Walter Benjamin’s (1892 - 1940) cultural criticism from the 1930s survives today largely through his trademark concept of an artwork’s unique “authenticity” and “aura” — that magical, intangible substance lost when original art is placed under the political and commercial demands of mechanical reproduction. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” Benjamin defined “aura” in his famous 1936 polemic “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The foundational tenets of that essay, however, had been worked out five years earlier in a little-known book titled Little History of Photography, first published as three articles between September and October 1931 in the German journal The Literary World.

The book critiqued the photographic act within the discourse of art and mass culture. The human countenance captured in early portrait photography following Louis Daguerre’s 1936 photographic invention, “entered the visual space of photography with their innocence intact,” Benjamin asserted, and managed to retain a special quality analogous to the aura usually associated with works of art. Commenting on David Octavius Hill’s photograph Newhaven Fishwife (1843-47), Benjamin identified “something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer’s art…something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in ‘art.’”

As portrait photography commercialized in the 1850s, thanks in part to André Disdéri’s popular “visiting card” sensation, the aura of the human image had to be reinterpreted in these curated and edited photographic images. Created in artificial studios, these commercial portraits “occupied so ambiguous a place between execution and representation” that the only remnant of any aura, Benjamin purported, could only be found in the estrangement and melancholy of the sitter’s gaze. 

According to Benjamin, the 20th century liberated the modern gaze from the genuine aura of portraits and the curated aura of commercial photography. Eugene Atget’s deserted scenes of Paris disregarded not only the city’s iconicity but people altogether. By removing “the makeup from reality,” Atget’s photographs focused intently on ordinary and overlooked objects such as architectural detail, café tables, garden, and details in nature, and in doing so, inaugurated a new genre altogether.

Little History of Photography was published with only eight images; among them a daguerreotype of the philosopher Freidrich Schilling whose stoic eyes and creased jacket lapels beheld, like Hill’s Fishwife, a lasting permanence, and a visiting card of an adolescent Franz Kafka whose “infinite sadness” set against a fabricated backdrop of palm fronds, bore “pathetic witness” to the departing vestiges of his aura. For a book on photography, the scant number of images leaves the reader little visual support for the author’s theoretical intrigues, and the images published as well as all the works Benjamin critically examined in the text, had only been seen by the author as reproductions in albums or periodicals. Interestingly enough, however, all practitioners mentioned in Benjamin’s book are represented in the Israel Museum’s vast collection of original 19th and 20th-century photography, thus giving rise to the current exhibition “In Pictures: Walter Benjamin’s Little History of Photography.”

Unlike other art exhibitions founded on theoretical literature (“Le Corbusier – An Architect of the Book” at the Jewish Museum, Moscow 2013, and “Ornament and Crime” at Eykyn McClean, New York 2018, for example, comes to mind), “In Pictures” affording a unique opportunity to immerse in Benjamin’s ideas vis-à-vis the actual visual sources he employed for critical analysis. The numerous original (dare I say authentic) photographic collections from Hill, Atget, August Sander, Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and others, give visual agency to Benjamin’s ideas and make the exhibits a necessary visual companion not just to Little History of Photography but to Benjamin’s entire body of critical work on art and photography in the age of mechanical reproduction.

One of the largest collections on display is from August Sander’s collection titled Face of Our Time. As Benjamin was publishing the articles that would later constitute his book, Sander was publishing the first installment of Faces that sought to document German social society. “Sander starts off with the peasant, the earthbound man, takes the observer through every social stratum and every walk of life up to the highest representatives of civilization, and then goes back down all the way to the idiot,” Benjamin noted. Bakers, bricklayers, politicians, and numerous other German citizens pose in uniform at their place of employment as testament to the nature of their social strata. For Benjamin, Sander’s scientific and documentary act also helped liberate the photographic act from the artificial aura of past decades.

Witnessing the Nazi party’s ascent to power in the early 1930s, Benjamin — a Jewish intellectual in Berlin — also suspected that Sander’s experiment in visual classification would come with inherent dangers. “Work like Sander’s could overnight assume unlooked-for topicality,” he warned, prophetically. “Sudden shifts of power such as are now overdue in our society can make the ability to read facial types a matter of vital importance. Whether one is of the Left or the Right, one will have to get used to being looked at in terms of one’s provenance. And one will have to look at others the same way.” Sander’s work transcended the bounds of a picture book and took on the function of what Benjamin called a “training manual” for new power structures bent on social identification.

The words would later come back to haunt Benjamin. As the curators of the exhibition noted, Benjamin’s intellectual achievements are matched by his unusual life and the fascinating circumstances surrounding his death. While escaping Nazi-occupied France in 1940 with a briefcase containing the manuscript to a monumental book-in-progress, Benjamin was turned back at the small Pyrenees town of Portbau, Spain. Later that night he committed suicide and the contents of his briefcase have never been found. “The word aura, so strongly identified with Benjamin’s thought,” noted the curators, “might be applied very aptly to the man himself.”