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Walter Benjamin's "Short History of Photography"

French Reproductive Engraving and the Metaphor of Translation

Stephen Bann

Warburg-Haus 31 January 2002

"My lecture is concerned with the practice of visual reproduction, particularly through the medium of engraving, and picks up the themes that I have begun to develop in my recent study, Parallel Lines. Usually, when one has completed a long book, it is a good time to tum to something completely different. The reason that I find constant new interest is this area is that we appear now to be entering a new historical phase in the culture and practice of reproduction, which impels us to think differently about topics until recently consigned to oblivion. Every schoolboy now knows the difference between analogue and digital reproduction. And as a result of that knowledge, we have left the Garden of Eden which the human race temporarily inhabited for a century and a half alter the invention of photography. The particular kind of illusion generated by the light responsiveness of the photographic plate is being equalled and indeed surpassed by a new binary code, which enables, for example, the combination of photographic colour and black and white within the same homogeneous visual field. Everything seems possible, in reproduction, at the price of the loss of a certain innocence."

I've read ten pages of William M. Ivins, Jr.'s Prints and Visual Communication and this work is incredible and incredibly neglected. In its first ten pages it presents a full revisionist history of Classical Antiquity vs. The Dark Ages (what the Greeks and Romans didn't have). (see "Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages", Lynn White, published in Speculum#15, April 1940)

From the blurb:

"The sophistication of the photographic process has had two dramatic results--freeing the artist from the confines of journalistic reproductions and freeing the scientist from the unavoidable imprecision of the artist's prints. So released, both have prospered and produced their impressive nineteenth- and twentieth-century outputs."

With all Ivins's talk about "freeing the artist from the confines of journalistic reproductions" with regards to the invention of the photographic process, I find it very surprising to find no mention of Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in this book. Benjamin wrote in 1935/1936:

"For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens."

"the shared principle of all paraphilic love-maps (fantasy) is to turn childhood tragedy into (sexual triumph)..." --John Money, 1966

Thomas Cook @200

"Where are you going?"

"To the Great Exhibition in London. I took your copy of The Stones of Venice , I hope that's alright?"

"I booked a ticket with Cook*"

"Where are you going?"

"Where are you going?"

"To the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855. I took your copy of Walt Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric, I hope that's alright?"