Walter Benjamin, A Brief History of Photography. A Brief History of Photography Analysis of Benjamin A Brief History of Photography

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Walter Benjamin
A Brief History of Photography

This publication was published as part of the joint publishing program of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture and Ad Marginem Press LLC.

The publishing house expresses its gratitude to Pavel Vladyevich Khoroshilov for the selection of photographic materials for this publication

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic version of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet or corporate networks, for private or public use without the written permission of the copyright owner.

A Brief History of Photography

To truly penetrate into its essence. Attempts at theoretical understanding of the problem are completely rudimentary. And no matter how long the debate on this issue was in the last century, they, in fact, did not move away from the comical scheme with the help of which the chauvinist leaflet, Leipziger Anzeiger, intended to stop the spread of the French infection. “The desire to preserve fleeting reflections,” the newspaper wrote, “is not only impossible, as it turned out after a thorough German investigation, but the mere desire to do this is blasphemy. Man is created in the likeness of God, and the image of God cannot be captured by any human machine. Unless the divine artist can dare, inspired by heaven, to reproduce the divine-human features without any mechanical assistance in moments of the highest inspiration and in obedience to the highest order of his genius.” This is a manifestation of the philistine concept of art in all its ponderous clumsiness, a concept to which any participation of technology is alien and which feels the approach of its end with the defiant appearance of new technology. Nevertheless, it was precisely this fetishistic, initially anti-technical concept of art that photography theorists tried to build a discussion on for almost a century, of course - without the slightest result. After all, they were trying to get the photographer’s recognition from the very authority that he was canceling.

A completely different spirit emanates from the speech that the physicist Arago made on July 3, 1839 in the Chamber of Deputies as a defender of Daguerre’s invention. What is remarkable about this speech is how it connects invention with all aspects of human activity. The panorama unfolded in it is wide enough that the dubious blessing of photography by painting - which could not be avoided here either - turned out to be insignificant, but the anticipation of the real significance of the discovery was fully revealed. “When the inventors of a new instrument,” says Arago, “use it to study nature, it always turns out that what they expected is only a small part in comparison with the series of subsequent discoveries that this instrument initiated.” This speech takes a broad look at the area of application of new technology from astrophysics to philology: next to the prospect of stellar photography is the idea of creating a corpus of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Daguerre's photographs were iodized silver plates exposed in a camera obscura; they had to be rotated until a soft gray picture could be seen from a certain angle. They were unique; On average, one record cost 25 gold francs in 1839. They were often kept like jewelry in luxurious cases. However, in the hands of some artists they turned into a technical aid. Just as seventy years later Utrillo II would draw his charming images of houses in the Parisian suburbs not from life, but from postcards, so the renowned English portraitist David Octavius Hill used a whole series of portrait photographs for his wall image of the first general synod of the Church of Scotland in 1843. However, he took these photographs himself. And it was these simple technical aids, not intended for prying eyes, that ensured his name a place in history, while his paintings fell into oblivion. And yet, more deeply than these series of photographic portraits, some documentary photographs introduce a new technique: these are images of nameless people, not portraits. Such images have long existed in pictorial form. If the paintings were kept in the house, then from time to time someone else would ask about who was depicted in them. Two or three generations later, this interest disappeared: paintings, if they retain meaning, retain it only as evidence of the art of the one who painted them. However, with the advent of photography, something new and extraordinary arises: in the photograph of the New Haven fisherman, looking down with such leisurely and seductive modesty, there remains something beyond what could be exhausted by the art of the photographer Hill, something that does not cease, stubbornly asking about the name of the one who lived then and continues to be present here and will never agree to completely dissolve in “art.”

I ask: what was the sparkle in that eye,
how those curls curled, shading the face,
how the lips kissed, a surge of voluptuousness,
like smoke without flame, sublimating 3 .

With his amazing photographs of plants, I was able to discover the shapes of ancient columns in the hollow stems, a bishop's staff in a fern, totem poles in a tenfold enlarged sprout of a chestnut and maple, and an openwork Gothic ornament in teasel leaves. 5 . Therefore, it is quite possible to say that the models of photographers like Hill were not so far from the truth when the “phenomenon of photography” seemed to them still “a great mysterious adventure”; even if for them it was nothing more than the consciousness that you are “standing before an apparatus which, in the shortest possible time, is capable of creating an image of the visible world, an image that seems as alive and authentic as nature itself.” Hill's camera was said to exhibit tactful restraint. His models, in turn, are no less restrained; they retain a certain timidity in front of the camera, and the principle of one of the later heyday photographers, “Never look into the camera,” might be inferred from their behavior. However, this did not mean that very “look at you” of animals, people and small children, into which the buyer is so unholy mixed up and to which there is no better contrast than the manner of description in which old Doutendai talks about the first daguerreotypes: “At first ... people did not dare,” he reports, “to look at the first photographs he took for a long time. They were timid before the clarity of those depicted and were ready to believe that the tiny faces in the photographs were capable of looking at the viewer themselves, such was the stunning effect of the unusual clarity and vitality of the first daguerreotypes on everyone.”

David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson. At the birdcage. 1843–1847. Photogravure. Collection of S. Burasovsky.

These first reproduced people entered the field of view of photography unsullied, or rather, unsigned. Newspapers were still a great luxury, they were rarely bought and most often looked through in cafes, photography had not yet become part of the newspaper business, very few could still read their name on newspaper pages. The human face was framed by silence, in which the gaze rested. In short, all the possibilities of this art of portraiture were based on the fact that photography had not yet come into contact with actuality. Many of Hill's photographs were taken in Edinburgh's Franciscan cemetery - an extremely typical start to photography, and even more remarkable is the fact that the models feel at home there. This cemetery indeed looks like an interior in one of Hill's photographs, like a secluded, fenced-off space where, leaning against the firewalls, tombstones grow out of the grass, hollow, like fireplaces, revealing in their bellies instead of tongues of flame, lines of inscriptions. However, this location would never have had such an impact if its choice had not been technically justified. The weak photosensitivity of early records required long exposures for location shooting. For the same reason, it seemed preferable to place the people being photographed as secluded as possible, in a place where nothing would interfere with their concentration. “The synthesis of expression that is forced by the fact that the model must remain motionless for a long time,” says Orlik about early photography, “is the main reason that these images, with all their simplicity, like good drawings and pictorial portraits, have a deeper impact on the viewer. and longer exposure than later photographs.” The technique itself encouraged the models to live not from moment to moment, but to get used to each moment; during the long exposure of these photographs, the models seemed to grow into the image and thereby entered into the most decisive contrast with the phenomena in the snapshot, corresponding to the changed environment in which, as Kracauer accurately noted, the same fraction of a second that the photograph continues depends on , “will the athlete become so famous that photographers will take pictures of him on the instructions of illustrated weeklies.” Everything about these early photographs was long-term oriented; not only the incomparable groups that gathered for the photographs - and their disappearance was one of the surest symptoms of what happened in society in the second half of the century - even the folds in which the clothes gather in these images last longer. Just look at Schelling's frock coat 6 ; he is most definitely ready to go into eternity with his owner, his folds are no less significant than the wrinkles on the face of a philosopher. In short, everything confirms the correctness of Bernard von Brentano, who suggested “that in 1850 the photographer was at the same height as his instrument” - for the first time and for a long time the last.

However, in order to fully appreciate the powerful impact of daguerreotype in the era of its discovery, it should be borne in mind that plein air painting began at that time to open up completely new perspectives for the most advanced of artists. Realizing that it is in this respect that photography must take up the baton from painting, Arago clearly says in a historical essay dedicated to the early experiments of Giovanni Battista Porta: “As for the effect arising from the incomplete transparency of our atmosphere (and which is not entirely accurately designated expression “aerial perspective”), then even the masters of painting do not hope that camera obscura” - we are talking about copying the images obtained in it - “could help in reproducing this effect.” At the moment when Daguerre managed to capture the images obtained in the camera obscura, the artist was removed from this post by a technician. Yet the true victim of photography was not landscape painting, but portrait miniatures. Events developed so quickly that already around 1840, most of the countless portrait miniaturists became photographers, first along with painting work, and soon exclusively. The experience of their original profession turned out to be useful, and it was not artistic, but precisely craft training that ensured the high level of their photographic work. Only gradually did this generation of the transition period disappear from the scene; it seems as if these early photographers - Nadar, Steltzner, Pearson, Bayar - received the blessing of the biblical patriarchs: they all approached ninety or a hundred years of age. But in the end, business people poured into the class of professional photographers from all sides, and when retouching of negatives then became widespread - the revenge of bad photographic artists - a rapid decline in taste began. This was the time when photo albums began to fill up. They were most often located in the most uncomfortable places in the apartment, on the console or a small table in the living room: leather folios with disgusting metal edging and thick sheets with a gold edge, on which were placed figures in stupid draperies and tight robes - Uncle Alex and Aunt Rickhen, Trudchen, when she was still little, daddy in her first year and, finally, to top off the shame, we ourselves: in the image of a salon Tyrolean, singing Tyrolean songs and waving his hat against the backdrop of painted mountain peaks, or in the image of a gallant sailor, legs, as befits a sea wolf , spread out, leaning against the polished handrail. The accessories of such portraits - pedestals, balustrades and oval tables - are still reminiscent of the time when, due to long exposures, it was necessary to create support points for the models so that they could remain motionless for a long time. If at first there were enough devices for fixing the head and knees, then soon “other devices followed, similar to those that were used in famous picturesque images and therefore seemed “artistic”. First of all, it was a column and a curtain.” More capable craftsmen were forced to speak out against this disgrace already in the 1860s. Here’s what they wrote in one special English publication back then: “If the column looks believable in paintings, then the way it is used in photography is absurd, because it is usually installed on a carpet. Meanwhile, it is clear to everyone that a carpet cannot serve as a foundation for a marble or stone column.” It was then that these photo studios appeared with draperies and palm trees, tapestries and easels, about which it is difficult to say whether they were for torment or for exaltation; Whether it was a torture chamber or a throne room, an early photograph of Kafka provides stunning evidence of their activities. In it, a boy of about six years old, dressed in a tight, strait-suit with many braids, is depicted in an environment reminiscent of a winter garden. Palm branches stick out in the depths. And, as if to make these plush tropics even more stuffy and heavy, in his left hand he holds an incredibly large hat with a wide brim, in the Spanish style. Of course, the boy would have disappeared in this surroundings if the excessively sad eyes had not overcome the situation imposed on them.

Nadar (Gaspard Felix Tournachon). Portrait of Georges Sand. 1877 [Hereinafter:] Private collection. Moscow.

With its vast sadness, this photograph contrasts with earlier photographs in which people had not yet received such an expression of loss and detachment as this boy. They were surrounded by an aura, an environment that gave their gaze passing through it fullness and confidence. Again, the technical equivalent of this feature is obvious; it lies in the absolute continuity of the transition from the brightest light to the darkest shadow. By the way, the law of anticipation of new achievements by the forces of old technology is also manifested in this case, namely in the fact that the old portrait painting, on the eve of its fall, gave rise to a unique flowering of gum arabic printing. It was a question of reproduction techniques, which were combined with photographic reproduction only later. As in the graphic sheets produced by this print, in the photographs of a photographer like Hill, light breaks through the darkness with force: Orlik speaks of the “generalizing light composition” caused by long exposures that gives “these early photographs their inherent grandeur.” And among the contemporaries of the discovery, Delaroche had already noted the previously “unattainable, magnificent, in no way disturbing the peace of the masses” general impression. It's about the technical basis that generates the aura. Some group shots in particular capture the fleeting togetherness that appears briefly on the record before it is destroyed by the “original shot.” It is this atmosphere that is elegantly and symbolically outlined by the already old-fashioned oval shape of the mat for photographs. Therefore, a complete misunderstanding of these photographic incunabula is indicated by the desire to emphasize “artistic perfection” or “taste” in them. These photographs appeared in rooms in which each client, in the person of the photographer, met primarily with a technician of the new generation, and each photographer, in the person of the client, met with a representative of an ascending social class with his characteristic aura, which was visible even in the folds of his frock coat and neckerchief. After all, this aura was not a direct product of a primitive camera. The fact is that in this early period the object and the technique of its reproduction coincided so closely with each other, while in the subsequent period of decadence they diverged. Soon, developments in optics made it possible to overcome shadows and create mirror images. However, photographers in the period after 1880 saw their task mainly in simulating the aura that disappeared from photographs along with the displacement of the shadow by fast lenses, just as the aura disappeared from life with the degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie - to simulate with all the tricks of retouching, in features of the so-called gum arabic seal. Thus, a twilight tone, interrupted by artificial reflections, became fashionable, especially in the Art Nouveau style; However, despite the twilight lighting, a pose was increasingly clearly indicated, the immobility of which betrays the powerlessness of this generation in the face of technological progress.

And yet, what is decisive in photography is the photographer’s attitude towards his technique. Camille Recht expressed this in an elegant comparison. “The violinist,” he says, “must first create a sound, catch the note instantly; The pianist presses a key and the note sounds. Both the artist and the photographer have their own tools. The artist's drawing and coloring are akin to the violinist's extraction of sound; the photographer has something in common with the pianist in that his actions are to a large extent - incomparable to the violinist's conditions - predetermined by technology, which imposes its own limitations. Not a single virtuoso pianist, be it Paderewski himself, will achieve that fame, will not achieve that almost fabulous charm of the public that Paganini achieved and achieved.” However, photography, if we continue this comparison, has its own Busoni, this is Atget 7 . Both were virtuosos, and at the same time forerunners. What they have in common is an unparalleled ability to lose themselves in their craft, coupled with the greatest precision. Even in their features there is something related. Atget was an actor who was disgusted with his craft, who took off his makeup and then began to do the same to reality, showing its unadorned face. He lived in Paris poor and unknown, selling his photographs for next to nothing to amateurs who were hardly less eccentric than himself, and not so long ago he said goodbye to life, leaving behind a gigantic opus of more than four thousand photographs. Berenice Abbott from New York collected these cards, selected works have just been published in an extraordinarily beautiful book 3
E.Atget. Lichtbilder. Eingeleitet von C. Recht. Paris, Leipzig, 1930.

Prepared by Kamil Recht. The contemporary press “knew nothing about this man who walked around art studios with his photographs, giving them away almost for nothing, for a few coins, often at the price of those postcards that at the beginning of the century depicted such beautiful scenes of a night city with a painted moon. He has reached the pole of supreme excellence; but from the stubborn modesty of the great master, who always keeps in the shadows, he did not want to plant his flag there. So some can consider themselves the discoverer of a pole that Atget had already visited.” Indeed: Atget's Paris photographs are an anticipation of surrealist photography, the vanguard of the only truly powerful column that surrealism was able to move forward. He was the first to disinfect the suffocating atmosphere that the photographic portrait of the decadent era spread around him. He purified this atmosphere, he purified it: he began to liberate the subject from the aura that constituted the undoubted merit of the earliest photographic school. When the avant-garde magazines “Bifur” or “Variété” publish with the captions “Westminster”, “Lille”, “Antwerp” or “Wroclaw” only photographs of details: now a piece of a balustrade, now a bare top of a tree, through whose branches a street lamp shines through, now a firewall or a hook with a life preserver hanging on it, on which the name of the city is written - then this is nothing more than a literary play on the motifs discovered by Atget. He was interested in the forgotten and abandoned, and therefore these photographs also turn against the exotic, pompous, romantic sound of city names; they suck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship.

Eugene Atget. Paris, rue des Franc-Bourgeois. 1899

What exactly is an aura? A strange interweaving of place and time: a unique sense of distance, no matter how close the object in question may be. To glance during a summer afternoon rest along the line of a mountain ridge on the horizon or a branch in the shadow of which a vacationer is located, while a moment or hour is involved in their appearance, means to inhale the aura of these mountains, this branch. The desire to “bring things closer” to oneself, or more precisely to the masses, is the same passionate desire of modern people as overcoming the unique in any situation through its reproduction. Day by day, the need to possess an object in close proximity in its image, rather in reproduction, becomes more and more irresistible. And a reproduction, as shown in an illustrated weekly or newsreel, is undoubtedly different from an image. In the image, uniqueness and duration are as closely connected as fleetingness and repetition in reproduction. The cleansing of an object from its shell, the destruction of the aura, are a characteristic sign of that perception in which the feeling of the same type in relation to everything in this world has grown so much that with the help of reproduction it achieves uniformity even from unique phenomena. And also almost always passed by “majestic views and so-called symbols,” but did not miss the long row of shoe lasts, did not pass by Parisian courtyards where handcarts stand in rows from evening to morning, did not pass tables that were not cleared after meals or that had accumulated in huge quantities dirty dishes, past a brothel on who knows what street in house number 5, as evidenced by the huge five that flaunts on four different places on the facade. Oddly enough, there are almost no people in these photographs. The Porte d'Arqueil gates near the bastions are empty, the luxurious staircases are empty, the courtyards are empty, the cafe terraces are empty, the Place du Tertre is empty, as usual. They are not deserted, but lacking in spirit; the city in these photographs is cleared, like an apartment into which new residents have not yet moved in. These are the results that allowed surreal photography to prepare a healing alienation between man and his environment. It frees up the field for the politically trained eye, which omits all intimate connections for the sake of accurately reflecting details.

It is clear that this new look was least likely to develop where photography had previously felt most confident: in paid, representative portraiture. On the other hand, abandoning a person turns out to be almost impossible for photography. Those who did not already know this were taught this by the best Russian films, which showed that both the environment surrounding a person and the landscape are revealed only to those photographers who can comprehend them in the nameless reflection that appears in the human face. However, the possibility of this again largely depends on who is being filmed. A generation that was not obsessed with the idea of capturing itself in photographs for posterity, when faced with such a need, was rather inclined to somewhat timidly squeeze into its familiar, lived-in surroundings - like Schopenhauer in his Frankfurt photograph of 1850 into the depths of his armchair - which is precisely why, however, he captured along with himself on the record and this world: this generation did not inherit his virtues. For the first time in several decades, Russian feature films have given the opportunity to appear in front of the camera for people who have no need for their photographs. And immediately the human face acquired a new, enormous meaning in the photograph. But it was no longer a portrait. What was it? The outstanding achievement of one German photographer was that he answered this question. August Sander 4
A. Sander. Antlitz der Zeit. Seichzig Aufnahmen deutscher Menschen des 20. Jahrhuderts. Mit einer Einleitung von Alfred Döblin. München, o.J.

8 collected a series of portraits that are in no way inferior to the powerful physiognomic gallery opened by such masters as Eisenstein or Pudovkin, and he did it in a scientific aspect. “The collection he created consists of seven groups corresponding to the existing social order, and should be published in 45 folders of 12 photographs each.” So far, only a book with a selected 60 photographs has been published, providing inexhaustible material for observations. “Zander begins with a peasant, a man tied to the land, leads the viewer through all strata and professional groups, rising to representatives of the highest civilization and descending to an idiot.” The author undertook this colossal task not as a scientist, not as a person following the advice of anthropologists or sociologists, but, as the preface says, “based on direct observation.” These observations were undoubtedly extremely unprejudiced, moreover, bold, at the same time, however, and delicate, namely in the spirit of what Goethe said: “There is a delicate empiricism that identifies itself in the most intimate way with the object and thereby becomes a real theory.” Accordingly, it is quite legitimate that an observer like Döblin 9 drew attention precisely to the scientific aspects of this work and notes: “Like comparative anatomy, through which only one can understand the nature and history of organs, this photographer took up comparative photography and thereby took a scientific position that elevates him above those who deal with particular types of photography " It would be extremely unfortunate if economic conditions prevent continued publication of this corpus. The publisher could, in addition to this general point, point out one more specific motive for publication. Works like Sander's can instantly take on unexpected relevance. Changes in power structures, which have become familiar to us, make the development and sharpening of physiognomic abilities a vital necessity. Whether a person represents the right or the left, he must get used to the fact that he will be recognized from this point of view. In turn, he himself will recognize others in this way. Zander's creation is not just an illustrated publication: it is an educational atlas.

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Joint publishing program of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and Ad Marginem Publishing House

The collection presents three texts by the German philosopher, critic, writer and translator Walter Benjamin dedicated to photography: “A Brief History of Photography”, “Paris - the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility”. The afterword was written especially for this edition by the famous photography historian Vladimir Levashov.

In the article “A Brief History of Photography” (1931), Benjamin did not set out to give a clear picture of the development of photography over a hundred years of its existence; The philosopher’s attention is focused on the consequences of the emergence of photography that are important for world culture as a whole: “With the development of reproduction technology, the perception of great works of art has changed. They can no longer be looked at as the works of individual people; they have become collective creations so powerful that in order to assimilate them they must be reduced.” In this essay, Benjamin first outlines a number of points that he later developed in his most famous essay, “The Work of Art...”, in particular the famous concept of the aura. His remarks are interesting about the influence of the technical basis of early photography on the formation of its aura, about individual genres and specific masters of photography, for example, about David Octavius Hill, August Sander and Eugene Atget (the forerunner of surrealism, according to Benjamin).

In the article “Paris - the capital of the nineteenth century” (1935), Benjamin writes about the new relationship between art and technology in an era of rapid technological progress - not only about photography, but also about architecture, in which for the first time they began to use an artificial building material - iron, about the invention of pictorial panoramas, about the emergence of the entertainment industry at the world's fairs of the 19th century. The emergence of photography, as the author argues, contributes to the renewal of the pictorial language, formal searches, since with its spread the informational value of painting decreases and it has to move away from realism into “areas into which photography cannot yet follow it”; This is how the emphasis on the color elements of the image arises, impressionism, and later cubism.
Photography, in turn, sharply expanded the scope of its commercial application in the 19th century, as a result of which, according to Benjamin, there was a separation of creative activity from art and its entry into the market. As an attempt to protect art from the influence of technological progress, as a protest against the power of the market in the same era, the theory of “pure art”, “art for art’s sake” arose.

The collection concludes with Benjamin's most famous work, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” (1936). It was in it that he developed his idea of the aura - the “here and now” of a work of art, its unique existence in space and time, which determines the concept of its authenticity. Reproduction destroys the aura, nullifies the historical value, and therefore the authority of the thing.

Benjamin believes that the disintegration of the aura is socially conditioned; this process is based on two circumstances related to the growing importance of the masses, which are characterized by a “passionate desire... to overcome the uniqueness of any given thing through the acceptance of its reproduction... “a taste for the same type in the world” has intensified so much that the masses want to squeeze out this sameness even from unique phenomena with the help of reproduction. The growing influence of the masses on the role of art cannot but interest a Marxist thinker: “The masses are the matrix from which at the moment every habitual attitude towards works of art comes out degenerated. Quantity has turned into quality: a very significant increase in the number of participants has led to a change in the way of participation.” The masses strive for a collective rather than personal perception of art, superficial entertainment rather than immersion in a work - hence the popularity of cinema at the expense of painting.

Benjamin considers important the trend of changes in the functions of a work of art over time, namely the weakening of its ritual, cult function and the increase in its expositional function. But it is with the emergence of reproductive technology - photography - that, according to the philosopher, “the entire social function of art is transformed. The place of the ritual foundation is taken by another practical activity: political.” In this vein, it is interesting to think about the fundamental differences between fascism and communism in the approach to politics and art, especially if we recognize, as Benjamin does, the extreme degree of aestheticization of war in politics.

about the author

Walter Benjamin(1892-1940) - German philosopher, cultural theorist, literary critic, writer and translator. Early works are devoted to German romanticism, in particular Goethe, and German baroque drama. Benjamin became famous for his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility,” which had a significant influence on European aesthetic theory, and for his posthumously published text “On the Concept of History.”

Walter Benjamin

A Brief History of Photography

This publication was published as part of the joint publishing program of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture and Ad Marginem Press LLC.

The publishing house expresses its gratitude to Pavel Vladyevich Khoroshilov for the selection of photographic materials for this publication

A Brief History of Photography

The fog that shrouds the origins of photography is not as thick as that which obscures the beginnings of printing; It is more clearly evident in this case that at the moment when the opening hour struck, several people felt it at once; Independently of each other, they strived for one goal: to preserve the images obtained in the camera obscura, known at least since the time of Leonardo. When, after about five years of searching, Niépce and Daguerre managed to do this simultaneously, the state, taking advantage of the patent difficulties faced by the inventors, intervened in this matter and promoted it, paying them compensation, to the rank of a public activity. Thus, the preconditions were created for long-term accelerated development, which made it impossible to look back. So it turned out that the historical or, if you prefer, philosophical questions raised by the rise and fall of photography remained unaddressed for decades. And if today they are beginning to be realized, then there is a clear reason for this. The latest literature points to the fact that the rise of photography is associated with the activities of Hill and Cameron, Hugo and Nadar 1 - that is, it falls on its first decade. But this is also the decade that preceded its industrialization. This does not mean that at this early time market traders and charlatans did not try to use new technology as a source of profit; this was done, and even often. But it was much closer to the arts of the fair - photography was at home at the fair to this day - than to industry. The industry's advance in this area began with the use of photography to make business cards; It is characteristic that the person who first used photography for these purposes became a millionaire. It would not be surprising if the features of photographic practice that today first draw our attention to this pre-industrial flowering of photography were in a hidden way connected with the crisis of capitalist industry. This, however, does not make it any easier to use the beauty of the images contained in the wonderful recent publications on old photography to really penetrate into its essence. Attempts at theoretical understanding of the problem are completely rudimentary. And no matter how long the debate on this issue was in the last century, they, in fact, did not move away from the comical scheme with the help of which the chauvinist leaflet, Leipziger Anzeiger, intended to stop the spread of the French infection. “The desire to preserve fleeting reflections,” the newspaper wrote, “is not only impossible, as it turned out after a thorough German investigation, but the mere desire to do this is blasphemy. Man is created in the likeness of God, and the image of God cannot be captured by any human machine. Unless the divine artist can dare, inspired by heaven, to reproduce the divine-human features without any mechanical assistance in moments of the highest inspiration and in obedience to the highest order of his genius.” This is a manifestation of the philistine concept of art in all its ponderous clumsiness, a concept to which any participation of technology is alien and which feels the approach of its end with the defiant appearance of new technology. Nevertheless, it was precisely this fetishistic, initially anti-technical concept of art that photography theorists tried to build a discussion on for almost a century, of course - without the slightest result. After all, they were trying to get the photographer’s recognition from the very authority that he was canceling.

A completely different spirit emanates from the speech that the physicist Arago made on July 3, 1839 in the Chamber of Deputies as a defender of Daguerre’s invention. What is remarkable about this speech is how it connects invention with all aspects of human activity. The panorama unfolded in it is wide enough that the dubious blessing of photography by painting - which could not be avoided here either - turned out to be insignificant, but the anticipation of the real significance of the discovery was fully revealed. “When the inventors of a new instrument,” says Arago, “use it to study nature, it always turns out that what they expected is only a small part in comparison with the series of subsequent discoveries that this instrument initiated.” This speech takes a broad look at the area of application of new technology from astrophysics to philology: next to the prospect of stellar photography is the idea of creating a corpus of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Daguerre's photographs were iodized silver plates exposed in a camera obscura; they had to be rotated until a soft gray picture could be seen from a certain angle. They were unique; On average, one record cost 25 gold francs in 1839. They were often kept like jewelry in luxurious cases. However, in the hands of some artists they turned into a technical aid. Just as seventy years later Utrillo2 would draw his charming images of houses in the Parisian suburbs not from life, but from postcards, so the renowned English portraitist David Octavius Hill used a whole series of portrait photographs for his wall image of the first general synod of the Church of Scotland in 1843. However, he took these photographs himself. And it was these simple technical aids, not intended for prying eyes, that ensured his name a place in history, while his paintings fell into oblivion. And yet, more deeply than these series of photographic portraits, some documentary photographs introduce a new technique: these are images of nameless people, not portraits. Such images have long existed in pictorial form. If the paintings were kept in the house, then from time to time someone else would ask about who was depicted in them. Two or three generations later, this interest disappeared: paintings, if they retain meaning, retain it only as evidence of the art of the one who painted them. However, with the advent of photography, something new and extraordinary arises: in the photograph of the New Haven fisherman, looking down with such leisurely and seductive modesty, there remains something beyond what could be exhausted by the art of the photographer Hill, something that does not cease, stubbornly asking about the name of the one who lived then and continues to be present here and will never agree to completely dissolve in “art.”

I ask: what was the sparkle in that eye,
how those curls curled, shading the face,
how the lips kissed, a surge of voluptuousness,
like smoke without flame, sublimating 3 .

Or if you look at the photograph of photographer Doutendey, the poet’s father 4 , depicting him while he was the fiancé of a woman whom he found years later, after the birth of their sixth child, in their Moscow apartment with her veins cut. In the photo they are standing next to each other, he seems to be holding her, but her gaze is directed past him, glaring at the fatal distance. If you are immersed long enough in the contemplation of such a photograph, it becomes clear how closely the opposites come into contact here too: the most precise technology is able to give her works a magical power that a painted picture will never again have for us. Despite all the art of the photographer and the obedience of his model, the viewer feels an uncontrollable attraction, forcing him to look in such an image for the smallest spark of chance, here and now, with which reality seems to have burned through the character of the image, to find that inconspicuous place in which, in the so-being of that long-past minute the future continues to lurk now, and so eloquently that we, looking back, can discover it. After all, the nature facing the camera is not the same nature that is facing the eye; The difference, first of all, is that the place of the space mastered by the human consciousness is occupied by the space mastered by the unconscious. For example, it is quite common that we, even in the crudest form, imagine how people walk, but we probably know nothing about what their position is in that split second when they begin to walk. Photography, with its auxiliary means: short shutter speeds, magnification, reveals this position to him. He learns about this optical-unconscious only with her help, just as he learns about the unconscious in the sphere of his impulses with the help of psychoanalysis. Organized structures, cells and cells that technology and medicine usually deal with are all initially much closer to the camera than a moody landscape or a soulful portrait. At the same time, photography reveals in this material physiognomic aspects, pictorial worlds that live in the smallest corners, understandable and secluded to the extent that they take refuge in visions, but now, having become large and clearly formulated, they are capable of revealing the difference between technology and magic as historical variables. So, for example, Blosfeldt, with his amazing photographs of plants, was able to discover the shapes of ancient columns in hollow stems, a bishop's staff in a fern, totem poles in a tenfold enlarged sprout of chestnut and maple, and an openwork Gothic ornament in teasel leaves. 5 . Therefore, it is quite possible to say that the models of photographers like Hill were not so far from the truth when the “phenomenon of photography” seemed to them still “a great mysterious adventure”; even if for them it was nothing more than the consciousness that you are “standing before an apparatus which, in the shortest possible time, is capable of creating an image of the visible world, an image that seems as alive and authentic as nature itself.” Hill's camera was said to exhibit tactful restraint. His models, in turn, are no less restrained; they retain a certain timidity in front of the camera, and the principle of one of the later heyday photographers, “Never look into the camera,” might be inferred from their behavior. However, this did not mean that very “look at you” of animals, people and small children, into which the buyer is so unholy mixed up and to which there is no better contrast than the manner of description in which old Doutendai talks about the first daguerreotypes: “At first ... people did not dare,” he reports, “to look at the first photographs he took for a long time. They were timid before the clarity of those depicted and were ready to believe that the tiny faces in the photographs were capable of looking at the viewer themselves, such was the stunning effect of the unusual clarity and vitality of the first daguerreotypes on everyone.”

04.07.2014 18896

Walter Benjamin. A Brief History of Photography. M.: Ad Marginem Press, 2013

Three classic essays by the German philosopher written in the 1930s.

Unknown photographer. Paris. Eiffel Tower. After 1889.
Illustration from the book “Walter Benjamin. A Brief History of Photography." 2013

A Brief History of Photography includes three classic essays by Walter Benjamin, philosopher, historian of photography, and aesthetics: “A Brief History of Photography,” “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility,” and “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” accompanied by an afterword written by historian of photography, art critic Vladimir Levashov.

With the kind permission of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, we publish the essay “Paris - the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in his review of which another German philosopher and sociologist, Max Horkheimer, one of the founders of the Frankfurt School, wrote: “It seems that the method which consists in penetrating into the essence of the era through minor superficial symptoms, was completely successful. You go far beyond all existing attempts at a materialistic explanation of aesthetic phenomena.”

Paris - the capital of the nineteenth century
Blue waters, pink flowers;

The evening is a feast for the eyes;

The important ladies walk first,

The simpler ladies follow them.

Nguyen-Trong-Hiep:

Paris capitate de la France (1897)

I. Fourier, or passages
De ces palais les colonnes magiques

A l'amateur montrent de toutes parts

Dans les objets, qu’.talent leurs portiques

Que I'industrie est rivale des arts.

Nouveaux tableaux de Paris (1828) 1

Most of the Parisian passages arose in the decade and a half after 1822. The first prerequisite for their appearance was the rise of the textile trade. Magasins de nouveauté 2 appeared, the first trading establishments that had fairly large warehouses in the same premises. They were the forerunners of department stores. This was the time about which Balzac wrote: “Le grand roème de l’étalage chante ses strophes de couleur depuis la Madeleine jusqu’a la porte Saint-Dénis” 3 . The arcades are centers for trade in luxury goods. When they are finished, the art enters the service of the dealer. Contemporaries never tire of admiring them. For a long time they remain an attraction for visitors. One of the Illustrated Guides to Paris says: “These passages, the latest invention of industrial comfort, are glass-roofed, marble-lined passages through entire groups of houses whose owners have united for such an enterprise. On both sides of these passages, in which the light falls from above, there are the most luxurious shops, so that such a passage is a city, even the whole world in miniature.” The first gas lamps were installed in the passages.

The second prerequisite for the emergence of passages was the beginning of the use of metal structures in construction. From the standpoint of the Empire style, this technique was supposed to contribute to the renewal of architecture in the ancient Greek spirit. The architectural theorist Bötticher expresses a general conviction when he says that “with regard to the artistic forms of the new system” the “formal principle of the Hellenistic model” must come into force. Empire style is a style of revolutionary terrorism, for which the state is an end in itself. Just as little as Napoleon understood the functional nature of the state as an instrument of the class rule of the bourgeoisie, the architects of his time comprehended the functional nature of iron, with which the dominance of the constructive principle in architecture begins. These architects gave the support beams the appearance of Pompeian columns and the factory buildings the appearance of residential buildings, just as the early train stations later imitated Swiss-style country houses. “The design takes on the role of the subconscious.” Nevertheless, the concept of the engineer, which originates from the revolutionary wars, becomes increasingly significant, and a struggle begins between the designer and the decorator, between the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts 4 .

For the first time in the history of architecture, an artificial building material—iron—appears. It is subject to development, the pace of which increases as the century progresses. The decisive impetus for the development was that locomotives, which had been attempted since the late 1820s, could only run on iron rails. The rail becomes the first piece to be mounted in Paris - the capital of the nineteenth century by Walter Benjamin, the predecessor of the beam. Iron is avoided in the construction of residential buildings and is used in arcades, exhibition halls, train stations - buildings intended for temporary occupancy. At the same time, the architectural sphere of glass is expanding. However, the social prerequisites for its intensive use as a building material appeared only a century later. Even in Scherbart's Glass Architecture (1914) 5 its application is part of a literary utopia.

Chaque époque rêve la suivante.

Michelet: Avenir! Avenir! 6

The form of the new means of production, which at first still repeats the form of the old (Marx) 7, in the collective consciousness corresponds to images in which the new is permeated with the old. These images are an expression of desires, and the collective tries to overcome or mitigate in them the incompleteness of the social product, as well as the shortcomings of the social mode of production. At the same time, these visions express a persistent desire to dissociate themselves from the obsolete - and this means: from the immediate past. These tendencies send fantastic images, brought to life by the new, back to what is irrevocably past. In the vision in which the next era appears before the eyes of each era, this subsequent era appears united with elements of the primitive past, that is, a classless society. The primitive experience stored in the unconscious of the collective gives birth, in combination with the new, to a utopia that leaves its mark in a thousand life configurations, from long-term buildings to fleeting fashion.

These relationships are manifested in Fourier's utopia. Its internal impulse is the appearance of machines. But this is not expressed directly in her images; they proceed from the immorality of commercial entrepreneurship and the pseudo-morality that is in its service. The phalanstery must return people to a situation in which morality turns out to be unnecessary. Its extremely complex organization turns out to be machinery. The cogwheels of passions, the close interaction of mechanical and intriguing passions, represent a primitive analogy of a machine based on psychological material. This mechanism, made up of people, produces a country with milk rivers and jelly banks, an ancient dream that Fourier's utopia filled with new life.

In the passages, Fourier saw the architectural canon of the phalanstery. What is noteworthy is their reactionary transformation: created for trading purposes, Fourier’s passages are transformed into living quarters. Phalanster is a city of passages. In the midst of strict Empire forms, Fourier builds a colorful Biedermeier idyll. Its faded shine can still be felt in Zola. He picks up Fourier's ideas in Labor, bidding farewell to passages in Thérèse Raquin. Marx, in a polemic with Karl Grün, came to the defense of Fourier, emphasizing the “grandiose image of human life” created by him 8 . He also paid attention to Fourier's humor. Indeed, Jean Paul in his “Levan” is as akin to Fourier the teacher as Scherbart in his “Glass Architecture” is to Fourier the utopian.

II. Daguerre, or panoramas
Soleil, prends garde. toi!

A.J. Wiertz. OEuvres litt.raires (Paris 1870) 9

Just as architecture begins to outgrow art in its development, the same thing happens with painting in panoramas. The culmination of the preparation of the panoramas coincides with the appearance of the passages. The desire to transform panoramas into a perfect imitation of nature with the help of artistic techniques was tireless. Attempts were made to recreate the change in lighting during the day, the rising of the moon, and the sound of a waterfall. David 10 advises his students to use sketches from life for panoramas. By creating deceptive imitations of natural processes, panoramas anticipate what followed photography - cinema and sound cinema.

Along with the panorama, panoramic literature arose. It includes “The Book of Miscellaneous Things,” “The French as Portrayed by Themselves,” “The Devil in Paris,” and “The Big City.” These books prepared the way for collective fictional activity, for which in the 1830s Girardin opened the field of activity in the illustrated sheet. They consist of individual essays, whose anecdotal form corresponds to the three-dimensional foreground of the panorama, and the informative basis - to the picturesque background of the panorama. This literature is also panoramic in social terms. For the last time, the worker - outside his class - appears as staff of the idyll.

Panoramas, heralding a revolution in the relationship between art and technology, are at the same time an expression of a new sense of life. The city dweller, whose political superiority over the countryside has been repeatedly demonstrated throughout the century, attempts to bring the countryside into the city. In the panoramas, the city expands its boundaries, taking in the surrounding area, just as it does later, in a more refined way, for the flâneur. Daguerre is a student of the panoramic artist Prevost, whose works are in the panoramic passage. Description of the panoramas of Prevost and Daguerre. In 1839, the Daguerre panorama burned down. In the same year he announced the invention of the daguerreotype.

Arago introduces the photograph in a parliamentary speech. He points to its place in the history of technology. He prophesies its application in the field of science. Artists begin to discuss its artistic value. The advent of photography leads to the destruction of the large craft class of portrait miniaturists. This happens not only for economic reasons. Early photography was artistically superior to portrait miniatures. The technical reason for this was the long exposure, which required the highest concentration from the subject. The social reason for this was the fact that the photographers were representatives of the cultural avant-garde, which supplied a significant part of their clientele. From the fact that Nadar started filming in the sewer system of Paris, it is clear that he was ahead of his fellow artists in his development. After all, he was the first to make the lens a tool for making discoveries. Its significance is the greater, the more doubtful the subjective moment in pictorial and graphic information is felt in the light of the new technical and social reality.

The 1855 World's Fair included a special exhibition on photography for the first time. In the same year, Wirtz published an article on photography, recognizing its task as the philosophical insight of painting. He understood, as his own paintings show, this insight was in a political sense. Thus, Wirtz can be considered the first who, if not anticipating montage as the use of photography for propaganda purposes, then at least put forward a demand of this kind. With the development of means of communication, the informational value of painting decreases. When reacting to a photograph, it first begins to emphasize the color elements of the image. When impressionism gives way to cubism, painting opens up another area into which photography cannot yet follow it. Photography, in turn, has sharply expanded since the middle of the century the scope of its commercial application, offering to the market in unlimited quantities portraits, landscapes, scenes that either did not find use at all, or only as images for a specific customer. To increase sales, she updated her objects with a new fashionable shooting technique, which determined the subsequent history of photography.

III. Granville, or world exhibitions
Qui, quand le monde entier, de Paris jusqu'en Chine,

O divin Saint-Simon, sera dans ta doctrine,

L'âge d'or doit renaître avec tout son éclat,

Les fleuves rouleront du thé, du chocolat;

Les moutons tout rôtis bondiront dans la plaine,

Et les brochets au bleu nageront dans la Seine;

Les .pinards viendront au monde fricasses,

Avec des croûtons frits tout au tour concassés.

Les arbres produiront des pommes en compotes

Et l'on moissonnere des cerricks et des bottes;

Il neigera du vin, il pleuvera des bullets,

Et du ciel les canards tomberont aux navets.

Langlé et Vanderbusch. Louis-Bronze et le Saint-

Simonien (1832) 11

World's fairs are places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish. “L’Europe s’est déplacépour voir des merchandises,” 12 says Taine in 1855. World exhibitions are preceded by national industrial exhibitions, the first of which took place in 1798 on the Champ de Mars. It is based on the desire to “entertain the working people so that it becomes a celebration of their emancipation.” The worker as a client is in the foreground. The structure of the entertainment industry has not yet been formed. The national holiday should create this structure. Chaptal's speech celebrating the industry opens the exhibition. The Saint-Simonists, planning to industrialize the planet, pick up the idea of world exhibitions. Chevalier, the first authority in the new field, was a student of Enfantine and publisher of the Saint-Simonist newspaper Globe. The Saint-Simonists foresaw the development of the world economy, but not the class struggle. Participating in mid-century industrial and commercial enterprises, they were helpless in matters affecting the proletariat. World exhibitions highlight the exchange value of goods. They create a situation in which their use value recedes into the background. They reveal a phantasmagoria into which a person enters in order to surrender to entertainment. The entertainment industry makes his situation easier by elevating him to the level of a commodity. He entrusts himself to her manipulations, enjoying the alienation from himself and from others. The enthronement of the product and the aura of entertainment surrounding it constitute the secret theme of Granville's art 13 . This corresponds to the dissonance between its utopian and its cynical elements. His sophistication in the depiction of dead objects corresponds to what Marx called the “theological contrivances” of the commodity 14 . It finds expression in the "spécialité" - an exclusive trademark appearing at this time in the luxury goods industry; Granville's pencil turns all of nature into such a commodity. He depicts them in the same spirit in which advertising - this word also appears then - begins to present its object. Eventually he goes crazy.

Fashion: Lady Death! Lady Death!

Leopardi. Dialogue between Fashion and Death

World's fairs create a universe of commodities. Granville's fantasies project commodity characteristics onto the universe. They are modernizing it. The rings of Saturn turn into a cast-iron balcony, onto which its inhabitants go out in the evenings to get some fresh air. The literary equivalent of these graphic fantasies are the books of the naturalist, the Fourierist Toussenal. Fashion prescribes a ritual in which the fetish of the commodity is to be venerated, and Granville expanded the scope of its pretensions to include both everyday objects and outer space. Taking the situation to the extreme, he reveals the nature of fashion. It is in conflict with the organic world. She covers the organic body with a cap of the inorganic world. She observes the rights of the corpse in the living. Her vital nerve is fetishism, subordinate to the sex appeal of the inorganic world. The cult of the commodity takes him into its service.

For the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867, Victor Hugo issued a manifesto: “To the peoples of Europe.” Earlier and more clearly, their interests were expressed by French delegations of workers, the first of which was sent to the London World Exhibition of 1851, the second, numbering 750 people, to the exhibition of 1862. This second delegation was indirectly important for the founding of the international Marx workers' association. The phantasmagoria of capitalist culture reaches a dazzling peak at the World Exhibition of 1867. The Empire is at the zenith of its power. Paris confirms its fame as the capital of luxury and fashion. Offenbach sets the rhythm of Parisian life. The operetta is an ironic utopia of the unshakable dominance of capital.

IV. Louis Philippe, or interior
La tête...

Sur la table de nuit, comme une renoncule,

Baudelaire. Un martyre 15

Under Louis Philippe, the private house, the private person, entered the historical arena. The expansion of the democratic state apparatus coincides with the parliamentary corruption orchestrated by Ghio. Under its shadow, the ruling class makes history, pursuing its selfish interests. He develops railroads to increase his dividends. He supports the dominance of Louis-Philippe, as the power - the main rentier. During the July Revolution, the bourgeoisie achieved the goals of 1789 (Marx).

For the privat, the living space comes into conflict with the workplace for the first time. The basis of living space is the interior. The office acts as its complement. The private person, settling scores with reality in the office, requires that the interior nourish his illusions. This necessity is all the more urgent since he does not intend to extend his business considerations to the limits of social ones. By creating his own private space, he moves away from both. Hence the phantasmagoria of the interior. For the private one, this is the universe. He collects in it what is removed in space and time. His salon is a box in the world theater.

An excursion about the Art Nouveau style. The interior shock takes place at the turn of the century in the Art Nouveau style. However, in its ideology it seems to be bringing the interior to perfection. The enlightenment of a lonely soul is his goal. Individualism is his theory. For Vandervelde, the house turns out to be an expression of personality. The ornament in this house is the same as the signature of a painting. The real meaning of Art Nouveau style does not appear in this ideology. He is the latest attempt to break through art, besieged by technology in its ivory tower. He mobilizes all the resources of penetration. They find expression in the mediumistic language of lines, in the flower as a symbol of naked, wild nature, opposed to the technical environment of man. New elements of metal building structures and beam shapes are taking over the modern era. Through ornament he tries to return these forms to the realm of art. Concrete opens up new possibilities for plastic modeling in architecture. At this time, the real center of gravity of the living space shifts to the bureau. He who is deprived of reality creates it in his home. The result of the Art Nouveau style is summed up by “The Builder Solnes” 16: the attempt of an individual to measure his strength with technology, relying on the strength of his soul, ends in death.

Je crois... à mon âme: la Chose.

Léon Deubel Œuvres (Paris, 1929) 17

The interior is a haven of art. The collector is the true inhabitant of the interior. His business is the enlightenment of things. He had the Sisyphean task of acquiring objects into his possession to remove their commercial character. However, instead of a use value, he gives them only an amateur value. The collector in his dreams is carried away not only to a distant world or the world of the past, but also to a more perfect world, in which people, although they are just as little endowed with what they need as in the everyday world, but the things in it are free from heavy duty be useful.

The interior is not only the universe, but also the rentier’s case. To live means to leave traces. They are emphasized in the interior. Many covers and coverings, cases and boxes are being invented in which traces of everyday household items are imprinted. Traces of the occupant are also imprinted in the interior. A literary detective emerges, following these tracks. The first interior physiognomist was Poe, as evidenced by The Philosophy of Furnishings and his detective stories. The criminals of the first detective novels are not gentlemen or dregs of society, but private individuals from the bourgeois environment.

V. Baudelaire, or Parisian streets
Tout pour moi deviant allegoric.

Baudelaire. Le Cygne 18

Baudelaire's talent, fueled by melancholy, is an allegorical talent. With Baudelaire, Paris becomes the subject of lyrical poetry for the first time. This lyric is not a glorification of native places, the gaze of an allegorical poet aimed at the city is rather the gaze of an alienated person. This is the view of a flâneur, whose way of life still surrounds the future bleak existence of a metropolis resident with a reconciling halo. The flâneur is still on the threshold, the threshold of both the metropolis and the bourgeois class. Neither one nor the other has yet defeated him. Neither there nor here does he feel at home. He seeks refuge in the crowd. Early discussions of the physiognomy of the crowd can be found in Engels and Poe. The crowd is a veil through which the familiar urban environment winks at the flâneur like a phantasmagoria. In the crowd, the city is sometimes a landscape, sometimes a living room. They are then used to build a department store, which uses the flâneurs to increase turnover. The department store is the latest trick of the flâneur.

In the guise of a flâneur, the intelligentsia enters the market. As it seems to her, to look at it, but in reality it is already in order to find a buyer. At this intermediate stage, when she still has patrons of the arts, but is already beginning to get used to the market, she acts as a bohemian. The uncertainty of its economic position corresponds to the uncertainty of its political function. It is most clearly manifested in the activities of professional conspirators, who entirely belong to bohemians. The initial sphere of their activity is the army, then the petty bourgeoisie, and sometimes the proletariat. However, this layer sees its opponents in the true leaders of the proletariat. The "Communist Manifesto" means the end of their political existence. Baudelaire's poetry draws its strength from the rebellious pathos of this layer. He sides with asocial elements. The only opportunity for him to realize sexual intimacy is with a prostitute.

Facilis descensus Averno.

Virgilius. Aeneis 19

Baudelaire's lyrics are unique in that the images of women and death intersect in a third image - the image of Paris. The Paris of his poems is a city sunk into the abyss, more underwater than underground. The chthonic elements of the city - its topographical basis, the old, dried-up bed of the Seine - found some expression in him. And yet, in Baudelaire’s “dead idyllic” city, the social substrate, modern, is of fundamental importance. Modernity sets the main emphasis of his poetry. In the form of a spleen, he breaks the ideal (“Spleen and the Ideal”). However, it is precisely the spirit of modernity that constantly refers to primitive antiquity. Here this happens through the ambiguity that is characteristic of social relations and the creations of this era. Ambiguity is a clear manifestation of dialectics, a frozen law of dialectics. This stopped state is a utopia, and the dialectical picture is the product of a dream. This picture depicts the product as such: as a fetish. This picture is presented by the passages, which are both the house and the stars. This picture is presented by a prostitute, who is both a saleswoman and a product.

Je voyage pour connaître ma geographie. 20

Notes of a Madman (Paris, 1907)

The last poem of “The Flowers of Evil,” “The Journey”: “Le mort? vieux capitaine, il est temps, levons l'ancre" 21 . The flâneur's last journey: death. Her goal: to learn new things. "Au fond de l'inconnu pour trouver du nouveau" 22. Novelty is a quality independent of the consumer value of the product. It constitutes the source of the inalienable deceptive brilliance of the images generated by the collective unconscious. This is the quintessence of pseudo-consciousness, of which fashion is a tireless agent. This brilliance of the new is reflected, like one mirror in another, in the equally deceptive impression that everything is constantly repeating itself. The result of this play of mirrors is a phantasmagoria of “cultural history” in which the bourgeoisie enjoys its pseudo-consciousness. Art, which begins to doubt its purpose and ceases to be “inséparable de l’utilité” 23 (Baudelaire), has to accept the new as the highest value. Arbiter novarum rerum 24 becomes a snob for him. He is to art what a dandy is to fashion. Just as in the 17th century allegory became the canon of dialectical paintings, so in the 19th century it became a novelty. Newspapers are the companions of novelty stores. The press organizes a market for spiritual values, which initially experiences a boom. Nonconformists rebel against the fact that art is being handed over to the power of the market. They gather under the banner of “l’art pour l’art”. From this slogan arises the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, which is an attempt to isolate art from the influence of technological progress. The reverence that constitutes his ritual is the other pole of the entertainment that illuminates the product. Both of them abstract from human social existence. Baudelaire turns out to be weaker than Wagner's spell.

VI. Osman, or barricades
J'ai le culte du Beau, du Bien, des grandes choses,

De la belle nature inspiration le grand art,

Qu'il enchante l'oreille ou charme le regard;

J'ai l'amour du printemps en fleurs: femmes et roses!

Baron Hausmann. Confession d'un lion devenu

Blooming space of scenery,

The canopy of a forest or the splendor of a palace,

The Law of Omnipotent Perspective

On stage he has endless power.

Franz Böhle. Theater Catechism

Haussmann's urban ideal 26 was the ability to see the perspective of long street routes. It responds to the desire to ennoble technical necessity with artistic principles, constantly noted in the 19th century. The institutions of secular and spiritual power of the bourgeoisie were to reach their apotheosis in the frame of the avenues. During the work, the avenues were covered with canvas, and when they were ready, they were opened like monuments. Haussmann's activities are in harmony with Napoleonic idealism. It creates favorable conditions for financial capital. Paris is experiencing a heyday of speculation. Playing on the stock exchange pushes aside forms of gambling that came from feudal society. The phantasmagoria of space into which the flâneur plunges corresponds to the phantasmagoria of time that envelops the player. The game turns into a drug. Lafargue declares the mysteries of the conjuncture to be a small prototype. The expropriation carried out by Osman causes fraudulent speculation. The verdicts of the court of cassation, inspired by the bourgeois and Orléanist opposition, increase the financial risk of Haussmannization. Haussmann is trying to strengthen his dictatorship and impose a state of emergency in Paris. In one of the parliamentary speeches of 1864, he expresses his hatred of the uprooted population of the giant city. And this population is constantly growing as a result of his activities. Rising rents are forcing the proletariat to move to the suburbs. As a result, Parisian neighborhoods are losing their identity. The red ring of Paris appears. Haussmann himself gave himself the nickname Artiste démolisseur 27. He felt called to do what he did, and emphasizes this in his memoirs. In doing so, however, he alienates Parisians from their city. They no longer feel at home there. They begin to realize the inhumane nature of the metropolis. Maxime D. Camp's monumental work "Paris" arose from this consciousness. "Jérémiades d'un Hausmannisé" 28 give it the form of a biblical lament. The true purpose of the work that Osman carried out was to secure the city from civil war. He wanted to make barricades permanently impossible in Paris. For the same purpose, Louis Philippe already introduced wooden coverings for pavements. Nevertheless, barricades played a role in the February Revolution. Engels studied the technique of barricade fighting. Osman wanted to prevent the appearance of barricades in two ways. The widening of the streets was supposed to make them impossible, and the new streets were supposed to pave the shortest route from the barracks to the workers' quarters. Contemporaries dubbed this enterprise L'embellissement stratégique.

Fais voir, en déjouant la ruse,

O république, à ces pervers

That grande face de Méduse,

Au milieu de rouges éclairs.

Chanson d'ouvrier vers 1850 29

Barricades are reborn in the Commune. It is stronger and more advanced than ever before. It crosses large boulevards, often reaches the second floor and covers the trenches hidden behind it. Just as the Communist Manifesto ends the era of professional conspirators, so the Commune puts an end to the phantasmagoria that dominates the freedom of the proletariat. It dispelled the illusion that the task of the proletarian revolution is to complete, hand in hand with the bourgeoisie, what was started in 1789. This illusion dominates the period from 1831 to 1871, from the Lyon weavers' revolt to the Commune. The bourgeoisie never shared this delusion. Its struggle against the social rights of the proletariat begins already during the great revolution and coincides with the philanthropic movement that reached its greatest development under Napoleon III, masking this struggle. Under Napoleon III, the fundamental work of this movement appeared: “European Workers” by Le Play. Along with the disguised position of philanthropism, the bourgeoisie constantly took an open position of class struggle. Already in 1831 she declared in the Journal des débats: “Every manufacturer lives in his factory like a planter among his slaves.” Of course, this is the trouble with the early uprisings of the workers that they did not have a revolutionary theory to show them the way, but, on the other hand, this was also the condition for the immediate strength and enthusiasm with which they took on the organization of a new society. This enthusiasm, which reaches its climax in the Commune, temporarily attracts the best representatives of the bourgeoisie to the side of the workers, but in the end it makes them victims of its worst representatives. Rimbaud and Courbet take the side of the Commune. The fire of Paris becomes a fitting end to Haussmann's destructive activities.

My good father visited Paris.

Karl Gutskov. Letters from Paris (1842)

Balzac was the first to talk about the ruins of the bourgeoisie. But only surrealism opened their panorama. The development of the productive forces reduced the symbols of the aspirations of the last century to ruins before the monuments representing them fell to pieces. This development emancipated creative activity from art in the 19th century, just as it emancipated the sciences from philosophy in the 16th century. This began with architecture as an engineering design. This is followed by reflecting nature through photography. Fantasy is preparing to find practical application as advertising graphics. Poetry in an illustrated publication obeys the law of montage. All these products are sent to the market as goods. But they still hesitate, stopping at the threshold. What remains from this century are passages and interiors, exhibition halls and panoramas. These are relics of a fantasy world. The use of elements of fantastic visions during awakening is a textbook case of dialectical thinking. Therefore, dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Each epoch not only dreams of the next epoch, but in dreams it also strives for awakening. It carries within itself its ending and develops it—as Hegel already noted—by cunning. With the upheaval of the commodity economy, we begin to understand the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins, although they have not yet disintegrated.

Notes
The work was written in May 1935 as a prospectus for the Institute of Social Research, in order to include the topic on which Benjamin was working in the plans of the institute. As a result, a preliminary draft of an essay emerged, which was supposed to give a panorama of the cultural history of the 19th century through the prism of certain everyday phenomena. Work on this work began in the 1920s and remained unfinished. The “Essay on Passages,” as Benjamin briefly called it, received the approval of his colleagues. M. Horkheimer, in his review of the prospectus (09/18/1935), wrote: “It seems that the method of penetrating into the essence of the era through minor superficial symptoms was completely successful. You go far beyond all existing attempts at a materialistic explanation of aesthetic phenomena” (GS 5.2, 1143). During Benjamin's lifetime, the work was not published, just like the French version written in 1939. Translation according to edition: GS 5.1, 45-59.

The magical columns of these
palaces
Prove to an amateur
arts comprehensively
The items that are on display
in their porticos,
What industry is
rival of art.
New paintings of Paris.
New fashion stores.
“The great poem of shop windows lifts its colorful stanzas from the Church of the Madeleine to the Porte Saint-Denis” (“History and Physiology of Parisian Boulevards”).
Polytechnic and Art Institute.
A fantastic novel by the German poet and writer, the forerunner of modernist literature, Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915).
“Every era dreams of the next one after it,” - the words of the French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874).
"Capital", dept. 4, ch. 13 (Marx K., Engels F. Soch., 1960, vol. 23. P. 394).
“German Ideology” (Soch., 1955, vol. 3, p. 518).
"Sun, take care of yourself!"
A. Wirtz. Literary essays.
Jacques Louis David (David, 1748-1825) - French classicist artist, court painter of Napoleon.
What, divine Saint-Simon,
if the whole world
From Paris to China, was arranged
according to your teaching,
It would be truly golden
century,
Rivers of tea would flow
and chocolate;
Fried lambs would jump
through the meadows,
And the stewed pikes would float in the Seine;
And spinach would be born
in fricasse,
Along with croutons,
shredded
and passivated.
Apple trees would grow on the trees
compotes,
Instead of rain it would fall from the sky
wine, and instead of snow
Chickens and ducks with rutabaga would die.
Langlais and Vanderbush. Louis and Saint-Simonist.
“All of Europe moved to look at the goods.”
Granville (real name: Jean-Jacques Isidore Gerard, 1803-1847) was a cartoonist, creator of contemporary satirical works and literary illustrations (La Fontaine, Beranger, Hugo).
"Capital", dept. 1, ch. 14.
Severed head on the table
lies,
Like an unprecedented buttercup.
Baudelaire. Martyr
(translated by V. Levik).
Drama by G. Ibsen (1892).
“I believe... in my soul: a thing.”
Leon Debelle. Essays.
“Everything becomes an allegory for me.” Baudelaire. Swan.
“The descent to Avernus is easy” (that is, to the underworld). Virgil, Aeneid, VI. 126.
"A journey to discover my geography."
"Death! Old captain!
On the road! Set sail!
(translated by M. Tsvetaeva).
"Into the unknown depths -
to find something new"
(translated by M. Tsvetaeva).
"inseparable from the useful."
"arbiter in new matters."
I serve the beautiful, the good,
great,
Inspiring the beautiful
great art by nature,
Delightful to the ears and eyes;
I love spring in bloom:
women and roses.
Baron Osman. Confessions of an Aging Lion.
Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann (Hausmann, 1809-1891) - politician, appointed by Napoleon III prefect of the metropolitan department in 1853 and for 16 years led the large-scale reconstruction of Paris. Under pressure from the opposition, which accused him of financial fraud, he was forced to resign.
Demolition artist.
“The Lament of Jeremiah, Victim of Ottomanization”; Benjamin gives an inaccurate title of the book: Paris desert. Lamentations d'un Hausmannise. Paris, 1868.
“Again they are preparing bonds for us...
But you, having broken the web of lies,
Republic, your face of Medusa,
Show them in the blaze of lightning!”
(translated by V. Dmitriev).
"The Song of the Vote", which Benjamin refers to as a "song of the workers around 1850", was written by Pierre Dupont (1821-1870) in 1848.

Walter Benjamin

A Brief History of Photography

This publication was published as part of the joint publishing program of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture and Ad Marginem Press LLC.

The publishing house expresses its gratitude to Pavel Vladyevich Khoroshilov for the selection of photographic materials for this publication

A Brief History of Photography

A completely different spirit emanates from the speech that the physicist Arago made on July 3, 1839 in the Chamber of Deputies as a defender of Daguerre’s invention. What is remarkable about this speech is how it connects invention with all aspects of human activity. The panorama unfolded in it is wide enough that the dubious blessing of photography by painting - which could not be avoided here either - turned out to be insignificant, but the anticipation of the real significance of the discovery was fully revealed. “When the inventors of a new instrument,” says Arago, “use it to study nature, it always turns out that what they expected is only a small part in comparison with the series of subsequent discoveries that this instrument initiated.” This speech takes a broad look at the area of application of new technology from astrophysics to philology: next to the prospect of stellar photography is the idea of creating a corpus of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Daguerre's photographs were iodized silver plates exposed in a camera obscura; they had to be rotated until a soft gray picture could be seen from a certain angle. They were unique; On average, one record cost 25 gold francs in 1839. They were often kept like jewelry in luxurious cases. However, in the hands of some artists they turned into a technical aid. Just as seventy years later Utrillo2 would draw his charming images of houses in the Parisian suburbs not from life, but from postcards, so the renowned English portraitist David Octavius Hill used a whole series of portrait photographs for his wall image of the first general synod of the Church of Scotland in 1843. However, he took these photographs himself. And it was these simple technical aids, not intended for prying eyes, that ensured his name a place in history, while his paintings fell into oblivion. And yet, more deeply than these series of photographic portraits, some documentary photographs introduce a new technique: these are images of nameless people, not portraits. Such images have long existed in pictorial form. If the paintings were kept in the house, then from time to time someone else would ask about who was depicted in them. Two or three generations later, this interest disappeared: paintings, if they retain meaning, retain it only as evidence of the art of the one who painted them. However, with the advent of photography, something new and extraordinary arises: in the photograph of the New Haven fisherman, looking down with such leisurely and seductive modesty, there remains something beyond what could be exhausted by the art of the photographer Hill, something that does not cease, stubbornly asking about the name of the one who lived then and continues to be present here and will never agree to completely dissolve in “art.”

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Walter Benjamin, A Brief History of Photography. A Brief History of Photography Analysis of Benjamin A Brief History of Photography