Walter Benjamins “Short History of Photography ”
These first to be photographed enter the viewing space unfamed or, rather, uncaptioned. Newspapers, then, were still items of luxury, which one seldom bought but rather looked at in cafes. The photographic procedure had not yet become a tool of theirs; the fewest possible people even saw their names in print. The human face had a silence about it in which its glance rested. In short, all possibilities of this portrait art rested upon the fact that the connection between actuality and photo had not yet been entered upon. Many images by Hill were taken at the Edinburgh cemetery of Greyfriars. Nothing is more representative of this early period: it is as if the models were at home in this cemetery. And the cemetery, according to one picture that Hill made, is itself like an interior, a delineated, constricted space where gravestones lean on dividing walls and rise out of the grass floor—gravestones hollowed out like fireplaces showing in their hearts the strokes of letters instead of tongues of flame.
But this place could never have achieved its great effect had not its selection been for technical reasons. The lower sensitivity to light of the early plates made necessary a long period of exposure in the open. This, on the other hand, made it desirable to station the model as well as possible in a place where nothing stood in the way of quiet exposure. “The synthesis of expression which was achieved through the long immobility of the model,” Orlik says of the early photographs, “is the chief reason besides their simplicity why these photographs, like well drawn or painted likenesses, exercise a more penetrating, longer-lasting effect on the observer than photographs taken more recently.” The procedure itself caused the models to live, not out of the instant, but into it; during the long exposure they grew, as it were, into the image.
Photography, however, with its time lapses, enlargements, etc. makes such knowledge possible. Through these methods one first learns of this optical unconscious, just as one learns of the drives of the unconscious through psychoanalysis. Concern with structure, cell forms, the improvement of medicine through these techniques: the camera is ultimately more closely related to these than to the moody landscape or the soulful portrait. At the same time, however, photography opens up in this material the physiognomic aspects of the world of images, which reside in the smallest details, clear and yet hidden enough to have found shelter in daydreams. Now, however, large and formulatable as they have grown, they are able to establish the difference between technology and magic as a thoroughly historical variable. Thus Blossfeldt,2 with his astonishing photographs of plants, brought out the forms of ancient columns in horsetails, the bishop’s staff in a bunch of flowers, totem poles in chestnut and acorn sprouts enlarged ten times, gothic tracery in teasel.
Daguerre (1787–1851) and the Invention of Photography | Essay
Photography plays a substantial role in people’s life by allowing them to understand their past and remember stories, places, and feelings. They offer glimpses into past lives, historical events, and forgotten places and serve as an actual copy of reality compared to recorded texts and visual materials. Indeed, many textbooks and academic histories rely on images to illustrate the content of the past that they narrate. However, a very little number of people spend time exploring the photographs since they pay extra attention to the written content as the source of information.
But he made these photographs himself. Modestly conceived as aids for his own use, they are what gave his name historical significance, while as a painter he is forgotten. To be sure, there are a few studies which reveal more about the new medium than that series of heads: not the portraits but nameless images of people. There had been such faces in painting for a long time. If they remained in the possession of the family, then people inquired after the identity of the people represented time and time again. But after two or three generations such interest subsided: the pictures, inasmuch as they survived, did so only as testimony to the art of the painter.
The images serve as a support of the written history other than a source of history themselves. Hence, it is crucial to understand whether historians can use photography to write history. Historians can rely on photographs to write history since images represent factual and unedited content, guide a person’s understanding of the surrounding conditions, and offer new data.
Everything in these early pictures was set up to last; not only the incomparable grouping of the people—whose disappearance was certainly one of the most precise symptoms of what happened to society in the second half of the century—even the folds that a garment takes in these images persists longer. One needs only look at Schelling’s coat; it enters almost unnoticed into immortality; the forms which it assumes on its wearer are not unworthy of the folds in his face. In short, everything speaks to the fact that Bernhard van Brentano suspected: “that a photographer of 1850 was on the highest level of his instrument”—for the first and for a long time for the last time.
The History of Photography: Capturing Moments in Time
With that step were established conditions for a continually accelerated pace of development which for a long time prevented any look backward. And so the historical or perhaps philosophical questions which accompany the rise and fall of photography for decades went unconsidered. If those questions are beginning to enter our consciousness today it is for a specific reason. The most recent literature seizes on the striking fact that the flowering of photography, the achievement of Hill and Cameron, of Hugo and Nadar—occurs in its first decade.^^a^^ That is the decade which preceded its industrialization. Not to say, of course, that in this early period the peddlers and charlatans had not gotten hold of the new technology and turned it to profit; they did that on a massive scale. But that was closer to the methods of the marketplace, where even today photography is at home, than to those of industry.
[PDF] A short history of photography* Walter Benjamin The fog ..
Historians can write history through images since it illustrates everyday life’s incidental, random, and fragmented elements without losing essential details. Specifically, photography offers facts and crucial historical insights, serving as other textual sources and materials (Masterson et al., 2018). Raw, historically produced images can give historians a new approach to witnessing historical components that would not have been documented in written texts. The nature of cinematography can enhance the writing of past and present history since it connects the past and hinders discontinuity.
A short history of photography*
For instance, the Agencia Forografica Mexicana photojournalism had more than 500,000 negatives and prints of Mexican cultural, social, economic, and political history, which are currently digitized. Historian John Mraz utilized these photographs to write graphic history about the 20th-century primary and most radical revolutionary movement (Coleman et al., 2018). In sum, historians can use photography to write history since the artistic works give them new visibility about historical concepts which would have been left out in other historical artifacts.
A Brief History of Photography and Truth
Benjamin’s essay sparkles with intriguing and provocative aperçus. His admiration for and understanding of Atget, Sander, and Blossfeldt is far ahead of its time and rooted in close observation of the photographs themselves. The remarks on photo captions near the end of this essay are both true and ironic: a few years after Benjamin was writing, picture magazines like Life appeared and proved the power of captions to direct meaning. Benjamin’s uneasiness with aggressively esthetic notions of photography, his understanding of the social and political meanings of the medium, and his explication of the concept of “aura,” powerfully define basic issues for photographic criticism. In the future, Benjamin may become as inescapable a presence for anyone trying to understand photography as the photographic genius to whom he was most sensitive: Atget.