4. These were not published in Benjamin’s
lifetime. The vignette depicted in ‘The Wall’ may be taken
from life. Benjamin spent time on Spanish soil, in Ibiza,
staying from April to July 1932 with friends in the town of
San Antonio, in the shade of a broken windmill, having
arrived on the post boat. He was in exile from a Germany
in which sinister political moves were afoot, but he was also
compelled to find a place where he could live cheaply, for
his sources of income were few. He returned in March
1933 as a refugee, without his possessions, and would not
be able to return again to his home city or country.
The story revolves around a postcard. It evokes themes
of misunderstanding in the linguistic muddling of S. and
Saint; of reality and its reproduction and the adequation
or not of the two; of the uncanny, in which that which is
most familiar appears unknown or distant. It also evokes
the theme of someone lost in a place and time, away from
home, but unable to integrate himself in his new circum-
stance, fearful of how he appears to others – a bungler
who wishes to appear competent. Benjamin spent his time
in Ibiza composing autobiographical vignettes from his
childhood. Here too he wrote of linguistic reinventions
and misunderstandings made by children, and uncanny
141
knowledge, possessed by them too. He wrote too of postcards
of faraway places which, donated by his maternal grand-
mother, had kindled a desire to undertake far-flung journeys.
Engrossed in the postcards’ images, he embarked on dream-
journeys to ‘Tabarz, Brindisi, Madonna di Campiglio’ and
sailed the oceans with the ‘bows of the Westerland slicing
high through the waves’.1 In exile, he thought of postcards
of his childhood, which had opened up a world of sights
to him. Now he was compelled to wander between them, or
at least between the ones in whose vicinity he could afford
to live.
Among his postcard collection were several depicting
sights in Ibiza – a windmill, a Gothic window, the museum,
a town, the mysterious rocky Es Vedrà island – all photo-
graphed by Domingo Viñets, a name close to the one cited
in the short story.

Translation History
is text appeared in English, translated by Esther Leslie,
in Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, edited
by Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and
Erdmut Wizisla (London, 2007).

1 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. ii, Part 2: 1931–1934, ed.

Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith
(Cambridge, ma, 2005), p. 621.

142
Domingo Viñets, Windmills on Ibiza, 1920s. Benjamin had this
among his postcard collection.
 The Wall (c. 1932–4)

I had been living for a few months in a rocky eyrie on

Spanish soil. I often resolved to set out one day into the
environs, for it was bordered by a ring of severe ridges
and dark pinewoods. In between lay hidden villages: most
were named after saints, who might well have settled in
this paradisiacal region. But it was summer; the heat
allowed me to postpone my resolve from day to day
and I even wished to save myself from the cherished
promenade to Windmill Hill, which I could see from my
window. And so I stuck to the usual meanders through
the narrow, shady alleyways, in whose network one was
never able to find the same hub more than once. One
afternoon during my strolling I came across a general
store, where postcards were for sale. Anyway, some were
displayed in the window and among their number was
a photo of a town wall, such as have been preserved in
numerous places in this corner of the world. But I had
never seen one quite like this. The photograph had caught
all of its magic: the wall swung through the landscape
like a voice, like a hymn singing across the centuries of
its duration. I made a promise to myself that I would
not purchase the card before I had seen the wall that
was depicted on it with my own eyes. I told no one of
my resolution and I was all the more able to refrain from
doing so for the card led me with its signature, ‘S. Vinez’.
145
To be sure, I did not know of a St Vinez. But did I know
any more of St Fabiano, a holy Roman, or Symphorio,
after whom other market towns nearby were named?
That my guidebook did not include the name did not
necessarily mean anything. Farmers had occupied the
region and mariners had made their markings on it, and
yet both had different names for the same places. And so
I set about consulting an old map, and when that did not
advance my mission at all, I got hold of a navigational
map. This research soon began to captivate me and it
would have been a blot on my reputation to seek help
or advice from a third party at such an advanced stage in
the matter. I had just spent another hour poring over my
maps when an acquaintance, a local, invited me to take
an evening walk. He wanted to take me to the hill just
outside the town, from where the windmills, which had
long been still, had so often greeted me from above the
tops of the pine trees. Once we had managed to reach
the summit, it began to grow dark, and we paused in
order to await the moon, upon whose first beam we made
our way home again. We stepped out of the little pine
forest. There in the moonlight, nearby and unmistakable,
stood the wall, whose image had accompanied me for
days. And in its custody was the town, to which we
were returning home. I did not say a word, but parted
soon from my friend. – The next afternoon I stumbled
unexpectedly upon my general store. The picture postcard
was hanging still in the window. But above the door I read
on a sign, which I had overlooked before, in red letters,
‘Sebastiano Vinez’. The painter had included a sugarloaf
and some bread.

146
 Introduction to ‘Review of Gisèle
Freund’s La Photographie en France
au dix-neuvième siècle: Essai de
sociologie et d’esthétique’

is review of Freund’s study of photography was written

around November 1937 and published in the Zeitschrift
für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social Research) in the
autumn of 1938.1 Gisèle Freund (1908–2000), originally
from Berlin, was in contact with Benjamin in the years of
their exile in Paris. Both were interested in photography
and chess. Freund began taking photographs in the early
1920s. She studied sociology and art history and, in 1932,
was at the Goethe University Frankfurt sociology depart-
ment, in the orbit of Karl Mannheim and Norbert Elias.
e book reviewed by Benjamin is her doctoral dissertation.
It was published in 1936 by Adrienne Monnier, who intro-
duced her to a number of Paris-based writers and artists.
Some of these she photographed, sometimes, unusually for
the time, in colour. Benjamin’s review draws on a ‘Letter
from Paris’ on painting and photography that he had
written in 1936 for the communist journal Das Wort. He
reported there too on how Freund details the battle between
painting and photography, and how the latter overturned
the former when it accomplished with ease the former’s
ultimate aim of representing realistically the scales of a fish.2
Benjamin wrote on several occasions about the challenges
to the traditional notion of art presented by photography,
or initially, daguerreotypy, and he explored the thoughts
of photography’s critics, including Baudelaire, fearful as
147
they were of mechanization, deskilling, soullessness and
the like, in ‘Small History of Photography’ (1931), among
other studies.

Translation History
There is a translation of this review by Edmund Jephcott
in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. iv: 1938–1940
(Cambridge, ma, 2003).

1 Gisèle Freund, La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle:

Essai de sociologie et d’esthétique (Paris, 1936).
2 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. iii: 1935–1938, ed.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, ma,
1999), pp. 239–40.

148
 Review of Gisèle Freund’s
La Photographie en France au
dix-neuvième siècle: Essai de
sociologie et d’esthétique (1938)

Research into the history of photography began about

eight to ten years ago. People know of a number of works
– for the most part illustrated – on its beginnings and
on the early masters. We have had to wait for this recent
publication to see the object treated in connection with
the history of painting. Gisèle Freund’s study represents
the rise of photography as conditional on the rise of the
bourgeoisie and is successful in making this conditionality
comprehensible in relation to the history of the portrait.
Setting out from the portrait technique that was most
widespread during the ancien régime, the costly ivory
miniature, the author illustrates the various procedures
which around 1780 – that is, 60 years before the invention
of photography – pushed for acceleration and price
reduction and, thereby, a wider diffusion of the demand
for portraits. The description of the physiognotrace
as an intermediary between portrait miniatures and
photographic shots shows, in an exemplary fashion, how
technical conditions can be made socially transparent.
The author then goes on to lay out how technical
development reached a state of social assimilation in
photography, whereby the portrait became affordable
for broad layers of the bourgeoisie. She explains how
the miniaturists were the first among the ranks of
painters to fall victim to photography. Finally, she
149
reports on the theoretical debate between painting and
photography around the middle of the century.
e question as to whether photography was an art
was debated passionately at the time by Lamartine,
Delacroix and Baudelaire. And yet the fundamental
question was not raised: whether, on account of the
invention of photography, the entire character of art
had changed. e author has perceived the decisive thing
well. She observes how high the artistic level was of a
number of early photographers, who set about their work
without artistic pretention and who showed their works
only to the eyes of a small circle of friends. ‘Photography’s
claim to be an art was raised precisely by those who
wanted to make of photography a business’. In other
words, the claim of photography to be an art occurs
simultaneously with its appearance as a commodity. is
concurs with the influence that photography itself as a
procedure of reproduction exerted on art. It isolated it
from the client in order to conduct it to the anonymous
market and its demands.
The method of the book is oriented towards the
materialist dialectic. Discussion of it might promote
its development. Therefore I would like to touch on
an objection, which might determine, in addition, the
scientific location of this research. The author writes:
‘The greater the genius of the artist, the better his work
reflects – indeed due to the power of the originality of his
design – the tendencies of his society of his time’. What
is questionable about this statement is not the attempt to
circumscribe the artistic reach of a work with reference to
the social structure of its time of emergence; questionable is
only the assumption that this structure shows once and for
all time the same aspects. In truth, its aspects change with
the various epochs that steer their gaze to the work. To
define its significance with reference to the social structure
of its time of appearance amounts rather to its capacity to
150
provide access to the epoch of its time of appearance for
those epochs that are most remote and alien to it – that is,
to identify the history of its effects. Such a capability was
exhibited by Dante’s poem for the twelfth century;
Shakespeare’s work provides it for the Elizabethan age.
e clarification of the question raised here is all
the more important as Freund’s formulation threatens
to lead back to a thesis that found its most drastic and
simultaneously most questionable expression in
Plekhanov. ‘The greater a writer is’, according to
Plekhanov’s polemic against Lanson, ‘the more strongly
and clearly the character of his work depends on the
character of the epoch, or, in other words: the less it
allows the presence in the work of those elements that
one might label “personal”.’

Glossary
physiognotrace is instrument was invented in 1783–4 by
Gilles-Louis Chrétien, in order to mechanically trace a sitter’s facial
features, in particular their profile as a silhouette.

Lamartine Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) was a French poet

and politician.

Delacroix Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was a painter of grand

canvases and murals in the Romantic style, with exotic and historical
themes.

Baudelaire Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), a poet, critic and

translator, was vocal in his misgivings about photography.

Plekhanov Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918) was a Russian Marxist.

Benjamin had read a French translation of Plekhanov’s polemic
against Lanson’s History of French Literature: e Nineteenth Century
(1894). is appeared in the journal Commune in December 1934.

Lanson Gustave Lanson (1857–1934) was a French literary critic

and professor.

151
 Acknowledgements

For Iris and Mordecai, so they may know more of what

those curling bits of paper are, now our image worlds
are digitized.

153
 Photo Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks

to the below sources of illustrative material and/or
permission to reproduce it:

Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Walter Benjamin Archiv:

pp. 6 (photo Selle und Kuntze, Potsdam und Spandau),
79; from Aus der Frühzeit der Photographie, 1840–70,
Helmut Th. Bossert and Heinrich Guttmann (Societäts-
Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1930): pp. 32, 46, 60, 62,
63, 64, 74, 86, 94; collection of the author: pp. 140, 143;
from The Court of Flora / Les Fleurs animées: The Engraved
Illustrations of J. J. Grandville (George Braziller, New
York, 1981): p. 38; from Heinrich Schwartz, David
Octavius Hill, Der Meister der Photographie (Insel-Verlag,
Leipzig, 1931): pp. 61, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71; from Arthur
Freiherrn Von Hubl, Das deutsche Lichtbild: Jahresschau
1931 (Verlag Robert & Bruno Schultz, Berlin, 1930):
pp. 122, 125; Nachlass Günther Anders, Sig, öla 237/04,
Literaturarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek,
Wien (lit): p. 77; from Mario Bucovich, Paris (Editions
Henri Jonquières et Cie, Editeurs, Paris, 1928): p. 136;
© Die Photographische Sammlung/sk Stiftung Kultur –
August Sander Archiv, Cologne; dacs, London, 2015:
pp. 87, 89; from Schünemanns Monatshefte, Bremen,
August 1929: p. 11; from Variétés: Revue mensuelle
155
illustrée de l’esprit contemporain, 15 January 1930: p. 14;
from Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser,
Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. ii, Part i
(Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1977), courtesy
Estate Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen:
pp. 73, 78.

156