Little History of Photography by Walter Benjamin

• “Little History of Photography” throughout there are lots of different photographs. 
• Starts to talk about the beginnings of photography and the start of printing.  
• But also the first camera obscura.
• Talks about so many different photographers throughout history. 
• Niepce and Dagueerre have both simultaneously succeeded in doing this and they were aided by the patenting difficulties encountered by the inventors, assumed the control of the enterprise and made it public, with compensation to the pioneers.  
• Massively helped the development of photography.  
• Rapid ongoing development which long precluded any backward glance. 
• Philosophical questions suggested by the rise and fall of photography have gone unheeled for decades. 
• Decade which preceded its industrialization. 
• Gained new techniques. 
• industry made its first real inroads with the visiting-card picture, who first manufacturer, significantly, became a millionaire. 
• It would not be surprising if the photographic methods which today are harking back to the preindustrial heyday of photography had an underground connection with the crisis of capitalist industry. 
• Doesn’t make it any easier to use the charm of old photographs, available in fine recent publications, for real insights into their nature. 
• Theoretical mastery of the subject have so far been entirely rudimentary. 
• The discussion never got away from the ludicrous stereotype which a chauvinistic rag, the Leipziger Stadtanzeiger, felt it had to offer in timely opposition to this black art from France. 
• “To try to capture fleeting mirror images,” it said, “is not just an impossible undertaking, as has been established after thorough German investigation; the very wish to do such a thing is blasphemous. Man is made in the image of God, and God’s image cannot be captured by any machine of human devising. The utmost the artist may venture, borne on the wings of divine inspiration, is to reproduce man’s God-given features without the help of any machine, in the moment of highest dedication, at the higher bidding of his genius.”
• It was this fetishistic and fundamentally anti technological concept of art.
• The theoreticians of photography sought to grapple for almost a hundred years, naturally without the smallest success. 
• They undertook nothing less than to legitimize the photographer before the very tribunal he was in the process of overturning. 
• The physicist Arago, speaks on behalf of Daguerre’s invention, gave in the Chamber of Deputies on July 3, 1839. 
• Speech is the connections it makes with all aspects of human activity. 
• Panorama it sketches is broad enough not only to make the dubious project of authenticating photography in terms of painting. 
• It offers an insight into the real scope of the invention. 
• “When inventors of a new instrument,” says Arago, “apply be a trifle compared with the succession of subsequent discoveries of which the instrument was the origin.” 
• Arago’s speech spans the field of new technologies. 
• Daguerre’s photographs were iodized silver plates exposed in the camera obscura.
• In the proper light, a pale gray image could be discerned. 
• English portrait painter David Octavius Hill based his fresco of the first general synod of the Church of Scotland in 1843.  
• Is a long series of portrait photograph’s. 
• He took these photographs. 
• Number of his studies lead even deeper into the technology.  
• Series of portraits-anonymous images, not posed subjects.
•  Figures had long been the subject of painting. 
• Paintings of portraits have faded after 2 or 3 generations. 
• Hill’s Newhaven fishwife, her eyes cast down in such indolent, seductive modesty.  
• Remains something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer’s art. 
• Fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, 
• The woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in “art”. 
• Picture of Dauthendey the photographer, from the time of his engagement to that woman whom he found one day. 
• Lying in the bedroom of his Moscow house with her veins slashed. 
• Her husband is seen to be near her. 
• Her gaze passes him by.  
• Immerse yourself in such a picture long enough. 
• You will realize to what extent opposites touch. 
• Precise technology can give its products a magical value. 
• No matter how artful the photographer and no matter how carefully posed his subject. 
• The beholder feels an irresistible urge to search a picture for the tiny spark of contingency.
• Which reality has seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. 
• Another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye.  
• “Other” above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a spaced informed by the unconscious. 
• Photography first discovered, the existence of this optical unconscious. 
• We discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. 
• Shows the details of structure, cellular tissue, with which technology and medicine are normally concerned-all this is, in its origins, more native to the camera than the atmospheric landscape or the soulful portrait. 
• Photography reveals in this material physiognomic aspects. 
• Meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place. 
• Enlarged and capable of formulation, makes the difference between technology and the magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable. 
• Blossfeldt takes photographs of plants. 
• Reveals the forms of ancient columns in horse willow, a bishop’s crosier in the ostrich fern, totem poles in tenfold enlargements of chestnut and maple shoots, and gothic tracery in the fuller’s thistle. 
• Hill’s subjects, were probably not far from the truth when they described “the phenomenon of photography” as still being “a great and mysterious experience”. 
• The consciousness of “standing before a device which in the briefest time could capture the visible environment in a picture that seemed as real and alive as nature itself.” 
• Hill’s camera that it kept a discreet distance. 
• His subjects are no less reserved; they maintain a certain shyness before the camera.
• The watchword of a later photographer from the heyday of the art, “Don’t look at the camera,” could be derived from their attitude. 
• Dauthendey talks about daguerreotypes and said “We didn’t trust ourselves at first” and “to look long at the first pictures he developed. We were abashed by the distinctness of these human images, and believed that the little tiny faces in the picture could see us, so powerfully was everyone affected by the unaccustomed clarity and the unaccustomed fidelity to nature of the first daguerreotypes.”
• First people to be reproduced entered the visual space of photography with their innocence intact. 
• Newspapers were still a luxury item.    
• Photography hadn’t yet become a journalistic tool. 
• Ordinary people had yet to see their names in print. 
• Portraiture of this period owes its effect to the absence of contact between contemporary relevance and photography. 
• Hill’s portraits were made in the Edinburgh Greyfriars cemetery. 
• Nothing is more characteristic of this early period.
• His subjects were at home there. 
• In one of Hill’s pictures, looks like an interior, a separate closed-off space where the gravestones propped against gable walls rise up from the grass, hollowed out like chimneypieces, with inscriptions inside instead of flames. 
• Setting could never have been so effective if it hadn’t been chosen on technical grounds. 
• Low light-sensitivity of the early plates made prolonged exposure outdoors a necessity. 
• Made it desirable to take the subject to some out of the way spot where there was no obstacle to quiet concentration. 
• “The synthetic character of the expression which was dictated by the length of time the subject had to remain still,” say Orlik.  
• Early photography, “is the main reason these photographs, apart from their simplicity, resemble well-drawn or well-painted pictures and produce a more vivid and lasting impression on the beholder than more recent photographs.”
• Procedures itself caused the subject to focus his life in the moment rather than hurrying on past it. 
• During the considerable period of the exposure, the subject grew into the picture, in the sharpest contrast with appearances in a snapshot which is appropriate to that changed environment.  
• Kracauer had noted, the split second of the exposure determines “whether a sportsman becomes so famous that photographers start talcing his picture for the illustrated papers.”
•   Early picture was built to last. 
• Not only the incomparable groups in which people came together and whose disappearance was surely one of the most precise symptoms of what was happening in society in the second half of the century. 
• Very creases in people’s clothes have an air of permanence. 
• Bernard von Brentano was right in his view that “a photographer of 1850 was on par with his instrument”. 
• Appreciating the full impact made by the daguerreotype in the age of its discovery, people would need to bear in mind that plain air painting was then opening up entirely new perspectives for the most advanced painters. 
•  Conscious that in this very area photography had to take the baton from painting. 
• Arago, in his historical review of the early attempts of Giovanni Battista Delia Porta commented “as regards the effect produced by the imperfect transparency of our atmosphere (which has been loosely termed ‘atmospheric degradation’), not even experienced painters expect the camera obscura”.
• Copying of images appearing in it “to help them to render it accurately.” 
• Daguerre succeeded in fixing the images of the camera obscura. 
• Real victim of photography was portrait miniature. 
• In the 1840 most of the innumerable miniaturists had already become professional  photographer’s. 
• The experience of their original livelihood stood them in good stead.  
• Not their artistic background so much as their training as craftsmen that we have to thank for the high level of their photographic achievement. 
• Businessmen invaded professional photography from every side. 
• The retouched negative, which was the bad painter’s revenge on photography, became ubiquitous, a sharp decline in taste set in. 
• Time that photography albums came into vogue. 
•  The accessories that are in the portraits are still reminiscent of the period of time.  
• The long exposure time, subjects had to be given support so that they wouldn’t move. 
•   Most capable started resisting this nonsense as early as the 1860s. 
• English trade journal of the time put it, “in painting the pillar has some plausibility, but the way it is used in photography is absurd, since it usually stands on a carpet. But anyone can see the pillars of marble or stone are not erected on a foundation of carpeting.”
• Period of those studios would have draperies and palm trees, their tapestries and easels which occupied so ambiguous a place between execution and representation. 
• Early portrait of Kafka bears a pathetic witness. 
• The technical equivalent is obvious. 
• Consists in the absolute continuum from brightest light to darkest shadow. 
• We see in operation the law that new advances are prefigured in older techniques for the earlier art of portrait painting and before its disappearance, had produced the strange flower of the mezzotint. 
• Mezzotint process was a technique of reproduction. 
• Later it combined with the new photographic reproduction. 
• Light struggles out of the darkness in the work of a Hill is reminiscent of mezzotint. 
• Orlik talks about the “comprehensive illumination” brought about by the long exposure times and this “gives these early photographs their greatness.”
• Delaroche noted the “unprecedented and exquisite” general impression, “in which nothing disturbs the tranquillity of the composition.”
•  The technical determinedness of the auratic appearance. 
• Group photos in particular still preserve an air of animated conviviality for a brief time on the plate and before being ruined by the print. 
• Sometimes captured with delicacy and depth by the now old-fashioned oval frame. 
•  It would be a misreading of these incunabula of photography to make too much of their “artistic perfection” or their “taste”. 
• Made in rooms where every client was confronted in person by the photographer, with a technician of the latest school. 
• The photographer was confronted, in the person of every client.  
• No means the mere product of a primitive camera. 
• Early period subjects and technique were as exactly congruent.
• They become incongruent in the period of decline that immediately followed. 
•  Optics made instruments available that wholly overcame darkness and recorded appearances.   
• 1880, photographers made it their business to simulate the aura. 
• This had been banished from the picture with the suppression of darkness through faster lenses. 
• It was being banished from reality by the deepening degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie. 
• Their task to simulate this aura is by using all the arts of retouching and especially the so-called gum print. 
• Especially in Jugendstil. 
• Penumbral tone, interrupted by artificial highlights, came into vogue. 
• Pose was more clearly in evidence, whose rigidity betrayed the impotence of that generation in the face of technical progress. 
• What is again decisive for photography is the photographer’s attitude to his techniques. 
• Camille Recht has found an apt metaphor: “the violinist,” he says, “must first produce the note, must seek it out, find it in an instant; the pianist strikes the key and the note rings out. The painter and the photographer both have an instrument at their disposal. Drawing and colouring, for the painter, correspond to the violinist’s production of sound; the photographer, like the pianist, has the advantage of a mechanical device that is subject to restrictive laws, while the violinist is under no such restraint. No Paderewski will ever reap the frame, ever cast the almost fabulous spell, that Paganini did.” 
• Continue the metaphor, a Busoni of photography, and that is Atget. 
• Both were virtuosos, however at the same time precursors. 
• Combination of unparalleled absorption in their work.
• Was even a facial resemblance. 
• Atget sold his pictures for a trifle to photographic enthusiasts scarcely less eccentric than himself. 
• He left behind over 4,000 pictures. 
• Berenice Abbott had gathered these together and a selection has just appeared and published by Camille Recht. 
• Contemporary journals “knew nothing of the man, who for the most plan hawked his photographs around the studios and sold them for next to nothing, often for the price of one of those picture postcards which, around 1900, showed such pretty town views, bathed in midnight blue, complete with touched-up moon. He reached the Pole of utmost mastery; but with the bitter modesty of a great craftsman who always lives in the shadows, he neglected to plant his flag there. Thierfore many are able to flatter themselves that they have discovered the Pole, even though Atget was there before them.”
• Atget’s uses surrealist photography. 
• He was the first to disinfect the stifling atmosphere that is generated by conventional portrait photography. 
• He initiates the emancipation of object from aura, which is the most signal achievement of the latest school photography. 
• Avant-garde periodicals like Bifur or Variete publish pictures that are captioned “Westminster”, “Lille,” but that show only details. 
• Nothing but a literary refinement of motifs that Atget discovered. 
• He looked for what was unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift. 
• Pictures work against the exotic, romantically sonorous names of the cities.  
• The pictures sucked the aura out of reality. 
• What is aura?
• Strange weave of space and time.
• The unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be. 
• Brings things closer to us. 
• Need to possess the object in close-up in the form of a picture, or rather a copy, becomes more imperative. 
• The difference between the copy is an illustrated papers and newsreels keep in readiness, and the original picture is unmistakable. 
• Uniqueness and duration are as intimately intertwined in the latter as are transience and reproducibility in the former. 

• Peeling away of the object’s shell, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose sense for the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness by means of its reproduction. 

• Atget almost always passed by the “great sights and so-called landmarks.” 
• Empty is the Porte d’Arceuil by the fortifications. 
• These pictures are not lonely, merely without mood. 

• Surrealist photography sets the scene for a salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings. 
• Gives free play to the politically educated eye, under whose gaze all intimacies are sacrificed to the illumination of detail. 
• New way of seeing stands to gain least in an area where there has been the greatest self-indulgence and they are commercial, conventional portrait photography.
• Without people is for photography the most impossible of renunciations. 
• Taught by the Russian films that milieu and landscape, too, reveal themselves most readily to those photographers who succeed in capturing their anonymous physiognomy.
• Wear presenting them at face value. 
• Depends very much on the subject. 
• Generation that wasn’t obsessed with going down to posterity in photographs.
• Shyly drawing back into their private space in the face of such proceedings. 
•  The way Schopenhauer withdrew into the depths of his chair in the Frankfurt picture, taken about 1850. 
• Generation didn’t pass on its virtues. 
• Russian feature film was the first opportunity in decades to put before the camera. 
• People who had no use for their photographs. 
• Human faces appeared on film with new and immeasurable significance.
• No longer a portrait. 
• August Sander has compiled a series of faces. 
• The tremendous physiognomic gallery mounted by an Eisenstein or a Pudovkin, and he has gone it from a scientific viewpoint. 
• “His complete work comprises seven groups which correspond to the existing social order, and is to be published in some forty-five folios containing sixty reproductions, which offer inexhaustible material for study. Twelve photograph’s each.”
• Sample volume containing sixty reproductions, which offer inexhaustible materials for study. 
• “Sander starts off with the peasant, the earthbound man, takes the observer through every social stratum and every walk of life up to the highest representatives of civilization, and then goes back down all the way to the idiot.” 
• Photographer didn’t approach this enormous undertaking as a scholar. 
• With the advice of ethnographers and sociologists, but, as the publisher says, “from direct observation.” 
• Very impartial, indeed a bold sort of observation, but delicate too, very much in the spirit of Goethe’s remark: “there is a delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory.”
• For an observer like Doblin to have hit on precisely the scientific aspects of this work, commenting: “just as there is comparative anatomy, which helps us to understand the nature and history of organs, so this photographer is doing comparative photography, adopting a scientific standpoint superior to that of the photographer of detail.” 
• Would be a pity if economic considerations should prevent the continuing publication of this extraordinary body of work. 
• Sanders could overnight assume unlooked for topicality. 
• Sudden shifts of power like are now overdue in our society.  
• Can make the ability to read facial types a matter of vital importance. 
• His work is more than a picture book.
• It’s a training manual. 
• “In our age there is no work of art that is looked at so closely as a photograph of oneself, one’s closet relatives and friends, one’s sweetheart,” wrote Lichtwark back in 1907.
• Thereby moving the inquiry out of the realm of aesthetic distinctions into that of social functions. 
• Significant that the debate has raged most fiercely around the aesthetics of photography as art. 
• Whereas the far less questionable social fact of art as photography was given scarcely a glance. 
• The impact of the photographic reproduction of artworks is of important for the function of art.  
• Artistry of a photography that regards all experience as fair game for the camera. 
• Amateur who returns home with great piles of artistic shots is in fact no more appealing a figure. 
• More illustrated magazines. 
• Emphasis changes completely if they turn from photography as art to art as photography. 
• People will notice how much easier it is to get hold of a painting, a sculpture, and especially architecture, in a photograph than in reality. 
• Tempting to blame this squarely on the decline of artistic appreciation, on a failure of contemporary sensibility. 
• The understanding of great works was transformed at about the same time the techniques of reproduction were being developed. 
• Works can no longer be regarded as the products of individuals. 
• Become a collective creation.
• A corpus so vast it can be assimilated only through miniaturization. 
• Mechanical reproduction is a technique of diminution that helps people to achieve the control over works of art. 
• The unresolved tension between the two introduced by the photography of works of art. 
• Photographers determine the current face of this technology. 
• Photographers started out as painters. 
• Turned their back on painting after attempts to bring its expressive resources into modern life. 
• Photography has taken the baton from painting. 
• Moholy-Nagy said: “the creative potential of the new is for the most part slowly revealed through old forms, old instruments and areas of design which in their essence have already been superseded by the new, but which under pressure from the new as it takes shape are driven to a euphoric efflorescence.  Thus, for example, futurist (structural) painting brought forth die clearly defined problematic of the simultaneity of motion, the representation of the instant, which was later to destroy it- and this at a time when film was already known but far from being understood … Similarly, some of the painters (neoclassicists and verists) today using representational-object methods can be regarded-with caution-as forerunners of a new representational optical form which will soon be making use only of mechanical, technical methods”. 
• Tristan Tzara, 1922: “When everything that called itself art was stricken with palsy, the photographer switched on his thousand-candle-power lamp and gradually the light-sensitive paper absorbed the darkness of a few everyday objects. He had discovered what could be done by a pure and sensitive flash of light- a light that was more important than all the constellations arranged for the eye’s pleasure.”
• Photographers wanted to some extent protected by their background against the greatest danger facing photography: the touch of the commercial artist. 
• Photography takes itself out of context. 
• Photography serving the connections illustrated by Sander, Blossfeldt, or Germaine Krull, when it frees itself from physiognomic, political, and scientific interest, it becomes creative. 
• Lens now looks for interesting juxtapositions. 
• Photography turns into a sort of arty journalism. 
• “The spirit that overcomes mechanics translates exact findings into parables of life.”
• The crisis of the present social order, and the more rigidly its individual components are locked together in their death struggle, the more the creative in its deepest essence a variant becomes a fetish, whose lineaments live only in the fitful illumination of changing fashion. 
• Creative in photography is its capitulation to fashion. 
• Unmasking the posture of a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance. but 
• Can’t grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists, even when this photography’s most dream-laden subjects are a forerunner more of its salability than of any knowledge it might produce. 
• Photographic creativity is the advertisement or association.
• Logical counterpart is the act of unmasking or construction. 
• Brecht says:” the situation is complicated by the fact that less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG tells us next to nothing about these institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations-the factory, say – means that they are no longer explicit, so something must in fact be built up, something artificial, posed.”
• Credit the Surrealists with having trained the pioneers of such photographic construction. 
• Creative and constructive photography is typified by Russian film. 
• Russian directors were possible only in a country where photography sets out not to charm or persuade, but to experiment and instruct. 
• Still some meaning in the grandiloquent salute offered to photography in 1855 by that uncouth painter of ideas Antoine Wiertz. 
• ‘Before another century is out, this machine will be the brush, the palette, the colours, the craft, the experience, the patience, the dexterity, the sureness of touch, the atmosphere, the luster, the exemplar, the perfection, the very essence of painting… Let no one suppose that daguerreotype photography will be the death of art … When the daguerreotype, that infant prodigy, has grown to its full stature, when all its an and strength have been revealed, then will Genius seize it by the scruff of the neck and shout:”come with me -you are mine now! We shall work together!”’ 
• Baudelaire announced the new technology to his readers and two years later, in his Salon of 1857. 
• Can be read today only with a subtle shift of emphasis. 
• Violent reaction to the encroachments of artistic photography. 
• “In these sorry days, a new industry has arisen that has done not a little to strengthen the asinine belief … that art is and can be nothing other than the accurate reflection of nature… A vengeful god has hearkened to the voice of this multitude. Daguerre is his messiah.”
• “If photography is permitted to supplement some of art’s functions, they will forthwith be usurped and corrupted by it, thanks to photography’s natural alliance with the mob. It must therefore revert to its proper duty, which is to serve as the handmaiden of science and the arts.”
• Wiertz and Baudelaire failed to grasp and the lessons inherent in the authenticity of the photograph.
• Can’t be forever circumvented by a commentary whose cliches merely establish verbal associations in the viewer. 
• Camera is getting smaller. 
• Readier captures fleeting and secret images whose shock effect paralyzes the associative mechanisms in the beholder. 
• The photography of the literarization of the conditions of life. 
• All photographic construction must remain arrested in the approximate. 
• Not an accident that Atget’s photographs have been likened to those of a crime scene. 
• Isn’t it the task of the photographer to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures? 
• “The illiteracy of the future,” someone has said “will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography.”
• Shouldn’t a photographer who can’t read their own pictures be no less accounted an illiterate?
• Won’t inscription become the most important part of the photograph? 
• The questions in which the interval of ninety years that separate us from the age of the daguerreotype discharges its historical tension. 
• Is in the illumination of these sparks that the first photographs emerge, beautiful and unapproachable, from the darkness of our grandfathers’ day.  

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Benjamin, Walter (1931) “Little History of Photography”, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2, 1931–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), 507–530, 510.