Walter Benjamin - A Short History of Photography review
In this review I will be discussing the following issues:
1. The way the document is written
2. A different way of “seeing” the photograph when compared to painting
3. Art as Photography instead of Photography as Art
The way that A Short History of Photography (ASHOP) is written does become a barrier to it being understood. For instance, the paragraphs are too long, sometimes over a page in length, and they cover multiple subjects instead of just one, such as the first paragraph. This starts with comparing the invention of photography with printing, then jumps to the legal difficulties which leads to the invention being made public to cover its costs. Then it moves into claiming the first decade of its invention was before its industrialisation and then contradicts himself in the very next sentence talks about the first decade of photography being “already full of market vendors and charlatans who had mastered the new technique for the sake of profit.” Unfortunately, this style continues throughout the article. Virtually every paragraph jumps from subject to subject without resolving the previous issue and gives the impression of being jumbled up.
However, the impression of incoherence gives rise to the notion that Benjamin wanted to write more about the theory of photography rather than its history. Indeed, it is even tempting to give the ASHOP a quick edit and re-arrange everything into those two topics, which could possibly make the points Benjamin raises more clearer and accessible. As an example, Benjamin mentions about the “the phenomenon of photography still to be a great mysterious experience” and then returns to this point 10 pages later when he discusses “the procedure itself taught the models to live inside rather than outside the moment.” Because of this gap of discussing the subject the reader has moved from that subject to another and then needs to recap what was said before to understand what is being currently asserted.
Even with this being the case, ASHOP still retains some value and shows the genesis of some ideas that Benjamin would develop further later in other articles, mainly within The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (WAAMR). In ASHOP Benjamin mentions about the “Aura” of the photograph, an idea more fully fleshed out in WAAMR, with the Aura being defined as “a peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be.” This is similar to when Benjamin writes in WAAMR “even with the most perfect reproduction, one thing stands out: the here and now of the work of art – its unique existence in the place where it is at the moment.” Both of these quotes point heavily towards a connection between the work of art and phenomenology, a philosophical approach to how reality is interpreted and appreciated.
Another point worth mentioning with ASHOP is the sentence “the accents change completely, if one turns from photography as art to art as photography.” Having this change in emphasis, of art incorporating photography instead of photography becoming art, the emphasis is on the definition of art. This definition was challenged and widened during the modernist period of the late 19th century and early 20th century, for instance a Duchamp’s urinal being presented as a modern sculpture instead of its original functional. This is different to photography becoming art, which is photography trying to imitate art – especially painting – to legitimise its claim to be an artistic medium.
The interesting point here is that pictorialism tries to be photography becoming art and produces (in my opinion) cliché and uninteresting photographs. It is the type of aesthetic that people discover in camera clubs or in high street photographers, a style of photography that promotes style above content. However, if the photographer concentrated more on the tenets of photography, then images can be produced with more depth and meaning than previously thought possible.
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