Walter Benjamin On the Fate of Our Photos
When we remove an unwanted person from a photograph or replace an awkward expression, we bring the image closer to what we intended to capture. But photographs often become important for reasons their makers could never have anticipated, through details that seemed irrelevant at the time. What do we lose when our images conform to what we already consider worth remembering?
In Little History of Photography, published in 1931, Walter Benjamin explores how the camera changes both what we can see and our relationship with the past. Looking at an early photograph of a woman selling fish in Newhaven, he finds that an appreciation of the photographer’s skill can’t satisfy his interest in her. He wants to know her name, because the photograph preserves a particular life whose significance exceeds the intentions of the person behind the camera.
Benjamin calls our attention to a “tiny spark of contingency”, through which something unplanned survives within a carefully composed image. A photograph taken to commemorate a family occasion might later become important because of someone barely visible in the background, whose presence raises questions nobody thought to ask. The photograph can preserve evidence that becomes recognisable only when circumstances change and someone approaches it with a different concern.
The camera also gives us access to aspects of ordinary life that we could not otherwise examine, when, for example, we recognise someone walking without noticing the precise position of their body during a fraction of a step. Benjamin calls this the “optical unconscious”, suggesting that our understanding of what we have experienced depends partly on what technology enables us to discover afterwards.
Yet greater visibility does not necessarily produce greater understanding, as Benjamin makes clear through Bertolt Brecht’s observation that a photograph of a factory tells us little about the place itself. We might see its buildings in extraordinary detail while learning nothing about who owns them, how labour is organised or what conditions its workers face. The precision of the image can often give us confidence that we have encountered reality even while the relationships that organise it remain obscure.
Benjamin is interested in our ability to read photographs, since knowing where an image came from, comparing it with others and investigating its circumstances can change what we understand it to show. Even a technically accomplished photograph of poverty can turn suffering into something visually compelling without helping us understand how that suffering is produced.
The technical possibilities of a device and a society’s historical capacity to realise them are not the same. A society can possess a new technology while using it mainly to reproduce familiar forms of prestige, authority and representation. Benjamin finds this tendency in photographers who used the camera to imitate the conventions of painted portraits.
This distinction is important today when automated systems select and enhance the images returned to us as memories. If familiar faces and recognisably significant occasions determine what we see, details whose importance we have yet to discover may receive less attention. Preserving photographs is important, but so does retaining the opportunity to encounter them in ways that our existing preferences do not anticipate.
In our course Time, History, Memory, we will read from Benjamin’s Little History of Photography alongside his writings on history and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema, exploring how images preserve more than we intended and how learning to read images can change our relationship with the past.
