Walter Benjamin
[Philosopher, critic, and theorist, b. 1892, Berlin, d. 1940, Port Bou, France.]
Anybody will be able to observe how much more easily a painting, and above all sculpture or architecture can be grasped in photographs than in reality.
However skillful the photographer, however carefully he poses his model, the spectator feels an irresistible compulsion to look for the tiny spark of chance, of the here and now, with which reality has, as it were, seared the character in the picture; to find that imperceptible point at which, in the immediacy of that long-past moment, the future so persuasively inserts itself that, looking back, we may rediscover it.
For it is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious.
Evidently, a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man.
Is it not the task of the photographer—descendent of the augurs and haruspices—to uncover guilt and name the guilty in his pictures?
On the rise of photography... a new reality unfolds, in the face of which no one can take responsibility for personal decisions. One appeals to the lens.
It is a fetishistic, fundamentally anti-technical notion of art with which theorists of photography have tussled for almost a century, without, of course, achieving the slightest result. For they sought nothing beyond acquiring credentials for the photographer from the judgment-seat from which he had already been overturned.
For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most artistic functions that henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens.
