Short history of photography benjamin pdf A Short History of Photography 1931. Walter benjamin a short history of photography book Just as 70 years later Utrillo. “What is aura? A peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be. To follow, while reclining on a summer’s noon, the outline of a mountain range on the horizon or a branch, which casts its shadow on the observer until the moment or the hour partakes of their presence—this is to breathe in the aura of these mountains, of this branch. Today, people have as passionate an inclination to bring things close to themselves or even more to the masses, as to overcome uniqueness in every situation by reproducing it. Every day the need grows more urgent to possess an object in the closest proximity, through a picture or, better, a reproduction. And the reproduction, as the illustrated newspaper and weekly readily prove, distinguishes itself unmistakably from the picture. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely intertwined in the latter as transitoriness and reproducibility in the former.” —. Program sanitasi rumah sakit. (1931) (1892-1940) This essay comes at a period where Benjamin’s thought processes seem to be shifting. Earlier in his life, he was influenced by the and Jewish mysticism (evident in One-Way Street from 1928). The History Of PhotographyHere, we can detect a shift to a more historical materialist and Marxist tone (evident in from 1936), particularly due to his relationship with. Photography developed rapidly, disseminated widely – “the time was ripe for the invention” – but this also means that, in 1931, Benjamin finds that “attempts at theoretical mastery of the subject have so far been entirely rudimentary” – and so he undertakes his project. In conjunction with industrialization, photography harkens a huge shift, and photographers struggle with the way art is traditionally conceptualized – as a reflection on man in the image of God, created with dedication under divine inspiration: “Here we have the philistine notion of ‘art’ in all its overweening obtuseness, a stranger to all technical considerations, which feels that its end is nigh with the alarming appearance of the new technology. Nevertheless, it was this fetishistic and fundamentally antitechnological concept of art with which the theoreticians of photography sought to grapple for almost a hundred years, naturally without the smallest success. For they undertook nothing less than to legitimize the photographer before the very tribunal he was in the process of overturning” – iodized silver plates, one of a kind, 25 gold francs, kept in a case Photography displays “something new and strange” – we search for “the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject [].
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