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IMAGE NECESSITIES: Walter Benjamin Symposium (Part II)

This is the second and last piece in a pair of documentation posts for IMAGE NECESSITIES: A Symposium on the Media-Theoretical Writings of Walter Benjamin.

The last speaker was Dr. Bernd Stiegler, a professor and researcher at The University of Konstanz (Germany). Stiegler’s areas of expertise include: theory/history of photography, 19th-20th century German/French literature, and literary media studies. His paper/lecture was entitled…

“Walter Benjamin’s Photoalbum”

Dr. Stiegler proposed a particular manner of reading historical photographs, via Walter Benjamin’s meticulously curated personal collection of photographs, books and manuals.

Benjamin’s aggregate included mostly portraits. A notable example being one of Arthur Schopenhauer. His book selection, according to Stiegler, showcased “The Dark Side of Modernity.” He described the library as Euro-centric and inclusive of many pragmatic handbooks and texts on the history of avant-garde.

Stiegler points to one of Benjamin’s books in particular, Philosophie in der veränderten Welt (Philosphy In The Changing World) by Walter Schulz. The author posits photography as a new art of both reporting and conveying mood images.

Benjamin wrote in a letter, “The limits of photography cannot be determined. Even the search for techniques yields creation.”

Benjamin explains in later writings and letters that photographs are characterized by both the readability of photograph AND the photographer’s visual literacy. Seeing/reading are intimately linked. He calls this “The New Language of Photography.”

Stiegler notes, however, that while avant-garde photography is emphatically ahistorical, Benjamin’s personal photographs are emphatically historical. In this way, the history of photography is the history of changing memory and recollection. Photography has changed culture by affecting the temporality of The Moment.

The shutter release is a metaphor for the release of lasting social changes. There is a relationship between subject, environment, and personal history. In this way, photography simulates everyday life and adapts people to the technology of the city. Through multiple perspectives, photos can transport the viewer into an aesthetic space of training, apart from tradition. Photography, Benjamin says, is the objective form of seeing in our time. Tts products are accessible to human perception. The act of taking a photo is both tactile and visual.

This view can easily be likened to those of Charles Baudelaire in his writing On Photography from the Salon of 1859. He associates exposure length with length of life. Long exposure shots are images of general recollection, while short exposures are images of memory (snapshots, “nude perception”).

Benjamin kept a beloved photo of Franz Kafka as a child. Stiegler uses this as an example of photographic transferability and palimpsest.

After the talk, an attendee asked if Stiegler a prediction for the disappearance of man in Benjamin’s writings on photography. Stiegler disagreed, stating that in the 20′s and 30′s at least, humans were very much present in photographs, especially as the identity of one person could be subject to multiples.

Brigid Doherty, moderator and co-editor of The Work of Art In The Age of Its Technological Reproducibility… noticed that Benjamin talked about “present day” urban space cleared out as if the scene of a crime, but implied that it could be rehabitated by inscription. Therefore, Stiegler’s analysis of Benjamin’s viewing mechanisms made sense, as the legibility inscription of photographs would serve to rehabitate urban space.

The presentation concluded with Stiegler good naturedly observing, that in his talk, he purposely omitted a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s extensive postcard collection.

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A long, but by no means laconic day terminated with a stroll around the Art Museum grounds. The texture and presence of “Big Figures” by Magdalena Abakanowicz is incredible.

The towering piece is situated outside of the building. I was rather surprised to be confronted with a piece of this scale and grandeur in this particular location. Nonetheless, impressive.