History is photography: the afterimage of Walter Benjamin

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

It seems in keeping with such distinctions between high and low, the self-consciously relevant and the blissfully banal, that throughout the introduction to her book Rugg sets observations about the "sophisticated" understanding of photography against assertions about its "naive" consumption. These rhetorical moves are not only suggestive of the larger historical situation of photography, that spans both the most forgettable of commercial imagery and a fine art of photography determined not to be eclipsed from view, but they also begin to point to Benjamin's importance as a central participant in the theoretical discussion of the medium. Nowhere does the problem of naivete and sophistication come more to the fore than when raising the vexed question of what Benjamin meant by "aura" and photography's role in its supposed death or resurrection.

As Miriam Hansen has aptly observed, "Benjamin's attitude towards the decline of the aura is profoundly ambivalent, just as the concept of "aura" itself displays an 'irritating ambiguity'"(20) Benjamin's definition of this concept is most often derived from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in which "aura" is described in reference to natural objects as "the unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be."(21) Related to Benjamin's preoccupations with both memory and history, the "aura" of cultural objects is commonly understood to refer to the traditional mystique of the work of art as singular and enduring. As such, it is with some excitement about its revolutionary potential that Benjamin announces the dismantlement of "aura" by the processes of mechanical reproduction that are able to replicate artworks into infinity. But he also seems to mourn its passing as one of the last vestiges of habits of naturalized memory. In this way, Benjamin's equivocal theorization of "aura" relates to larger issues of photography's ontological instability, its perceived relation to mortality and to the displacement of immanence by mere information. As John Durham Peters suggests in "Beauty's Veils: The Ambivalent Iconoclasm of Kierkegaard and Benjamin" the particular inflections of this relationship between photograph and death come into clearer view when Benjamin's working through of "aura" is read in the context of his discussion of "Schein" or "beautiful semblance" in his essay on "Goethe's Elective Affinities," only recently available in translation and so not yet widely considered in American scholarship on Benjamin. Benjamin focuses on Ottilie, the beautiful young woman who becomes a strangely static object of desire in Goethe's novella. Her immobility is such that one is tempted to call her a pre-photographic image which, as Peters observes:

is most beautiful when most frozen. Ottilie, who dies in anorexic penance for the inadvertent death of the child who resembled her, is buried in a glass-covered coffin so that her appearance may remain. Before photography, Goethe . . . recognizes a complicity between the desire to capture an image and the fixity of death.(22)