On

Photography
Walter Benjamin
Edited and translated
by Esther Leslie

reaktion books
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
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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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Printed and bound in Great Britain

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isbn 978 1 78023 525 7

 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. They 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. The 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. The 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. This 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. ‘The 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.’ The 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. The true victim of photography though
was not landscape painting, but the portrait miniature.
Things 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.
This 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. They 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. The 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.’ The 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.

The 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. There 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’.
These 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. That 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. They 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. ‘The 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. The 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. The 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. The 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.’
The 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’. This observation was certainly
extremely unprejudiced, if bold, yet also at the same
time tender – in the sense, that is, of Goethe’s phrase:
‘There 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
 ‘There 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. They turned their back on painting
after attempts to bring this means of expression closer to
a vivid and explicit connection with contemporary life.
The 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: ‘The 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. Thus, 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. This 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’. The
lens’s concern turns to overviews; the photographic
hack arises. ‘The spirit, having conquered mechanics,
reframes its precise outputs as analogies of life.’ The
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.
‘The 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. The 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 Th[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.

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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.

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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).

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