Everyone has lost the ability to tell the difference between the image and the world but also between the real and the artificial. Walter Benjamin was working with an older opposition, one had derived from György Lukács, between first nature (our helplessness before the uncontrollable fury of thunderstorms) and second nature (our helplessness before the uncontrollable fury of the global economy). Walter Benjamin was highly influenced by Surrealism however like Lukács’ theory of reification, asserted our view of reality is clouded by a faulty rationality. People do not prefer the artificial to the real because we’re simpletons duped by the irresistible lure of the image but, we have reshaped our reality so totally and so perfectly that we no longer recognise it as our own. Walter Benjamin had admired the work of the early 20th-century photographer Eugène Atget. Who was also a Surrealist as well. Atget wasn’t naive however he saw himself as a tradesman who was making a living photographing ordinary street scenes in Paris. Most of the time his photographs had no one in them, a motif that had fascinated Benjamin and the Surrealists. Before Atget, the human face and body were the primary subject of photography and he banished people from photography. Looking at the photographs of a deserted Paris were like the scenes of a crime, Benjamin noticed. His work provided no ground for contemplation. Everyday objects of ordinary experience were revealed as a strange and unsettling scene. Photographs acquire the first traces of political significance, that all was not as it appeared at first glance. To control meaning, the captions became necessary for the first time. Walter Benjamin put it in “Little History of Photography” (1931), Atget “looked for what was unremarked, a forgotten, cast adrift. And thus such pictures . . . work against the exotic, romantically sonorous names of the cities; they suck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship.”
Later on in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) Walter Benjamin made a similar but more sweeping claim about the cinema. It’s a different nature presents itself to the movie camera than to the naked eye. Instead of being something, people enter into the unconsciously or vaguely, in film we enter nature analytically. While the painter loves caresses the surfaces of nature, the cameraman adds a piece of dynamite at it and then the reassembles the pieces:
“Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-clung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.”
With a movie camera it can be mounted on a speeding locomotive, dropped down a sewer, or secreted in a valise and carried surreptitiously around a city. The camera will reveal aspects of reality that register in our senses but never quite get processed consciously. Film changed how people view the least significant minutiae of reality just as surely as Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life changed how people look at incidental phenomena like slips of the tongue. Films serve as an optical unconscious. Walter Benjamin asserts the film camera “introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.” Walter Benjamin’s lifetime photographic and cinematographic technologies that have improved dramatically, thus widening the spectrum of visual experience that can be caught on film. With the idea of improving technology can expand our sense of perception and the make of the unconscious visible continues today.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
One-Way Street. 2021. One-Way Street: The Optical Unconscious. [ONLINE] Available at: https://onewaystreet.typepad.com/one_way_street/2009/10/the-optical-unconscious.html. [Accessed 28 January 2021].
Kathryn Salsbury photography 