Archive for the ‘Walter Benjamin’ Category
Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction translated by J. A. Underwood (London, Penguin Books, 2008) 1-50 p.3 In principle, the work of art has always been reproducible. What man has made, man has always been able to make again. […]
Filed under: Books, Essays, Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin | 1 Comment
Metaphor
Price, Mary. ‘Metaphor’ The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Space (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994) 134-149 pp.134-135 Before photography, according to Ivins [William M, Ivins, Jr.], the syntactical analysis of a picture preceded the handmade reproduction, which became a symbolic representation of its original. references for reproduction are the woodcut, etching, or lithograph that reproduce a […]
Filed under: Ambiguity and Photography, Books, Criticism of Photography, Image Proliferation, Invention of photography, John Berger, Magic/Uncanny & Photography, Mary Price, Mechanical Reproduction, Memory & Photography, Time and photography, Walter Benjamin, Writing/Literature & Photography | Leave a Comment
Danger
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Danger’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 47-59 p.47 It is because the question of reproducibility extends far beyond the realm of art that it raises the possibility of the democratization of death. Not only does technical reproducibility change our relation to death, but the incursion of the […]
Filed under: Books, Eduardo Cadava, Mechanical Reproduction, Personal Responses to Images, Politics & Photography, Walter Benjamin, War & Photography, Writing/Literature & Photography | Leave a Comment
Politics
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Politics’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 44-47 p.44 What is at stake in the question of technological reproducibility – in the question of photography, for example – is not whether photography is art, but in what way all art is photography. For Benjamin, as soon as […]
Filed under: Mechanical Reproduction, Photography's Art History, Politics & Photography, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
Reproducibility
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Reproducibility’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 42-44 p.42 [Benjamin] suggests that technical reproducibility can only be understood by considering the historical relations between science and art – especially in terms of their relation to the historical conditions of production and reproduction. [..] Technical reproduction is not […]
Filed under: "We live to be photographed", Eduardo Cadava, Invention of photography, Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
Stars
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Stars’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 26-30 p.26 Benjamin not only associates stars with a photographic language that focuses on the relations between light and darkness, past and present, life and death, reading and writing, and knowledge and representation – motifs that all belong to the […]
Filed under: Eduardo Cadava, Melancholy/Death & Photography, Walter Benjamin, Writing/Literature & Photography | Leave a Comment
Inscriptions
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Inscriptions’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 18-21 p.18 The prevalence of techniques of reproduction within the field of photography, for example, makes it possible to replicate any given negatives an indefinite number of times. This capacity for reproduction and circulation undermines the notion of an artwork’s […]
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Translations
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Translations’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 15-18 p.15 The disjunction between a photograph and the photographed corresponds to the caesura between a translation and an original. […] in order to be faithful to what is translatable in the original, the translator must depart from it, must […]
Filed under: "We live to be photographed", Eduardo Cadava, Mechanical Reproduction, Melancholy/Death & Photography, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
Mimesis
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Mimesis’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 13-15 p.13 The forgetting of the photograph’s ghostly or spectral character, of its relation to a death that survives itself, corresponds to what Benjamin refers to as “the decline of photography.” p.14 What is surprising is that photography’s […]
Filed under: Books, Eduardo Cadava, Images and reality, Magic/Uncanny & Photography, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
Ghosts
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Ghosts’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 11-13 p.11 Like an angel of history whose wings register the traces of this disappearance, the image bears witness to an experience that cannot come to light. Although what the photograph photographs is no longer present or living, […]
Filed under: "We live to be photographed", Books, Eduardo Cadava, Magic/Uncanny & Photography, Melancholy/Death & Photography, Photography as Historical Witness, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
Mortification
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Mortification’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 7-11 p.7 The incunabula of photography – its beginnings, its childhood, but also its burial place, its funereal plot its relation to printing and inscription flashes the truth of the photo. This truth says, if it can say […]
Filed under: Books, Eduardo Cadava, Melancholy/Death & Photography, Memory & Photography, Observer & the Photograph, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
Origins
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘Origins’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) 5-7 p.5 Photography prevents us from knowing what an image is and whether we even see one. It is no accident that Benjamin’s 1931 essay ‘A Short History of Photography’ begins not with a sudden clarity that grants knowledge security, […]
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History
Cadava, Eduardo. ‘History’ Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997) pp.1-5 p.1 [In ‘Theses on the concept of History’] Benjamin’s consideration of the historical and philosophical questions suggested by the rise and fall of photography can therefore be understood as an effort to measure the extent to which the […]
Filed under: Eduardo Cadava, Mechanical Reproduction, Photography as Historical Witness, Politics & Photography, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
Batchen, Geoffrey. ‘Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the bourgeois imagination’ Photography: Theoretical Snapshots (Oxon: Routledge, 2009) p.80-97 p.80 […] the search for imagination in the carte-de-visite must be directed elsewhere, away from the usual focus on photographer and subject, and instead onto the minds eye of their viewers.[?] p.82 Compared to earlier processes such as the daguerrotype, […]
Filed under: Banality & Photographs, Essays, Geoffrey Batchen, Identification & Photography, Mechanical Reproduction, Observer & the Photograph, Photography's Art History, Touch/Tactile Perception, Vernacular Photography, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History 221-244 in Petro, Patrice. ed., Fugitive images, from photography to video (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) p.221 […] Benjamin persistently conceives of history in the language of photography, as though he wished to offer us a series of snapshots of his latest reflections on history. What […]
Filed under: Eduardo Cadava, Melancholy/Death & Photography, Memory & Photography, Photography and Unconscious, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
A Short History of Photography
Benjamin, Walter., ‘A Short History of Photography’ One-Way Street (London: Verso, 1979; 1997) 240–257 p.243 Immerse yourself in such a picture long enough and you will recognise how alive the contradictions are, here too: the most precise technology can give its productsa magical value, such as a painted picture can never again have for us. […]
Filed under: Photography and Unconscious, Photography's Art History, Studium/Punctum, Vernacular Photography, Walter Benjamin | Leave a Comment
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