Siegfried Kracauer
[Media critic and sociologist, b. 1889, Frankfurt, Germany, d. 1966, New York.]
The photograph annihilates the person.
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The question is whether the image decisively catches reality.
(1930) ![](/images/rdquo.gif)
Never before has an age been so informed about itself, if being informed means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic sense.
(1927) ![](/images/rdquo.gif)
...the world has become a photographable present, and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it.
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The flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory. Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against understanding… The ‘image-idea’ drives away the idea.
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The image wanders ghostlike through the present. Ghostly apparitions occur only in places where a terrible deed has been committed.
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A shudder runs through the viewer of old photographs. For they make visible not the knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a moment; what appears in the photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her.
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