1896 - 1966
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Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction
VI
In photography, exhibition value begins to displace
cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without
resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance.
It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography.
The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuse
for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates
from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face.
This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. But as
man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the
first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed
this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who,
around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly
been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene
of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing
evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical
occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a
specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate
to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way.
At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right
ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become
obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character
than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to
those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more
explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single
picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones. |
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