In the History of Photography, Walter Benjamin tries to tell the journey taken by this form of art from the very first decade of the invention. He states that the very first years of photography were the best. During this period that preceded industrialization, photography got mixed up with it and this led to major changes and inventions but it later on liberated itself and became a more practical and applicable work of art. It embraced technology all together and it can be said to produce the God- given image or appearance without the use of any machine. There is a kind of magical value that photography gives a photograph and this is what Walter seeks to explain, he goes further to explain the past that photography seeks to give the present. A portrait surpasses time and the individuality of the portrait in question but embodies the fact that the photographs were meant to go beyond the past and present and that they were meant to last.
This is a fact that is cemented by the fact that with the onset of photography, landscape painting became a thing of the past. It quickly became a business and long posing, the bad lighting and this kind of exposure made models pause for quite some time in order to impress and create a sense of duration. Walter goes on to assert the fact that photography made the viewers learn the art of visual language. Perception changed viewers had to learn the art of visual language so as to know how to interpret portraits well. Photographers themselves had to learn the art of understanding and interpreting their own images that they took. It was and still is not that simple. One needs to view and interpret a portrait by their heart. The portrait of Mona Lisa speaks volumes to any viewer and its meaning does not just call for face value analysis but the volume of deep meaning that it holds.
One thing that is clear about the author’s writing is the fact that he highlights some key concepts of photography such as the aura of any work of art as well as the influence that a work of art has on the viewers. Now I get to understand and appreciate that an artist can create scenery that was never seen before and it will be meant to represent a real picture but now through a portrait. The twisting of space and time brings out the ultimate replica through reproducibility of any piece of art. It is from this angle that a portrait comes out to speak volumes about the nature and reason of its existence. Walter makes it clear that the reality surrenders to the sublime and the subconscious looses to the contemporary subject. Actually, the real or object is ripped bare and the aura gets destroyed anyway.
In the production of any movie, the stillness of a portrait is redefined as the pictures are brought to motion thereby bringing out the almost natural aura (Hansen 3). There is an integration of all objects involved, space and time and with a mix of aesthetics, a series of events are put together and they amount to a movie. Tracing a couple of movements an observer or anyone watching a movie gets to patch things together and sees a flowing sequence of events and portrait which tell a story. Walter says that reproduction of images bring out the uniqueness that cannot be reproduced twice or thrice even if it took the same effort.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. Little History of Photography. PDF File
Hansen, Miriam. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: U California P, 2012.
