Walter benjamin short history of photography pdf. Walter Benjamin. Brief history of photography. Walter Benjamin A Brief History of Photography

ORDERING

In order to make an online purchase at the ROSPHOTO bookstore,Select the item, enter the quantity and click the "Add to Cart" button. Go to the "Cart" (upper right corner or at the bottom of the page). The page will display a list of the products you have selected, the quantity, and the total cost.

Choose the method of receiving the order: self-pickup from the museum and exhibition center (free of charge) or delivery by the courier service SDEK (300 rubles within the Ring Road, free of charge when ordering from 2500 rubles). Shipping costs will be added to the total amount of the order. Click the "Checkout" button.

At the "Checkout" stage, enter your data, check the details of the order and check the box in front of the line "I have read the Terms and Conditions and agree to them." Click the "Confirm Order" button. You will be redirected to the page of the PSCB Online payment service.

PAYMENT ORDER

The online store works only on 100% advance payment for the order.

Payment for orders on the site is made using the PSCB Online service, which allows you to make paymentsVISA, MasterCard, Maestro and NPS MIR bank cards.

To pay for an order with a bank card, you must enter data on the secure page of the processing center of JSC Bank PSCB. After entering the bank card details, click on the "Pay" button. For additional identification of the cardholder, 3D Secure technology can be used. If you use 3D Secure, you will be redirected to the page of the issuing bank to enter an additional one-time password.

Bank cards issued by banks of the CIS countries are accepted for payment. All payments are processed by the processing center of JSC Bank PSCB.

PAYMENT SECURITY

PSCB Online payment service processes bank card data in accordance with the requirements of the PCI DSS 3.0 international security standard. Information is transmitted using SSL encryption technology.

The ROSPHOTO online store does not collect, process or store bank card data. Confidentiality of information is guaranteed by JSC Bank PSCB.

DELIVERY

Local pickup (St. Petersburg)

You can pick up your order in the building of the State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSPHOTO at the address: St. Petersburg, Bolshaya Morskaya st., 35; Monday, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday from 11:00 to 19:00, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 12:00 to 21:00. The bookstore is located on the second floor of the Front Building. Upon receipt of the goods, you must state the order number.

Delivery of goods by courier (in St. Petersburg)

Delivery is carried out on weekdays from 10:00 to 18:00. The cost of delivery in St. Petersburg within the Ring Road - 300 rubles. When ordering from 2500 rubles, delivery within the Ring Road is free.

As soon as the order is assembled and ready to ship, a bookstore employee will contact you to confirm the delivery time. Orders are shipped within 2 business days of being placed.

The goods are released personally into the hands of the person indicated when placing the order as the recipient (it is necessary to present an identity document). Upon receipt of the order, it is necessary to check the complete set and presentation. Returns and exchanges of products are made only in the event of a manufacturing defect.

Terms of use

By joining this Agreement and leaving your data on http://www.site, (hereinafter referred to as the Site), by filling in the fields of the online application (registration) the User:

Confirms that all the data indicated by him belongs personally to him;
Confirms and acknowledges that he has carefully read the Agreement and the conditions for the processing of his personal data indicated by him in the fieldsonline applications (registrations), the text of the agreement and the conditions for processing personal data are clear to him;
Gives consent to the processing by the Site of the personal data provided as part of the information in order to conclude this Agreement between it and the Site, as well as its subsequent execution; , and also consents to the transfer of his personal data to third parties
Expresses consent to the terms of personal data processing without reservations and restrictions.

The user gives his consent to the processing of his personal data, namely the performance of actions provided for in paragraph 3 of part 1 of Art. 3 of the Federal Law of July 27, 2006 N 152-FZ "On Personal Data", and confirms that, by giving such consent, he acts freely, of his own will and in his own interest.

The User's consent to the processing of personal data is specific, informed and conscious.

This consent of the User is recognized as executed in a simple written form, for the processing of the following personal data: last name, first name, patronymic; the year of birth; place of stay (city, region); phone numbers; e-mail addresses (E-mail).

The User grants the Site the right to carry out the following actions (operations) with personal data: collection and accumulation; storage within the periods of storage of reports established by regulatory documents, but not less than three years, from the date of termination of the use of services by the User; clarification (update, change); usage; destruction; depersonalization; transfer at the request of the court, including to third parties, in compliance with measures that ensure the protection of personal data from unauthorized access.

This consent is valid indefinitely from the moment the data is provided and can be revoked by you by submitting an application to the site administration indicating the data specified in Art. 14 of the Law "On Personal Data".

Withdrawal of consent to the processing of personal data can be carried out by sending the User an appropriate order in a simple written form to the e-mail address (E-mail) admin@site.

The Site is not responsible for the use (both legal and illegal) by third parties of the Information posted by the User on the Site, including its reproduction and distribution, carried out by all possible means.

The site has the right to make changes to this Agreement. When making changes in the current version, the date of the last update is indicated. The new version of the Agreement comes into force from the moment of its placement, unless otherwise provided by the new version of the Agreement.

The current version is always located on the page at

The law of the Russian Federation shall apply to this Agreement and the relationship between the user and the Site arising in connection with the application of the Agreement.

The refund is made on the basis of the Client's application on the terms of the User Agreement (clause 7.7).

Completed application must be sent to the email address: buh@site

If the Client, for any reason, did not receive Tickets on Order at the museum box office within the established time limits (clause 7.2.5 of the User Agreement), this event is a sufficient reason for ROSPHOTO to terminate its obligations under the User Agreement unilaterally and consider its obligations to the Client completed in full.

Current page: 1 (total book has 8 pages) [available reading excerpt: 1 pages]

Walter Benjamin
Brief history of photography

This publication was published as part of the joint publishing program of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture and Ad Marginem Press LLC.

The publishing house expresses its gratitude to Pavel Vladyevich Khoroshilov for the selection of photographic materials for this publication

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic version of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet and corporate networks, for private and public use, without the written permission of the copyright owner.

Brief history of photography

For a real insight into its essence. Attempts to theoretically comprehend the problem are completely rudimentary. And no matter how long the debates on this issue have been in the last century, they, in fact, have not departed from the comical scheme with which at one time the chauvinist leaflet, Leipziger Anzeiger, intended to stop the spread of the French contagion. “The desire to preserve fleeting reflections,” the newspaper wrote, “is not only impossible, as it turned out after a thorough German investigation, but the mere desire to do so is blasphemy. Man is created in the likeness of God, and the image of God cannot be imprinted by any human machine. Is it possible that a divine artist, inspired by heaven, can dare to reproduce divine-human features without any machine help in moments of the highest inspiration and obeying the highest order of his genius. This is a manifestation of the philistine concept of art in all its ponderous clumsiness, a concept to which any participation of technology is alien and which feels the approach of its end with the defiant appearance of new technology. Nevertheless, it is on this fetishistic, initially anti-technical concept of art that photography theorists have been trying to build a discussion for almost a century, of course - without the slightest result. After all, they tried to get the recognition of the photographer from the very authority that he canceled.

A completely different spirit emanates from the speech with which the physicist Arago delivered on July 3, 1839 in the Chamber of Deputies as a defender of Daguerre's invention. Remarkable in this speech is how she finds the connection of the invention with all aspects of human activity. The panorama unfolded in it is wide enough so that the dubious blessing of photography with painting - without which it could not have done here - turned out to be insignificant, but the foresight of the real significance of the discovery was fully revealed. “When the inventors of a new instrument,” says Arago, “use it to study nature, it always turns out that what they expect is only a small part in comparison with the series of subsequent discoveries that this instrument initiated.” This speech broadly covers the application of new technology from astrophysics to philology: next to the perspective of star photography is the idea of creating a corpus of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Daguerre's photographs were iodized silver plates exposed in a camera obscura; they had to be turned until at a certain angle it was not possible to see a pale gray picture. They were unique; on average, one plate cost 25 gold francs in 1839. Often they were kept like a jewel in luxurious cases. However, in the hands of some artists, they turned into a technical aid. Just as seventy years later Utrillo 2 would paint his charming images of houses in the Parisian suburbs not from life, but from postcards, so the recognized English portrait painter David Octavius Hill used a whole series of portrait photographs for his wall image of the first general synod of the Scottish church in 1843. However, he took these pictures himself. And it is these simple technical aids, not intended for prying eyes, that have secured his name a place in history, while his pictorial work is consigned to oblivion. And yet, deeper than these series of photographic portraits, some documentary shots are introduced into the new technique: these are images of nameless people, not portraits. Such images have long existed in pictorial form. If the paintings were kept in the house, then from time to time someone else asked about who was depicted in them. Two, three generations later, this interest disappeared: pictures, if they retain their meaning, retain it only as evidence of the art of the one who painted them. However, with the advent of photography, something new and extraordinary arises: in the photograph of the fisherwoman from New Haven, looking down with such slow and seductive bashfulness, there is still something more than what could be exhausted by the art of the photographer Hill, something that does not stop, stubbornly inquiring about the name of the one who lived then and continues to be present here and will never agree to completely dissolve in "art".

I ask: what was the eye of these brilliance,
how these curls curled, shading the face,
how they kissed the lips, a surge of voluptuousness,
like smoke without a flame, sublime 3 .

With his amazing photographs of plants, he was able to detect the forms of ancient columns in hollow stems, a bishop's baton in a fern, totem poles in a tenfold enlarged sprout of chestnut and maple, and an openwork Gothic ornament in the leaves of a pile. 5 . Therefore, it is quite possible to say that the models of photographers like Hill were not so far from the truth when the "phenomenon of photography" seemed to them to be still "a great mysterious adventure"; even if for them it was nothing more than the consciousness that you "stand in front of an apparatus that in the shortest possible time is able to create an image of the visible world, an image that seems as alive and authentic as nature itself." Hill's camera was said to exhibit tactful restraint. His models, in turn, are no less restrained; they retain some timidity in front of the camera, and the principle of one of the later heyday photographers, "Never look at the camera," might be inferred from their behaviour. However, this did not mean that same “look at you” among animals, people and small children, into which the buyer is mixed in such an unholy way and to which there is no better opposition than the manner of description in which the old man Dautendey tells about the first daguerreotypes: “At first ... people did not dare, - he says, - to look at the first pictures he made for a long time. They were shy in front of the clarity of the depicted and were ready to believe that the tiny faces in the pictures themselves were able to look at the viewer, such was the stunning effect of the unusual clarity and vitality of the first daguerreotypes on everyone.

David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson. At the bird cage. 1843–1847 Photogravure. Collection of S. Burasovsky.

These first reproduced human beings entered the photographic field unstained, or rather unsigned. Newspapers were still a great luxury, they were rarely bought and most often looked through in cafes, photography had not yet become part of the newspaper business, very few could still read their name on newspaper pages. The human face was framed by the silence in which the gaze rested. In short, all the possibilities of this art of portraiture rested on the fact that photography had not yet come into contact with actuality. Many of Hill's photographs were taken in Edinburgh's Franciscan Cemetery - this is extremely characteristic of the beginning of a photograph, perhaps even more remarkable is that the models feel at home there. This cemetery really looks like an interior in one of Hill's photographs, like a secluded, fenced-off space where, leaning against firewalls, tombstones grow out of the grass, hollow, like fireplaces, opening lines of inscriptions in their womb instead of flames. However, this place would never have had such an impact if its choice had not been technically justified. The low light sensitivity of the early records required long exposures for outdoor shooting. For the same reason, it seemed preferable to place the people being filmed as far away as possible, in a place where nothing would interfere with their concentration. “The synthesis of expression, forcedly arising from the fact that the model must be motionless for a long time,” Orlik says of early photography, “is the main reason that these images, for all their simplicity, like good drawings and pictorial portraits, have on the viewer a deeper and longer exposure than later photographs." The technique itself encouraged models to live not from moment to moment, but to get used to every moment; during the long exposure of these shots, the models seemed to grow into the image and thus entered into the most decisive contrast with the phenomena in the snapshot, corresponding to the changed environment in which, as Krakauer aptly noted, the same fraction of a second that photography continues depends on , "whether the athlete becomes so famous that photographers will shoot him on assignment from illustrated weeklies." Everything in these early shots was long time oriented; not only are the incomparable groups that gathered to take pictures - and their disappearance was one of the surest symptoms of what happened in society in the second half of the century - even the folds in which clothes gather in these images last longer. Just look at Schelling's coat 6 ; he is most definitely ready to go to eternity with his master, his folds are no less significant than the wrinkles on the face of a philosopher. In short, everything confirms the correctness of Bernard von Brentano, who suggested "that in 1850 the photographer was at the same height as his instrument" - for the first and for a long time for the last time.

However, in order to fully experience the powerful impact of the daguerreotype in the era of its discovery, it should be borne in mind that plein air painting began at that time to open completely new perspectives to the most advanced of artists. Realizing that it is precisely in this respect that photography should take over from painting, Arago says with all certainty in a historical essay on the early experiments of Giovanni Battista Porta: “As for the effect arising from the incomplete transparency of our atmosphere (and which is designated by the expression "aerial perspective"), then even the masters of painting do not hope that the camera obscura" - we are talking about copying the images obtained in it - "could help in reproducing this effect." At the moment when Daguerre managed to capture the images obtained in the camera obscura, the artist was removed from this post by a technician. Yet the true victim of photography was not landscape painting, but portrait miniature. Events moved so rapidly that already around 1840 most of the innumerable portrait miniaturists became photographers, at first along with painting, and soon exclusively. The experience of their original profession turned out to be useful, and not artistic, but precisely craft skills ensured a high level of their photographic work. Only gradually did this generation of the transitional period disappear from the scene; it seems as if these early photographers—Nadar, Stelzner, Pearson, Bayar—were blessed by the biblical patriarchs: they were all close to ninety or a hundred years old. But in the end, business people poured into the class of professional photographers from all sides, and when then the retouching of negatives became widespread - the revenge of bad photographic artists - a rapid decline in taste began. It was the time when photo albums began to fill up. Most often they were located in the most uncomfortable places of the apartment, on a console or a small table in the living room: leather folios with disgusting metal edging and thick sheets with gold trim, on which were placed figures in stupid draperies and tight robes - Uncle Alex and Aunt Rickhen, Trudkhen, when she was still little, daddy in the first year and, finally, to top the shame, ourselves: in the form of a salon Tyrolean singing Tyrolean songs and waving his hat against the background of painted mountain peaks, or in the form of a brave sailor, legs, as befits a sea wolf , vraskoryachku, leaning against the polished handrail. The accessories of such portraits - pedestals, balustrades and oval tables - are still reminiscent of the time when, due to long exposure, it was necessary to create fulcrum for models so that they could remain motionless for a long time. If at first there were enough devices for fixing the head and knees, then soon “other devices followed, similar to those used in the famous picturesque images and therefore seemed “artistic”. First of all, it was a column and a curtain. More capable craftsmen were forced to speak out against this disgrace already in the 1860s. Here is what they wrote then in one special English edition: “If the column looks plausible in picturesque paintings, then the way it is used in photography is absurd, because it is usually installed on a carpet. Meanwhile, it is clear to everyone that a carpet cannot serve as a foundation for a marble or stone column. It was then that these photo studios appeared with draperies and palm trees, tapestries and easels, about which it is difficult to say whether they were for torment, or for exaltation; whether it was a torture chamber or a throne room, an early photograph of Kafka is a stunning testimony to their activities. It depicts a boy of about six, dressed in a narrow, like a restraint suit with many braids, is depicted in an environment reminiscent of a winter garden. Palm branches stick out in the depths. And, as if to make these plush tropics even more stuffy and heavy, in his left hand he holds an incredibly large hat with a wide brim, in the Spanish style. Of course, the boy would have disappeared in this entourage if the excessively sad eyes had not overcome the situation imposed on him.

Nadar (Gaspard Felix Tournachon). Portrait of George Sand. 1877 [Here and further:] Private collection. Moscow.

With its boundless sadness, this picture contrasts with early photographs in which people have not yet received such an expression of loss and detachment as this boy. They were surrounded by an aura, an environment that gave their gaze, passing through it, fullness and confidence. Again, the technical equivalent of this feature is obvious; it lies in the absolute continuity of the transition from the brightest light to the darkest shadow. By the way, the law of anticipation of new achievements by the forces of old technology is also manifested in this case, namely, that the old portraiture on the eve of its fall gave rise to a unique flourishing of gum arabic printing. It was a reproduction technique, which was combined with photographic reproduction only later. As in the graphic sheets produced by this print, in photographs by a photographer like Hill, the light breaks through the darkness with an effort: Orlik speaks of the "generalizing light composition" caused by long exposure, which gives "these early photographs their inherent grandeur." And among the contemporaries of the discovery, Delaroche already noted the previously “unattainable, magnificent, in no way disturbing the tranquility of the masses” general impression. It's about the technical basis that generates the aura. In particular, some group shots capture a fleeting unity that briefly appears on the record before it is destroyed by the "original shot". It is this atmosphere that is elegantly and symbolically outlined by the already old-fashioned oval shape of the photo mat. Therefore, a complete misunderstanding of these photographic incunabula is indicated by the desire to emphasize in them "artistic perfection" or "taste". These photographs were taken in rooms in which each client, in the person of the photographer, first of all met a new generation of technicians, and each photographer, in the person of the client, met a representative of an ascending social class with its own aura, which could be seen even in the folds of a frock coat and neckerchief. After all, this aura was not a direct product of a primitive chamber. The fact is that in this early period the object and the technique of its reproduction so closely coincided with each other, while in the subsequent period of decadence they diverged. Soon the development of optics made it possible to overcome the shadow and create mirror images. However, photographers in the period after 1880 saw their task mainly in simulating the aura that disappeared from the photographs along with the displacement of shadows by high-aperture lenses, just as the aura disappeared from life with the degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie - to simulate with all the tricks of retouching, in features of the so-called gum arabic seal. So it became fashionable, especially in the Art Nouveau style, a twilight tone interrupted by artificial reflections; however, in spite of the twilight illumination, a pose became more and more clear, the immobility of which betrays the impotence of this generation in the face of technological progress.

Prepared by Camille Recht. The contemporary press “did not know anything about this man who went around with his photographs from art workshops, giving them away almost for free, for a few coins, often at the price of those postcards that at the beginning of the century depicted such pretty scenes of a city at night with a painted moon. He reached the pole of the highest skill; but out of the stubborn modesty of a great master who always keeps a low profile, he did not want to plant his flag there. So some people can consider themselves the discoverer of the pole, which Atget has already visited. Indeed, Atget's Parisian photographs are an anticipation of surrealist photography, the vanguard of the one and only really powerful column that surrealism could move forward. He was the first to disinfect the suffocating atmosphere that the photographic portrait of the era of decline spread around him. He purified this atmosphere, he purified it: he began to free the object from the aura, which was the undoubted merit of the earliest photographic school. When the avant-garde magazines Bifur or Variété publish under the captions Westminster, Lille, Antwerp or Wroclaw, only snapshots of details: either a piece of a balustrade, or a bare treetop with a street lamp shining through its branches, or a firewall or a hook with a lifebuoy hanging on it, on which the name of the city is written - then this is nothing more than a literary play on the motives discovered by Atget. He was interested in the forgotten and abandoned, and therefore these pictures also turn against the exotic, pompous, romantic sound of city names; they suck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship.

Eugene Atget. Paris, Franc-Bourgeois street. 1899

What exactly is an aura? A strange interweaving of place and time: a unique feeling of distance, no matter how close the object in question is. Glancing during a summer afternoon rest along the line of a mountain range on the horizon or a branch in the shade of which the vacationer is located, while a moment or an hour is involved in their appearance, means to breathe in the aura of these mountains, this branch. The desire to “bring things closer” to oneself, more precisely, to the masses, is the same passionate desire of modern people as overcoming the unique in any situation through its reproduction. From day to day, the need to own the object in close proximity in its image, rather in reproduction, is more and more irresistibly manifested. And a reproduction, as an illustrated weekly or newsreel shows, undoubtedly differs from the image. In the image, uniqueness and duration are as closely connected as transience and repetition in reproduction. The cleansing of an object from its shell, the destruction of the aura are a characteristic sign of that perception in which the feeling of the same type with respect to everything in this world has grown so much that it achieves the same type even from unique phenomena with the help of reproduction. And he almost always passed by “majestic views and so-called symbols”, but did not miss a long row of shoe lasts, did not pass by Parisian courtyards, where handcarts stand in rows from evening until morning, past tables not cleaned after eating or accumulated in huge numbers dirty dishes, past a brothel on who knows what street at number 5, as evidenced by the huge five, which flaunts in four different places on the facade. Oddly enough, there are almost no people in these pictures. Empty are the gates of the Porte d'Arcay by the bastions, empty are the splendid staircases, empty are the courtyards, empty are the cafe terraces, empty, as usual, is the Place du Tertre. They are not deserted, but devoid of mood; the city in these pictures is cleared, like an apartment that has not yet moved in new tenants. These are the results that have allowed surreal photography to prepare a healing alienation between man and his environment. It leaves the field for the politically trained eye, which omits all intimate connections for the sake of accurate reflection of details.

8 collected a series of portraits that are in no way inferior to the powerful physiognomic gallery opened by such masters as Eisenstein or Pudovkin, and he did it in a scientific aspect. "The collection he created consists of seven groups, corresponding to the existing social order, and should be published in 45 folders of 12 photographs each." Until now, only a book with selected 60 photographs has been published, providing inexhaustible material for observations. "Zander begins with a peasant, a man tied to the earth, leads the viewer through all strata and professional groups, rising to representatives of a higher civilization and descending to an idiot." The author embarked on this colossal task not as a scientist, not as a person following the advice of anthropologists or sociologists, but, as the preface says, "based on direct observation." These observations were undoubtedly extremely unprejudiced, moreover, bold, at the same time, however, and delicate, namely in the spirit of what Goethe said: “There is a delicate empiricism that most intimately identifies itself with the subject and thereby becomes a real theory.” Accordingly, it is quite legitimate that an observer like Döblin 9 drew attention precisely to the scientific aspects of this work and notes: “Like comparative anatomy, thanks to which it is only possible to know the nature and history of organs, this photographer took up comparative photography and thereby took a scientific position that raises him above those who are engaged in private types of photography ". It would be extremely unfortunate if economic conditions prevented further publication of this corpus. The publishing house, in addition to this general one, could point out one more more specific motive for the publication. Works like Sander's can instantly take on unexpected relevance. Changes in power structures, which have become familiar to us, make the development and sharpening of physiognomic abilities a vital necessity. Represents a person of the right or the left - he must get used to being recognized from this point of view. In turn, he himself will recognize others in this way. Sander's creation is not just an illustrated edition: it is an educational atlas.

Attention! This is an introductory section of the book.

If you liked the beginning of the book, then the full version can be purchased from our partner - the distributor of legal content LLC "LitRes".

Three classic essays ("A Brief History of Photography", "Paris - the Capital of the Nineteenth Century", "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility"), united by the theme of the changes taking place in art, when it goes from unique to mass and replicable. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) proposes to look at this process not from a conservative position, but, on the contrary, to see in its origins new forms of the social existence of art, a new anthropology of the “mass viewer” and a new communicative function of art in the space of the bourgeois world.

* * *

The following excerpt from the book A Brief History of Photography (Walter Benjamin, 2013) provided by our book partner - the company LitRes.

This publication was published as part of the joint publishing program of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture and Ad Marginem Press LLC.

The publishing house expresses its gratitude to Pavel Vladyevich Khoroshilov for the selection of photographic materials for this publication

Brief history of photography

The fog that shrouds the origins of photography is still not as thick as that which obscures the beginning of printing; it is more clearly manifested in this case that at the moment when the hour of opening struck, several people felt it at once; independently of each other, they strove for one goal: to preserve the images obtained in the camera obscura, known at least since the time of Leonardo. When, after about five years of searching, Niepce and Daguerre managed to do this at the same time, the state, taking advantage of the patent difficulties faced by the inventors, intervened in this matter and made it, by paying them compensation, into the rank of public activity. Thus, the prerequisites for a long accelerated development were created, which made it impossible to look back. So it turned out that the historical or, if you like, philosophical questions raised by the rise and fall of photography remained unaddressed for decades. And if today they are beginning to be realized, then there is a clear reason for this. The latest literature points to the fact that the flowering of photography is associated with the activities of Hill and Cameron, Hugo and Nadar. 1 - that is, falls on its first decade. But this is also the decade that preceded its industrialization. This does not mean that in this early period market traders and charlatans did not try to use the new technique as a source of profit; it was done, and even often. But it was much closer to the fair arts - at the fair, photography has been at home to this day - than to the industry. The industry's advance in this area began with the use of photography to make business cards; it is characteristic that the person who first used photography for these purposes became a millionaire. It would not be surprising if the peculiarities of photographic practice, today for the first time drawing our attention to this pre-industrial flourishing of photography, were implicitly connected with the crisis of capitalist industry. This, however, does not make it any easier to use the beauty of the pictures contained in the recent wonderful publications on old photography to really penetrate into its essence. Attempts to theoretically comprehend the problem are completely rudimentary. And no matter how long the debates on this issue have been in the last century, they, in fact, have not departed from the comical scheme with which at one time the chauvinist leaflet, Leipziger Anzeiger, intended to stop the spread of the French contagion. “The desire to preserve fleeting reflections,” the newspaper wrote, “is not only impossible, as it turned out after a thorough German investigation, but the mere desire to do so is blasphemy. Man is created in the likeness of God, and the image of God cannot be imprinted by any human machine. Is it possible that a divine artist, inspired by heaven, can dare to reproduce divine-human features without any machine help in moments of the highest inspiration and obeying the highest order of his genius. This is a manifestation of the philistine concept of art in all its ponderous clumsiness, a concept to which any participation of technology is alien and which feels the approach of its end with the defiant appearance of new technology. Nevertheless, it is on this fetishistic, initially anti-technical concept of art that photography theorists have been trying to build a discussion for almost a century, of course - without the slightest result. After all, they tried to get the recognition of the photographer from the very authority that he canceled.

I ask: what was the eye of these brilliance,

how these curls curled, shading the face,

how they kissed the lips, a surge of voluptuousness,

like smoke without a flame, sublime 3 .

Or if you look at the photograph of the photographer Doutendey, the father of the poet 4 , depicting him at the time when he was the fiancé of a woman whom he found years later, after the birth of his sixth child, in their Moscow apartment with his veins cut. In the photo they are standing side by side, he seems to be holding her, but her gaze is directed past him, staring into the fatal distance. If one is immersed in the contemplation of such a picture long enough, it becomes clear how closely opposites come into contact here too: the most precise technique is able to give her works a magical power that a painted picture will never have for us again. Despite all the art of the photographer and the obedience of his model, the viewer feels an irrepressible attraction, forcing him to look for the smallest spark of chance in such an image, here and now, with which reality seemed to burn through the character of the image, to find that inconspicuous place in which, in the so-being of that long-gone minute the future continues to lurk even now, and so eloquently that we, looking back, can find it. For the nature facing the camera is not the nature facing the eye; the difference primarily lies in the fact that the place of the space mastered by the human consciousness is occupied by the space mastered by the unconscious. For example, it is quite common that we imagine, even in the most crude form, how people walk, but we certainly do not know anything about what their position is in that split second when they start walking. Photography with its auxiliary means: fast shutter speed, magnification - opens this position for him. He learns about this optical-unconscious only with its help, just as he learns about the unconscious in the sphere of his impulses with the help of psychoanalysis. Organized structures, cells and cells, with which technology and medicine usually deal, are all initially much closer to the camera than a moody landscape or a soulful portrait. At the same time, photography reveals physiognomic aspects in this material, pictorial worlds that live in the smallest corners, understandably and secluded to the extent that they can take refuge in visions, but now, having become large and clearly formulated, they turn out to be able to reveal the difference between technology and magic. as historical variables. So, for example, Blosfeldt, with his amazing photographs of plants, was able to detect the forms of ancient columns in hollow stems, a bishop's baton in a fern, totem poles in a tenfold enlarged sprout of chestnut and maple, and an openwork Gothic ornament in the leaves of a pile. 5 . Therefore, it is quite possible to say that the models of photographers like Hill were not so far from the truth when the "phenomenon of photography" seemed to them to be still "a great mysterious adventure"; even if for them it was nothing more than the consciousness that you "stand in front of an apparatus that in the shortest possible time is able to create an image of the visible world, an image that seems as alive and authentic as nature itself." Hill's camera was said to exhibit tactful restraint. His models, in turn, are no less restrained; they retain some timidity in front of the camera, and the principle of one of the later heyday photographers, "Never look at the camera," might be inferred from their behaviour. However, this did not mean that same “look at you” among animals, people and small children, into which the buyer is mixed in such an unholy way and to which there is no better opposition than the manner of description in which the old man Dautendey tells about the first daguerreotypes: “At first ... people did not dare, - he says, - to look at the first pictures he made for a long time. They were shy in front of the clarity of the depicted and were ready to believe that the tiny faces in the pictures themselves were able to look at the viewer, such was the stunning effect of the unusual clarity and vitality of the first daguerreotypes on everyone.

David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson. At the bird cage. 1843–1847 Photogravure. Collection of S. Burasovsky.

Nadar (Gaspard Felix Tournachon). Portrait of George Sand. 1877 [Here and further:] Private collection. Moscow.

And yet decisive in photography is the attitude of the photographer to his technique. Camille Recht put it in an elegant comparison. “A violinist,” he says, “must first create a sound, instantly catch a note; the pianist presses the key - the note sounds. Both the artist and the photographer have their own tools. The drawing and coloring of the artist is akin to the production of sound by a violinist, the photographer has in common with the pianist that his actions are largely - incomparable to the violinist's conditions - predetermined by technique that imposes its own limitations. Not a single virtuoso pianist, be it Paderevsky himself, will achieve that glory, achieve that almost fabulous charm of the public, which Paganini achieved and sought. However, photography, if we continue this comparison, has its own Busoni, this is Atget 7 . Both were virtuosos, and at the same time forerunners. They are united by an unparalleled ability to dissolve in their craft, combined with the greatest precision. Even in their features there is something related. Atget was an actor who was fed up with his craft, who took off his make-up and then proceeded to do the same with reality, showing her unpainted face. He lived in Paris poor and unknown, selling his photographs for nothing to amateurs who were hardly less eccentric than himself, and not so long ago he said goodbye to life, leaving behind a gigantic opus of more than four thousand photographs. Berenice Abbott of New York has collected these cards, selected works have just appeared in an extraordinarily beautiful book prepared by Camille Recht. The contemporary press “did not know anything about this man who went around with his photographs from art workshops, giving them away almost for free, for a few coins, often at the price of those postcards that at the beginning of the century depicted such pretty scenes of a city at night with a painted moon. He reached the pole of the highest skill; but out of the stubborn modesty of a great master who always keeps a low profile, he did not want to plant his flag there. So some people can consider themselves the discoverer of the pole, which Atget has already visited. Indeed, Atget's Parisian photographs are an anticipation of surrealist photography, the vanguard of the one and only really powerful column that surrealism could move forward. He was the first to disinfect the suffocating atmosphere that the photographic portrait of the era of decline spread around him. He purified this atmosphere, he purified it: he began to free the object from the aura, which was the undoubted merit of the earliest photographic school. When the avant-garde magazines Bifur or Variété publish under the captions Westminster, Lille, Antwerp or Wroclaw, only snapshots of details: either a piece of a balustrade, or a bare treetop with a street lamp shining through its branches, or a firewall or a hook with a lifebuoy hanging on it, on which the name of the city is written - then this is nothing more than a literary play on the motives discovered by Atget. He was interested in the forgotten and abandoned, and therefore these pictures also turn against the exotic, pompous, romantic sound of city names; they suck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship.

Eugene Atget. Paris, Franc-Bourgeois street. 1899

It is clear that this new vision could least of all develop where photography had previously felt most confident: in paid, representative portraiture. On the other hand, the rejection of a person turns out to be almost impossible for photography. Whoever did not know this yet was taught this by the best Russian films, which showed that both the environment surrounding a person and the landscape are revealed only to those photographers who can comprehend them in a nameless reflection that arises in a human face. However, the possibility of this, again, largely depends on who is being filmed. A generation that was not obsessed with the idea of being photographed for posterity, when faced with such a need, rather tended to shrink somewhat timidly into its familiar, settled environment - like Schopenhauer in his Frankfurt photograph of 1850 deep into the armchair - which is why, however, captured along with him on the record and this world: this generation did not inherit its virtues. Russian fiction cinema for the first time in several decades has made it possible to appear in front of the camera to people who do not need their photographs. And immediately the human face acquired a new, enormous significance in the shooting. But it was no longer a portrait. What was it? The outstanding merit of one German photographer was that he gave the answer to this question. August Zander 8 collected a series of portraits that are in no way inferior to the powerful physiognomic gallery opened by such masters as Eisenstein or Pudovkin, and he did it in a scientific aspect. "The collection he created consists of seven groups, corresponding to the existing social order, and should be published in 45 folders of 12 photographs each." Until now, only a book with selected 60 photographs has been published, providing inexhaustible material for observations. "Zander begins with a peasant, a man tied to the earth, leads the viewer through all strata and professional groups, rising to representatives of a higher civilization and descending to an idiot." The author embarked on this colossal task not as a scientist, not as a person following the advice of anthropologists or sociologists, but, as the preface says, "based on direct observation." These observations were undoubtedly extremely unprejudiced, moreover, bold, at the same time, however, and delicate, namely in the spirit of what Goethe said: “There is a delicate empiricism that most intimately identifies itself with the subject and thereby becomes a real theory.” Accordingly, it is quite legitimate that an observer like Döblin 9 drew attention precisely to the scientific aspects of this work and notes: “Like comparative anatomy, thanks to which it is only possible to know the nature and history of organs, this photographer took up comparative photography and thereby took a scientific position that raises him above those who are engaged in private types of photography ". It would be extremely unfortunate if economic conditions prevented further publication of this corpus. The publishing house, in addition to this general one, could point out one more more specific motive for the publication. Works like Sander's can instantly take on unexpected relevance. Changes in power structures, which have become familiar to us, make the development and sharpening of physiognomic abilities a vital necessity. Represents a person of the right or the left - he must get used to being recognized from this point of view. In turn, he himself will recognize others in this way. Sander's creation is not just an illustrated edition: it is an educational atlas.

August Zander. Confectioner. 1928

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Portrait of V. Mayakovsky. 1924

“In our era, there is no work of art that would be contemplated so carefully as one’s own photograph, photographs of close relatives and friends, beloved,” wrote Lichtwark already in 1907, thereby transferring research from the field of aesthetic features to the field of social functions. Only from this position can it move forward.

It is indicative in this respect that the discussion was least advanced in cases where the conversation was about the aesthetics of “photography as art”, while, for example, the much less controversial social fact “art as photography” is not even worthy of a cursory examination. And yet the impact of photographic reproductions of works of art on the function of art is much more important than the more or less artistic composition of a photograph "capturing" a moment in life. Indeed, an amateur photographer returning home with many artistic shots taken is no more welcome than a hunter returning from an ambush with so much game that would only make sense if he was carrying it for sale. It seems that in fact there will soon be more illustrated publications than shops selling game and poultry. It's about how they "click", shooting everything in a row. However, the emphasis changes completely when one moves from photography as art to art as photography. Everyone had the opportunity to see how much easier it is to take a picture into the lens, and even more so, a sculpture or even an architectural structure, than the phenomena of reality. Immediately there is a temptation to attribute this to the decline of artistic flair, to the ineptitude of contemporaries. However, he is contradicted by the understanding of how much, around the same time, with the development of reproduction technology, the perception of great works of art has changed. They can no longer be looked at as the works of individuals; they have become collective creations so powerful that they must be reduced in order to be assimilated. Ultimately, the reproduction technique is a reducing technique and makes available to man that degree of mastery over works of art, without which they cannot find application.

If anything defines today's relationship between art and photography, it is not the relieved tension created between them by photographing works of art. Many of those who, as a photographer, define the current face of this technique, come from the fine arts. They turned away from him after trying to establish a lively, clear connection between his means of expression and modern life. The sharper their sense of the spirit of the times, the more doubtful their starting point became for them. Just like eighty years ago, photography took over from painting. “The creative possibilities of the new,” says Moholy-Nagy 10 , - are for the most part slowly opened up by such old forms, tools and areas of art, which in principle are destroyed with the advent of the new, but under the pressure of the upcoming new they are involved in euphoric activation. So, for example, futuristic (static) painting introduced into art, which later destroyed it, a clearly defined problematic of the synchronism of movement, the image of an instantaneous state; and this at a time when cinema was known, but still far from being understood... In the same way, one can - with a certain caution - consider some of the artists working today with figurative-objective means (neoclassicists and verists) as the forerunners of a new pictorial optical technique, which will soon use only mechanical technical means. A Tristan Tzara 11 wrote in 1922: “When everything that was called art began to suffer from gout, the photographer lit his thousand-candle lamp and the light-sensitive paper gradually absorbed the black color of some household items. He discovered the significance of a gentle, virginal glance, which was more important than all the compositions that are presented to us for admiring contemplation. Photographers who came from the fine arts to photography not for opportunistic reasons, not by accident, not for the sake of convenience, today form the avant-garde among their colleagues, because they are to a certain extent insured by their creative biography from the most serious danger of modern photography, the craft-artistic taste. “Photography as an art,” says Sasha Stone, “is a very dangerous area.”

Germaine Krul. From the Les Amies series. OK. 1924

Leaving those relations in which such people as Sander, Germaine Krul, Blosfeldt were engaged in it, emancipating from physiognomic, political, scientific interests, photography becomes “creative”. The business of the lens becomes a "review of events", a tabloid photojournalist appears. "The spirit, overcoming mechanics, transforms its exact results into life parables." The further the crisis of the modern social order develops, the stronger its individual moments freeze, forming dead contradictions, the more creative - in its deepest essence, the option, contrast is its father, and imitation is its mother - becomes a fetish, the features of which owe their life only to a change in fashionable lighting . Creative in photography is following fashion. “The world is beautiful” is her motto. It reveals itself to be the photograph that is ready to mount any tin can into the universe, but is not able to understand any of the human relationships that it enters into, and which in its somnambulistic plots turns out to be a forerunner of its venality rather than knowledge. Since the true face of this photographic creativity is advertising and association, its legitimate opposite is exposure and construction. For the proposition, Brecht notes, “is so complicated because, less than ever, a simple /reproduction of reality/ says anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp factories or the AES concern says almost nothing about these organizations. True reality slipped into the realm of the functional. The objectification of human relationships, for example in a factory, no longer betrays these relationships. Therefore, it is really necessary /to build something/, something /artificial/, something /given/” 12 . The training of the pioneers of this photographic construction is the merit of the surrealists. The next stage in this debate is marked by the appearance of Russian cinema. This is not an exaggeration: the great achievements of his directors were only possible in a country where photography is oriented not towards charm and suggestion, but towards experiment and learning.

Grigory Zimin. Photogram. 1929–1931

In this sense, and only in this sense, in the imposing salute that the clumsy creator of meaningful canvases, the painter Antoine Wirtz 13 addressed the photographs in 1855, some meaning may still be discovered. “A few years ago, for the glory of our century, a machine was born, which from day to day astonishes our thought and frightens our gaze. Before a century has passed, this machine will replace for the artist a brush, a palette, paints, craftsmanship, experience, patience, fluency, fidelity, color, glaze, pattern, and perfection, will become the essence of painting ... It is not true that the daguerreotype kills art ... When the daguerreotype, this huge child will grow up, when all her art and strength will develop, then the genius will grab her by the scruff of the neck and exclaim loudly: “Here! Now you are mine! We will work together.” How sober compared to this, even pessimistic, are the words with which four years later, in the Salon of 1859, Baudelaire introduced the new technique to his readers. Today it is hardly possible to read them, like those just quoted, without a slight shift in emphasis. However, although they contrast with the last quotation, they have fully retained their meaning as the sharpest rebuff to all attempts to usurp artistic photography. “In this miserable time, a new industry arose, which in no small measure contributed to the strengthening of the vulgar stupidity in its belief that art is nothing but an exact reproduction of nature, and cannot be anything else ... The vengeful god heard the voice of this crowd. Daguerre was his messiah." And further: “If photography is allowed to supplement art in one of its functions, then it will soon be completely supplanted and destroyed by it thanks to the natural allied help that will come from the crowd. Therefore, she must return to her direct duty, which is to be a servant of the sciences and arts.

Only then did both Wirtz and Baudelaire fail to grasp the indications that come from the authenticity of the photograph. It will not always be possible to get around them with the help of a report, the clichés of which are needed only to evoke verbal associations in the viewer. The camera becomes smaller and smaller, its ability to create images of the fleeting and secret increases, the shock of these shots freezes the associative mechanism of the viewer. At this moment, the signature is included, drawing photography into the process of literaryizing all areas of life, without its help, any photographic construction will remain incomplete. No wonder Atget's pictures were compared with a photograph of the scene. But isn't every corner of our cities a scene of an accident? And each of the passers-by is not a participant in the incident? Shouldn't the photographer - a descendant of Ogyurn and Haruspeks - determine the guilt and find the culprits? They say that "the illiterate in the future will not be the one who does not know the alphabet, but the one who does not know the photograph." But shouldn't a photographer be considered illiterate if he cannot read his own photographs? Won't the caption become the essential moment of creating a photograph? These are questions in which historical tension finds a détente, a distance of ninety years separating the living now from the daguerreotype. In the light of the sparks arising from this, the first photographs emerge from the darkness of great-grandfather times, so beautiful and inaccessible.

Walter Benjamin

Brief history of photography

This publication was published as part of the joint publishing program of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture and Ad Marginem Press LLC.

The publishing house expresses its gratitude to Pavel Vladyevich Khoroshilov for the selection of photographic materials for this publication

Brief history of photography

A completely different spirit emanates from the speech with which the physicist Arago delivered on July 3, 1839 in the Chamber of Deputies as a defender of Daguerre's invention. Remarkable in this speech is how she finds the connection of the invention with all aspects of human activity. The panorama unfolded in it is wide enough so that the dubious blessing of photography with painting - without which it could not have done here - turned out to be insignificant, but the foresight of the real significance of the discovery was fully revealed. “When the inventors of a new instrument,” says Arago, “use it to study nature, it always turns out that what they expect is only a small part in comparison with the series of subsequent discoveries that this instrument initiated.” This speech broadly covers the application of new technology from astrophysics to philology: next to the perspective of star photography is the idea of creating a corpus of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Daguerre's photographs were iodized silver plates exposed in a camera obscura; they had to be turned until at a certain angle it was not possible to see a pale gray picture. They were unique; on average, one plate cost 25 gold francs in 1839. Often they were kept like a jewel in luxurious cases. However, in the hands of some artists, they turned into a technical aid. Just as, seventy years later, Utrillo2 would draw his charming images of houses in the Parisian suburbs not from nature, but from postcards, so the recognized English portrait painter David Octavius Hill used a whole series of portrait photographs for his wall image of the first general synod of the Scottish church in 1843. However, he took these pictures himself. And it is these simple technical aids, not intended for prying eyes, that have secured his name a place in history, while his pictorial work is consigned to oblivion. And yet, deeper than these series of photographic portraits, some documentary shots are introduced into the new technique: these are images of nameless people, not portraits. Such images have long existed in pictorial form. If the paintings were kept in the house, then from time to time someone else asked about who was depicted in them. Two, three generations later, this interest disappeared: pictures, if they retain their meaning, retain it only as evidence of the art of the one who painted them. However, with the advent of photography, something new and extraordinary arises: in the photograph of the fisherwoman from New Haven, looking down with such slow and seductive bashfulness, there is still something more than what could be exhausted by the art of the photographer Hill, something that does not stop, stubbornly inquiring about the name of the one who lived then and continues to be present here and will never agree to completely dissolve in "art".

I ask: what was the eye of these brilliance,
how these curls curled, shading the face,
how they kissed the lips, a surge of voluptuousness,
like smoke without a flame, sublime 3 .

Joint publishing program of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and Ad Marginem

The collection contains three texts by the German philosopher, critic, writer and translator Walter Benjamin devoted to photography: "A Brief History of Photography", "Paris - the capital of the nineteenth century" and "The work of art in the era of its technical reproducibility". The well-known historian of photography Vladimir Levashov wrote an afterword specially for this edition.

In A Brief History of Photography (1931), Benjamin did not aim to give a clear picture of the development of photography over the hundred years of its existence; The philosopher's attention is focused on the consequences of the emergence of photography, which are important for world culture as a whole: “With the development of reproduction technology, the perception of great works of art has changed. They can no longer be looked at as the works of individuals; they have become collective creations, so powerful that in order to assimilate them, they must be reduced. In this essay, Benjamin for the first time outlines a number of points that he later developed in his most famous essay, "A Work of Art ...", in particular, the famous concept of the aura. Interesting are his remarks about the influence of the technical basis of early photography on the formation of its aura, about individual genres and specific masters of photography, for example, David Octavius Hill, August Sander and Eugene Atget (the forerunner of surrealism, according to Benjamin).

In the article "Paris - the capital of the nineteenth century" (1935), Benjamin writes about the new relationship between art and technology in an era of rapid technological progress - not only about photography, but also about architecture, in which for the first time they begin to use an artificial building material - iron, about the invention of picturesque panoramas, about the origin of the entertainment industry at the world exhibitions of the 19th century. The emergence of photography, according to the author, contributes to the renewal of the pictorial language, formal searches, since with its spread, the information value of painting decreases and it has to move away from realism in “areas into which photography cannot yet follow it”; so there is an emphasis on the color elements of the image, impressionism, and later cubism.
Photography, in turn, sharply expands the scope of its commodity application in the 19th century, as a result of which, according to Benjamin, there was a separation of creative activity from art and its entry into the market. As an attempt to protect art from the influence of technological progress, as a protest against the power of the market, the theory of "pure art", "art for art's sake" arose in the same era.

The collection ends with Benjamin's most famous work, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility (1936). It was in it that he developed his idea of an aura - the “here and now” of a work of art, its unique being in space and time, which determines the concept of its authenticity. Reproduction destroys the aura, nullifies the historical value, and hence the authority of the thing.

Benjamin believes that the disintegration of the aura is socially conditioned, this process is based on two circumstances associated with the increasing importance of the masses, which are characterized by "passionate desire ... to overcome the uniqueness of any given by accepting its reproduction ... "taste for the same type in the world" increased so much” that the masses want to squeeze out this uniformity even from unique phenomena with the help of reproduction. The growing influence of the masses on the role of art cannot fail to interest the Marxist thinker: “The masses are the matrix from which at the present moment every habitual attitude towards works of art emerges reborn. Quantity turned into quality: a very significant increase in the mass of participants led to a change in the way of participation. The masses strive for a collective rather than a personal perception of art, superficial entertainment, and not immersion in the work - hence the popularity of cinema to the detriment of painting.

Benjamin considers important the trend of changing the functions of a work of art over time, namely the weakening of its ritual, cult function and the increase in exposition. But it is precisely with the emergence of a reproducing technique - photography - that, according to the philosopher, “the entire social function of art is transformed. The place of the ritual foundation is occupied by another practical activity: political. In this vein, reflections on the fundamental differences between fascism and communism in their approach to politics and art are interesting, especially if we recognize, as Benjamin does, war as an extreme degree of aestheticization of politics.

about the author

Walter Benjamin(1892-1940) - German philosopher, cultural theorist, literary critic, writer and translator. Early writings are devoted to German romanticism, in particular Goethe, and German baroque drama. Benjamin was famous for his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility", which had a significant impact on European aesthetic theory, and the posthumously published text "On the Concept of History".

Walter benjamin short history of photography pdf. Walter Benjamin. Brief history of photography. Walter Benjamin A Brief History of Photography

ORDERING

PAYMENT ORDER

PAYMENT SECURITY

DELIVERY

Terms of use

Walter Benjamin
Brief history of photography

Brief history of photography

* * *

Joint publishing program of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and Ad Marginem

about the author

Environmental problems The essence of the environmental problem

Seminar for teachers "Auction of pedagogical ideas

In the last third of the 19th century, the main arena of colonial conquests

Presentation on the history of Rome

Download ppt "Rome Period of the Empire"

Walter benjamin short history of photography pdf. Walter Benjamin. Brief history of photography. Walter Benjamin A Brief History of Photography

ORDERING

PAYMENT ORDER

PAYMENT SECURITY

DELIVERY

Terms of use

Walter Benjamin Brief history of photography

Brief history of photography

* * *

Joint publishing program of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and Ad Marginem

about the author

Similar articles

Walter Benjamin
Brief history of photography