Walter Benjamin said, “The illiteracy of the future," someone has said, "will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography." But shouldn't a photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less accounted an illiterate? Won't inscription become the most important part of the photograph? He added, “What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value”. These are from his writing called, “A Short History of Photography” (1931).
AURA
Aura: The distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and be generated by a person, thing, or place. Benjamin talks a lot about Atget and “aura”. These ideas really resonate with me. He said that the emergence of photography brought about the renewal of artistic language and intensified formal explorations: "As the scope of communications increased, the informational importance of painting diminished. The latter began, in reaction to photography, firstly to emphasize the colored elements of the image. As Impressionism gave way to Cubism, painting created for itself a broader domain, into which for the time being photography could not follow it."
EUGENE ATGET
What is aura? A strange web of time and space: the unique appearance of a distance, however, close at hand. On a summer noon, resting, to follow the line of a mountain range on the horizon or a twig which throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or hour begins to be a part of its appearance—that is to breathe the aura of those mountains, that twig. Now to bring things themselves closer—and closer to the masses—is as passionate a contemporary trend as is the conquest of unique things in every situation by their reproduction. Day by day the need becomes greater to take possession of the object—from the closest proximity—in an image and the reproductions of an image. And the reproduction, as it appears in illustrated newspapers and weeklies, is perceptibly different from the original. Uniqueness and duration are as closely entwined in the latter as transience and reproducibility in the former. The removal of the object from its shell, the fragmentation of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose sensitivity for similarity has so grown that by means of reproduction it defeats even the unique.
Atget almost always passed by the “great sights and the so-called landmarks.” He did not, however, pass by a long row of boot lasts, or by the Parisian courtyards where from evening until morning hand-wagons stand in rows and groups; or by the uncleared tables and the uncollected dishes, which were there at the same time by the hundred thousand all over; or by the bordello at rue . . . no. 5, whose gigantic five appears in four different places on the facade. More noticeably, however, almost all of these pictures are empty. The Porte d’Arcueil fortifications are empty, as are the regal steps, the courts, the terrace cafes, and as is appropriate, the Place du Tertre, all empty.
AUGUST SANDER
August Sander put together a series of faces that in no way stand beneath the powerful physiognomic galleries that an Eisenstein or a Pudovkin revealed, and he did so from a scientific standpoint. “His total work forms seven groups, which correspond to the existing order of society, and are to be published in about 45 portfolios of 12 photos each.”d Sander goes from farmers, the earthbound men, and takes the viewer through all levels and professions up on one hand to the highest representatives of civilization and down on the other to idiots. The creator came to this task, not as a scholar nor instructed by racial theoreticians or social researchers, but, as the publisher says, “from direct experience.” The observation is certainly an unprejudiced one, but clever, also, and tender and sensitive in the sense of Goethe’s statement: “There is a sensitive empiricism which makes itself most inwardly identical with the object and thereby becomes genuine theory.” Therefore it is completely in order that an observer like Döblin struck straightaway onto the scientific aspects in this work and remarked: “As there is a comparative anatomy by virtue of which we come to a conception of nature and a history of organs, so this photographer pursues comparative photography and thereby achieves a scientific standpoint above and beyond that of photographic details.” (ArtForum)
SUSAN SONTAG
Susan Sontag has written some very good books about photography. She was a deep thinker, an intellectual for sure. I often draw on her writing for my own work. One of her books called, “Regarding the Pain of Others“ has some very relevant thoughts concerning my work. She said, “All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.” To me, this is at the core of my objectives with this work. She also reiterates what we all know, “Wherever people feel safe (...) they will be indifferent.” And we know what indifference leads to.
