Walter Benjamin’s focus
A review of On Photography: Walter Benjamin. Edited and translated by Esther Leslie. London: Reaktion Books. 2015.
Writing in 1928, Walter Benjamin opened a review of a collection of nature photography by observing that ‘criticism is a convivial art’, to this he adjoined a less encouraging reminder: ‘a healthy reader doesn’t give a fig for the reviewer’s judgement’. Reviews, Benjamin concludes, draw readers into a book whilst also imbuing it with the reviewers perspective. In this respect the review has at least one similar property to the photograph; it changes the way that the object is seen.
This recent collection of Benjamin’s writings on photography, edited and introduced by Esther Leslie, is slim but well-populated. It is one of a recent raft of books exploring Benjamin’s lesser-known and relatively neglected writings. This particular collection can be carved into thirds: with Leslie’s quality introductory essay covering a third of the book, a third is dedicated to Benjamin’s short history of photography and the final third is made up of Benjamin’s more fragmentary pieces on the topic. As well as providing the book’s introduction, Leslie also provides short contextual introductions to each of Benjamin’s pieces. The fact that a book can be hung around a relatively small amount of content from Benjamin is testament to the packed insights of his writing and the care and detail provided by the editor in explaining, developing and situating that content.
Benjamin was writing as the social presence of photography was rapidly escalating. Photography was becoming commonplace, as Leslie tells us, in the period 1925 to 1938 covered by the essays gathered here. This called for, as Benjamin puts it, the movement of the ‘analysis out of the realm of aesthetic distinctions and into that of social functions’. Benjamin was, Leslie explains, exploring the ‘potentials and actualities of the medium’. Leslie makes the point that Benjamin was ‘its critic, in a profound sense, because he tracked it as something changing, adapting, developing in history’. Part of the power is in the traces or ‘afterlives’ of the images. Photography was wrapped up with profound social changes on a large scale. Benjamin wrote on these changes, which in turn influenced not only his ideas but also his writing — which Leslie argues took on a photographic style.
What emerges from the collection is an argument about the way that photography, in the ‘crucial’ relationship between photographer and technology, changes perception and enables the world to be seen anew — the processes of ‘miniturization’ are, Benjamin notes, the facilitator. Photography became part of the shifts and shocks of modernity, it also captured the fragments of those modern experiences. Leslie’s excellent contextualisations superbly take the reader through Benjamin’s linkages of photography with these broader streams and the social effects it ‘unleashes’ — as well as laying out his intellectual influences.
The question Benjamin implictly tackles concerns the properties of photography that drive its social effects. The pieces gathered here offer insights into the disruptive powers of photos. Seeing the world in photographic images brings with it shifts in what we see of that world. In his history of photography Benjamin uses the concept of the ‘optical unconcious’ to capture this. Photography reveals our optical unconciousness to us, we learn of it, Benjamin argues, through the perspective the pictures bring. Photography brings things into view that were previously outside of our awareness — small hidden details, qualities, movements, actions, the granular, and so on. As such, this collection taps into some of the arguments Benjamin made in his more famous essay on reproducibility and art.
For Benjamin, as well as reshaping memory, fetishising creativity in photographic fashions, changing the traces left by people and challenging conceptions of art, it is in the redrawing of the limits of our optical consciousness that photography’s importance can be observed. It is with this central insight that this small collection leaves the reader wondering, especially given just how powerful images have become in the media environment we now occupy. Our optical conciousness, it would seem, continues to be reshaped, the same might also be said of the powerful social functions of photography to which Benjamin’s focus was attracted.
