History is photography: the afterimage of Walter Benjamin

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

Where to go from here? based upon the books under consideration, a few thoughts come to mind. First, we need to continue to grapple with the tension between what draws us to Benjamin and what we perceive as useful; what is worth repeating and what he has already done. If Hayden White approached the historical works of Jacob Burckhardt, Karl Marx, Jules Michelet, Alexis de Tocqueville, etc., as literary genres, then such approaches as Cadava's seem conceived in a similar spirit. What draws us to Benjamin, as White put it and as Cadava so elegantly explores, is "the consistency, coherence, and illuminative power of [his] respective vision of the historical field."(25) Never mind the small errors of fact that readers of his photography essay love to point out. All histories worth their while contain, if not errors, at least deliberate skewings of the data. And never mind Benjamin's notorious inconsistencies that are rooted in his commitment to a dialectical way of thinking. But what we should also take from him is the desire to return to the historical field in the same illuminative, ethical spirit. White sees this project as only possible when full credence is given to "the preconceptual and specifically poetic nature of . . . perspectives on history and its processes" that is, self-consciously formalist explorations of historical images are one means by which an image of history might become visible.

But there is more to it. For in order to conduct those explorations within the history of photography what is also needed is work that will de-totalize the conception of photographic formalism, whose reification has been blamed for too long on John Szarkowski and his crowd. Just as the populist moralizing tone of Sontag and Berger was a product of '60s-style activism, formalism, as it was bartered by the Photography Department of the Museum of Modern Art, had acquired such a bad name by the mid-1980s that institutional analyses became one of the few acceptable choices for politically-conscious photography historians and critics. There remains good reason for this skepticism. Certainly there is a formalism that has been deployed to occlude photography's complicity in dominant structures of power and to render its products palatable to a largely middle-class and obstinately complacent audience. (One need only to have observed the looks of happy aesthetic contemplation on the faces of visitors to the profoundly unsettling "Police Pictures" exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to get a sense of the degree to which even ostensibly revisionist, socio-historically-informed presentations can have trouble mounting any real resistance to this paradigm.(26)) But we all know that by now. Its very durability means that we can no longer afford to surrender formalism to this constituency. Just as we are now comfortable speaking of photography's many histories, or of the histories of many photographies, we should also explore the notion of its many formalist guises rather than seeking, ad nauseam, to define its ontological specificity. Benjamin's example may well help us with this, for his work is meant to be nothing if not tendentious and, simultaneously, nothing if not sensitive to formalism's infinite variations.