Imaginary Encounters: Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography

Abstract

This article explores Walter Benjamin's famous concept of the aura in relation to his writings on photography. Although Benjamin's “Artwork” essay charges photography with the decline of the aura of the traditional artwork, his essay on photography complicates this historical narrative, associating aura with early portrait photography but also with its successor, the commercial studio portrait. The childhood photograph of Franz Kafka, whose melancholy air serves Benjamin as an example of a paradoxical, post-auratic aura, recurs in his childhood memoirs, where the narrator projects himself into this picture. Benjamin's writings on photography thus develop an alternative concept of aura, one which transcends fixed historical or technological categories through the model of an imaginary encounter between viewer and image. This conception has far-reaching consequences not only for the theory of photography but also for its role within literature, as is suggested by Benjamin's empathetic engagement with the Kafka photograph and its incorporation into his own life story.

A Portrait of a ‘Selfie’ in the Making

“…And once again the technical equivalent is obvious: it consists in the absolute continuum from brightest light to darkest shadow," due-quoting Orlik-to a "comprehensive illumination brought about by the long exposure times." 53 Benjamin then examines a childhood photograph of Kafka, when "the reproducible collodium negative replaced the costly daguerreotype, paving the way for the large-scale commercial expansion of portrait photography," 54 which then became more widely affordable. Enhancing reproducibility and the commercializing of studio portraits, these technical developments made for formulaic poses and conventional decor, and provided…”

Mundane Myths: Heritage and the Politics of the Photographic Cliché

“…Walter Benjamin's definition of the 'aura' has been influential across these debates, surfacing in otherwise unrelated discussions of heritage and photography (e.g. Duttlinger 2008;Malpas 2008;Zhu 2012). Famously declaring that the 'aura of the work of art' may depreciate through mechanical reproduction, Benjamin argued that 'the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced' (2007 [1936]: 221) By effectively removing objects from this 'changeable fabric of tradition' (Jones, 2010: 189), Benjamin believed photographic and other mechanical forms of representation would destroy the auratic power of the original.…”

13 Transforming Archaeology, Transforming Materiality

“…The photograph as an inert trace, like Ingold's series of unconnected dots, contrasts here with a potential assemblage connecting the photo as trace with its temporality, its history. Berger's account of photographs of course recalls Walter Benjamin's tension between the photograph as a work of mechanical reproduction and the “aura” attributed primarily, but not exclusively, to the works of art photography replaces (Duttlinger ).

For Benjamin, the trace is intimately connected to aura, which Carlo Salzoni writes comes from the unique existence of an object ‘that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject’…aura is thus the result of the transmission of traces as an instance of tradition.

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“…[Berger 1980:61] The photograph as an inert trace, like Ingold's series of unconnected dots, contrasts here with a potential assemblage connecting the photo as trace with its temporality, its history. Berger's account of photographs of course recalls Walter Benjamin's tension between the photograph as a work of mechanical reproduction and the "aura" attributed primarily, but not exclusively, to the works of art photography replaces (Duttlinger 2008).…”