History is photography: the afterimage of Walter Benjamin

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 1998 by Jeannene M. Przyblyski

The questions raised by the links between photography and history touch on issues that belong to the entire trajectory of his writings - the historical and political consequences of technology; the relations between reproduction and mimesis, images and history, remembering and forgetting, allegory and mourning, visual and linguistic representation, and film and photography.(8)

As Cadava so elegantly puts it, and as any reader of Benjamin will recognize, Benjamin left us a series of words "to learn to read."(9) "Death, corpse, decay, ruin, history, mourning, memory, photography": Words of Light puts each of these Benjaminian motifs through its paces to reveal not only its pervasiveness within Benjamin's writings on history and photography, but also on literature, autobiography and material culture more generally. Fragmentary encryptions within Benjamin's legendarily fragmented oeuvre, these words form the basis for a series of meditations that traverse the modern and the postmodern, the Marxist and the mystic, the apocalyptic, and perhaps even the redemptive.

Cadava's is one of the most searching and painstaking readings of Benjamin's writings on photography and history to appear in the last few years, and exemplifies one possibility for the continued address to Benjamin and his work: namely, the option of burrowing ever deeper into the Benjaminian cosmos, teasing out its intertextual and poetic shifts within the photographic and historic image-fields. Thoroughly immersed in the field of Benjamin studies, Cadava is also at some pains to locate Benjamin within his own cultural milieu. His interweaving of texts on photography by Kracauer and Ernst Junger, the right-wing Weimar author of several photographically illustrated books, are particularly welcome, as are the few moments when Cadava reads Benjamin as a point of departure for further thoughts on some of his recurring subjects, including the philosopher of memory Henri Bergson, and, most compellingly, the nineteenth-century revolutionary visionary Auguste Blanqui.

Also taking up the challenge of reading Benjamin's words, Rugg's Picturing Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography is an attempt to bring contemporary theoretical discussions of photography to bear on our understanding of how modern autobiography is written. A literary scholar like Cadava, Rugg sees photography as the defining modern mode of representation intervening in the construction of the self. Indeed this assertion is almost the mirror reflection of Cadava's observation that "that photographic technology belongs to the physiognomy of historical thought means that there can be no thinking of history that is not at the same time a thinking of photography"(10) Autobiographers, Rugg asserts, need to go head to head with photography in order to win control of their images back from a medium which, because of its dual position of privilege in both the bureaucratic archives of the police, government, etc. and the family photograph album, as well as its pervasiveness as a staple of modern biography and autobiography (what would the celebrity bio be without pictures?), threatens to co-opt the individual's authority to control the way his or her self is apprehended in public: