Photographic History in The Spirit of Constructivism Reflections On Walter Benjamin's "Little History of Photography"

Art in Translation
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Photographic History in the Spirit of

Constructivism Reflections on Walter Benjamin’s
“Little History of Photography”
Herbert Molderings & John Brogden
To cite this article: Herbert Molderings & John Brogden (2014) Photographic History in the
Spirit of Constructivism Reflections on Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography”, Art in
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History in
the Spirit of
Constructivism
Reflections on
Walter Benjamin’s
“Little History of
Herbert Molderings Photography”
Translated by Abstract
John Brogden
First published in German as The German art historian Herbert Molderings offers a lucid analysis
H. Molderings, “Fotogeschichte of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “Little History of Photography”
aus dem Geist des
(1931), including its reception. Although it represented the first critical
Konstruktivismus—Gedanken
zu Walter Benjamin’s ‘Kleine study of photography in the German-speaking world, it was not until
Geschichte der Photographie’” the mid-1960s that it made its mark, when it was embraced by the
in Die Moderne der Fotografie
German New Left as a “manifesto” that reflected its own ideas. The
(Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts,
2008), pp. 155–79. essay offers a detailed account of the cultural and political background
to Benjamin’s essay and a critical analysis of Benjamin’s own percep-
tion of photography, his inclusions and omissions, his socio-political
standpoint, and his theoretical strategies.
318 Herbert Molderings
KEYWORDS: Bauhaus, Constructivism, historical materialism, indus-

trialization of photography, literarization of photography, New Left,
New Objectivity, optical unconscious, photo-historiography, photogra-
phy-as-art, Surrealism
Introduction by Clara Masnatta
Few have approached Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photo

graphy” (1931) and none address this cardinal yet neglected essay with
the lucidity of Herbert Molderings in “Photographic History in the
Spirit of Constructivism.” Molderings recovers this text, which marks
the beginning of the critical discourse on photography, by tracing its

place in history.
In his essay, Benjamin presented a founding insight by superimpos
ing the Marxist concept of history with that of photography. Launched
at the crossroads of writing and photography, the “Little History of
Photography” presented a media theory in the form of a review of
photo-books. It predated his other towering essay, “The Work of Art in
the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,” which famously placed aura
at its center, and consigned the essay that first advanced this signature
concept into its shadow. Yet the perceptibility encoded in Benjamin’s
aura is the first articulation of photography with history.
The reader will find in Moldering’s essay a reception history of
Benjamin’s text. Of particular interest is how the text was “rescued”
around 1968 at the time of the “integrated vs. apocalyptic” mass media
debate. Taken as a manifesto of the sociology of art, Benjamin’s essay
became almost a red flag held up, perhaps precipitately, by the German
New Left. A more discerning and less combative engagement ensued,
and the questions of perceptibility and the materialist perspectives
raised by Benjamin were taken up by art historians and literary scholars
alike. In this way, the “Little History of Photography” propelled photo-
historiography as an academic discipline in Germany.
Molderings’ article examines Benjamin’s essay in the context of its
production and original publication in 1931, unfolding a genealogy that
affirms the text’s links to Constructivism and avant-garde definitions of
art. The rapport is detailed between the theorizations of the Bauhaus
luminary László Moholy-Nagy and Benjamin’s concept of photogra
phy, including his much-touted “optical unconscious.” Molderings
relates Benjamin’s emphasis on inscription—Beschriftung—to this con
structivist lineage. What is more, this literary dimension encapsulated
Benjamin’s move towards a socially “constructive photography.”
Molderings captures Benjamin’s strategies without lapsing into
the obscurity that plagues so much Benjamin scholarship, and looks
both across the broad context of Weimar Germany and closely into
Benjamin’s oeuvre and biography.
Photographic History in the Spirit of Constructivism 319
Only the French reception (Barthes’ Camera Lucida leads the list) is
left aside in Molderings’ thorough historization.
In the end, Molderings calls Benjamin’s piece a “draft” or “sketch”
(of a triptych, one would add) rather than a collage. By designating
it an “intellectual torso”—a reference to Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of
Apollo”—Molderings celebrates the text’s unpetrified power with all its
virtue of incompleteness, and simultaneously inscribes it into the tradi
tion of great literature.
Notes on Sources
Passages quoted from Benjamin’s essay have been taken from the
English-language version as translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley
Shorter and published in: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, edited by
Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, Volume 2. Part
2, 1931–1934 (Cambridge, MA: First Harvard University Press, 2005),
pp. 507–30. The page references of the quoted passages are indicated in
brackets in the text.
Photographic History in the Spirit

of Constructivism
Reflections on Walter Benjamin’s “Little History
of Photography”
Herbert Molderings
Great intellects guess well. (Edgar Allan Poe)
If we read Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” against

the background of current research, we might at first be surprised at
the pretentious title of this essay, for it is more a collection of histori-
cal aperçus than an academic historical treatise. But in 1931, when
Benjamin decided to expand his collective review of six recently pub-
lished books on photography1 into a study of the historical development
of photography,2 neither a big nor a little “History of Photography”
was available in the German-speaking world. Books published under
this title by Schiendl,3 Eder,4 and Stenger5 were merely accounts of the
technical evolution of photographic processes, which were more or
less augmented by brief descriptions of their “areas of application.”
Nobody had hitherto sought to examine the function and development
of the photographic image in light of any socio-cultural circumstances
that prevailed during its history. Precisely this may have been the reason
why this passionate essayist did not shy away from giving his expanded
review such an ambitious title as “Little History of Photography.” It did
in fact provide the first ever socio-historical overview of the develop-
ment of photography from 1839 right up until Benjamin’s own time.
While it is only a draft or sketch, nobody has since attempted to fill
in its contours to form a complete picture, a tableau that narrates the
history of the medium of photography in a more detailed, more plastic,
more colorful and more intense way than the essay itself has already
done. For this reason, reading this essay even today gives the same aes-
thetic pleasure that all drafts and sketches hold in store for us. Indeed,
as a mental exercise on an unusual subject, as a boldly dashed-off sketch
of some of history’s great perspectives and horizons, its linearity at no

point being impeded by the multitude of historical facts, this essay
has retained the freshness of an original draft, the success or failure of
which—in terms of a finished historical tableau, so to speak—is in no
way certain, not even today.
Whether it was Benjamin’s intention in this essay not just to confine
himself to a theoretical standpoint but also to intervene in contempo-
rary photographic practice is doubtful. His choice of publication, Die
Literarische Welt, in which the essay appeared in three installments in
September/October 1931,6 rather contradicts this likelihood. At that
time, any theoretical debates on photography were conducted mainly
in magazines devoted to design, such as Bauhaus, Die Form, Das
neue Frankfurt, and in the annual anthology of modern photography
Das Deutsche Lichtbild. The latter had shortly before published arti-
cles by László Moholy-Nagy and Albert Renger-Patzsch (1927), Kurt
Tucholsky (1930) and Heinrich Kühn (1931).7
No matter how practical and spirited it was in the final analysis,
Benjamin’s essay addressed, by all appearances, not so much a pho-
tographic audience as a literary one. It had no historically verifiable
effect on the German photography scene between 1931 and 1933, and
even during the period after 1935, when academic research into pho-
tography was on the increase, it made hardly any mark. Lucia Moholy’s
A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939 does not even mention
Benjamin’s essay in its bibliography.8 The fact that it was not accounted
for in Erich Stenger’s Die Fotografie in Kultur und Technik, published
in Leipzig in 1938, is hardly surprising, as Stenger, an author who went
along with the National Socialists, would hardly have had any sympa-
thy for a left-wing cultural critic like Benjamin. Only in Gisèle Freund’s
doctoral thesis “La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle,”
published in Paris in 1936, was the sociological aspect of Benjamin’s es-
say cited from Die Literarische Welt and proven when applied to French
photography between 1840 and 18709—and proven with great reward,
as Benjamin himself was able to verify (Figure 1).10 Thirty years were
to go by before another author, Thomas Neumann, took up Benjamin’s
Figure 1
Gisèle Freund, Walter Benjamin
in the Cabinet des Estampes
of the Bibliothèque nationale,
theories in his Sozialgeschichte der Photographie,11 published in
Paris, 1936. Barbara and 1966. Neumann’s book was informative inasmuch as it showed that
Herbert Molderings Collection. Benjamin’s draft account of the history of photography could be neither
falsified nor augmented unless historical facts were researched to the
same extent as in other longstanding fields of research into the history
of the image, especially the history of the fine arts.
The actual story of the essay’s impact began with a delay of three and
a half decades, at the time of the student protests. Published in a small
volume by Suhrkamp in 1963 together with the essay “Das Kunstwerk
im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”(The work of art
in the age of its technical reproducibility), the “Kleine Geschichte
der Photographie”12 suddenly became a kind of manifesto of the art-
sociological and socio-cultural ideas of the New Left.13 The students’
movement, which was busy developing its criticisms of the consumer and
media society, recognized in Benjamin’s essay a seminal critical theory of
photography, a text model that was more fascinating the less one was
familiar with the historical facts it dealt with. More important than a
knowledge of the photographers and their works was—and here lies the
fundamental and “timeless” value of the essay for its readers—the fact
that the conclusions reached by Benjamin were identifiable with one’s
own immediate experiences. Commonplace, widely familiar actions
and circumstances—snapshots, illustrated weeklies, newsreels, the sub-
tle use of photography in advertising and political reportages—seemed

here to have been put in a nutshell for the very first time. Moreover,
they were dealt with in such a lofty language that they lost all semblance
of banality and readily assumed an existential character. Now, for the
first time ever, Benjamin had raised them to the level of a discourse of
philosophical and, not least for this reason, academic caliber.
Thus it was that the “Little History of Photography” was at first
received by the New Left not as a historical study but as a manifesto,
for it identified, once and for all, the “degeneration of the imperial-
ist bourgeoisie” as the cause of the decline in photography (p. 517),
cast doubt on “photography-as-art” (pp. 520, 523) and pleaded for
the functionalization of photography as a means of enlightenment on
the “reification of human relations” (p. 526). In order to bring things

“closer to the masses” (p. 519), Benjamin propagates a new “construc-
tive photography,” which, like the Russian film, should set out “not to
charm or persuade, but to experiment and instruct” (p. 526). And is it
not the task of the photographer, Benjamin asks, “to reveal guilt and to
point out the guilty in his pictures?” (p. 527). This was, for any New
Left reader, clearly a call to arms.
Benjamin’s theories on the history of photography, on which these
appeals had been based, were at first ignored, not least because the
names of such celebrities of photography as Atget, Sander, Krull and
Blossfeldt—unlike the names of historically famous painters—were not
immediately associated with any particular concept or movement. The
publications of these photographers discussed by Benjamin had long
since become antiquarian rarities and were hardly to be found in any
academic library. Moreover, as the Suhrkamp Verlag had waived the
need to print the eight photographs that had originally accompanied the
essay,14 the readers were freely able, instead of viewing the original pho-
tographs, to imagine photographs more in keeping with their own expe-
riences and interests. All the same, the “Little History of Photography”
was soon to prove to be the decisive stimulus for the development of
photo-historiography as an academic discipline in Germany.15 When a
small group of art historians and German philologists ventured at the
beginning of the 1970s into the still unexplored field of photographic
history, Benjamin’s essay served as their compass. Indeed, the results of
their initial research were, without exception, the fruition of their adher-
ence to Benjamin’s envisaged research aims based on historically mate-
rialistic, sociological and perceptual perspectives.16 Ever since then, the
contemporary discourse on photography has been unthinkable without
Walter Benjamin and his essay.17 Moreover, the demands—much dis-
cussed since the 1980s—for an integration of photo-historiography into
a media-oriented, cultural or general science of the image were readily
arguable on the basis of Benjamin’s essay, for it had analyzed the history
of photography not from any of the classical aspects of art-historical or
literary theory but rather in terms of a historical theory of perception.
But how do things stand with regard to Benjamin’s theories in his

“Little History of Photography” concerning both the famous historical
photographers whom he mentions in particular and the historical devel-
opment of photography in general? Can these theories hold their own
in light of current research? Indeed, in what light would we perceive this
essay if it itself were made the subject of historical analysis?
Now nothing could be easier than to enumerate the many errors
revealed by the most recent research in Benjamin’s assertions concern-
ing the works of individual photographers, movements and periods.18
But as Benjamin was a philosopher and a literary historian and had
not conducted his own research into photography, his picture of the
historical development of photography could be formed only by mate-
rial provided by others, which means that any such criticism should be
directed not at Benjamin but at those authors upon whose findings he
had relied.19
Let us therefore concentrate on what in Benjamin’s essay bears his
unmistakable stamp, that is, a markedly Constructivist avant-garde no-
tion of art combined with a strong identification with the theoretical
principles of historical materialism. It was through his contact with the
group of artists around the Berlin periodical G. Material zur elementa
ren Gestaltung that Benjamin familiarized himself with, and adopted
as his own, the Constructivists’ technically oriented concept of art.20
This concept had already been adapted by László Moholy-Nagy in his
Bauhaus book Malerei Photographie Film, published in 1925, to suit his
own particular field of interest, photography. This he did by elaborating
photography’s material and technology based autonomy in its depiction
of reality by contrast with painting.21 Indeed, it was Moholy-Nagy’s
Constructivist aesthetic as a photographer that formed the media-
theoretical foundation of Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography.”22
Meanwhile quoted a hundred times over, and as the fruits of his own
thinking, Benjamin’s reflections on the “optical unconscious”—in the
wake of his observation, “… it is another nature which speaks to the
camera rather than to the eye” (p. 510)—were paraphrases of the-
ses that had already been expressed by Moholy-Nagy in his famous
Bauhaus book.23
Benjamin had evidently kept an attentive eye on Moholy-Nagy’s
publications. They counted among the pioneering works of literature
he had read during his lifetime, as evidenced by the intellectual “genea-
logical tree” he had sketched out in his draft of the “Berliner Chronik”
(Berlin Chronicle) only a few months after the publication of his essay
on the history of photography.24 According to this schematic diagram,
Benjamin had made the acquaintance of Moholy-Nagy through Arthur
Müller-Lehning, the publisher of the Internationale Revue i 10, for
which Moholy-Nagy had been the responsible editor for photography
and film from 1927 until 1929.25 Benjamin first quoted Moholy-Nagy
at length in his review of Prof. Karl Blossfeldt’s “Urformen der Kunst.
Photographische Pflanzenbilder” (Archetypes in art. Photographic im-

ages of plant forms) in the November 1928 issue of Literarische Welt.26
Summarizing a lengthy passage from Moholy-Nagy’s essay “Photo
graphie ist Lichtgestaltung” (Photography is design with light) in the
magazine Bauhaus,27 Benjamin writes that Blossfeldt:
has proven how right the pioneer of the new light-image, Moholy-
Nagy, was when he said: “The limits of photography cannot be
determined. Everything is so new here that even the search leads
to creative results. Technology is, of course, the pathbreaker here.
It is not the person ignorant of writing but the one ignorant of
photography who will be the illiterate of the future.”28
The last sentence of this quotation, which was already to be found in

Moholy-Nagy’s contribution to the Internationale Revue i 10 of 1927 in
a slightly different form,29 is again quoted by Benjamin at the end of his
“Little History of Photography,” albeit from an “anonymous” source:
“‘The illiteracy of the future,’ someone has said, ‘will be ignorance not
of reading or writing, but of photography’” (p. 527). This omission was
by no means dictated by malevolence, for anyone who had anything to
do with photography in 1931 knew who the author of these words was.
Moholy-Nagy is mentioned by name only in connection with the no-
tion of the “law that new advances are prefigured in older techniques”
(p. 517), according to which:
[the] creative potential of the new is for the most part slowly
revealed through old forms, old instruments and areas of design
which in their essence have already been superseded by the new,
but which under pressure from the new as it takes shape are
driven to a euphoric efflorescence. (p. 52)30
What is perhaps most revealing here is that Benjamin, while going on to

cite Moholy-Nagy’s comparisons with the Futurists, Neo-classicists and
Verists, omits the following comparison made by Moholy-Nagy earlier
on in the same book: “Similarly, the painting of the Constructivists
which paves the way for the development on the highest level of re-
flected light composition such as already exists in embryo.”31 Benjamin
evidently had no wish to be identified with the abstract-constructivist
art of the Bauhaus teacher Moholy-Nagy.
Without its being mentioned by name, we come across the Con
structivist perspective on the history of photography wherever Benjamin
reflects both upon the widening and deepening of perception brought
about by technical innovation and upon its consequences for our world
view. By no means did Benjamin stand alone in this regard in 1931, for
most photographers and critics among the followers of the new school
viewed the history of photography from the same perspective. László
Moholy-Nagy, for example, wrote that the new way of seeing things in
consequence of the advance in photographic technique:
almost amounts to a psychological transformation of our eye-

sight, since the sharpness of the lens and the unerring accuracy
of its delineation have now trained our powers of observation to
a standard of visual perception which embraces ultra-rapid snap-
shots and the millionfold magnification of dimensions employed
in microscopic photography.32
What was new about Benjamin’s approach was the attempt to integrate
the Constructivist photographic aesthetic as originally developed by
Moholy-Nagy into the model of historical materialism and to come

up with something along the lines of a critical theory of photography.
Describing some years later his historical materialist approach in his
essay “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” Benjamin writes that
“it is precisely historical materialism that is interested in tracing the
changes in artistic vision not so much to a changed ideal of beauty as to
more elementary processes—processes set in motion by economic and
technological transformations in production.”33
The terrain Benjamin was here venturing into was so unexplored that
his reading of just a few books and essays on photography34 sufficed
for him to risk a materialist overview of the entire history of photog-
raphy. A great many biographical and political reasons could be given
as justification for such an intellectual adventure. One motive among
others may have been Kracauer’s brilliant psychological essay on pho-
tography, which had appeared four years earlier under the somewhat
unspectacular title of “Die Photographie” in the arts supplement of the
Frankfurter Zeitung.35 Kracauer here sought to explore the cognitive
limits of photography by comparing the photographic image with the
mental image as retained by memory. Benjamin for his part critically
augmented Kracauer’s purely psychological perspective on photogra-
phy by a socio-historical aspect. Following the Marxist socio-historical
tenet that the course of social history and, by the same token, that of
intellectual history is subject to the same cast-iron laws as natural proc-
esses, Benjamin took upon himself the task of verifying the effect of
principles and laws in the historical development of photography. To
this end he approached the history of photography primarily from just
one aspect of photography, that of portraiture, beginning with the early
works of David Octavius Hill from the 1840s and ending with August
Sander’s portrait compendium Antlitz der Zeit (Face of our time) of
1929. Benjamin divides the historical course of photography into three
distinct periods: a “preindustrial heyday” (p. 507) from 1839 to around
1850, a subsequent “age of decline” (p. 518) culminating in creative
photography—“photography-as-art”—by the turn of the century
(p. 526), and, thirdly, the present day, which for him was characterized
by new photographic beginnings in the form of Surrealist photography,

especially the works of its forerunner Eugène Atget (p. 518) and the
portrait compendium of August Sander (p. 520).
In shaping the history of photography into a rise-and-fall pattern from
the very outset, Benjamin was repeating not only a currently accepted
model of evolution but also a cliché that had marked the Constructivist
and New Objectivity photographers of the 1920s. In their endeavor
to differentiate themselves sharply from the preceding photography-
as-art movement, which still held sway in certain important branches
of photography, the modern exponents of photography and their liter-
ary apologists dated photography’s decline to the period “after 1880”
(p. 517).36 It was the period when bourgeois amateur societies propa-
gated the ennoblement of photography as art. Their conscious resort to

the known laws of form that governed painting was meant to protect
the photographic image from becoming more and more “depersonal-
ized” through the advancing industrialization of the photographic
process. The Constructivist and New Objectivity photographers of the
1920s, on the other hand, attached importance to the autonomy of the
medium. The photography-as-art movement was in no way entirely re-
actionary, nor was it doomed to failure the moment it came into being.
The actual decline did not set in until it began to lose its bearings in a
changed world following the First World War, whereupon there were
enough reasons for the new generation of photographers to consider it
a closed chapter.
Benjamin did not call in question these modern photographers’ view
of recent photographic history, but rather sought to substantiate it ma-
terialistically within the compass of his own theoretical strategy. This he
did by combining the young photographers’ practice of dividing photo-
graphic history into periods with the Marxist/Leninist conception of the
history of the bourgeoisie. For the “preindustrial heyday” of photog-
raphy, for example, Benjamin found an explanation in the observation
that at that time “the photographer was confronted, in the person of
every client, with a member of a rising class” (p. 517), men and women
“equipped with an aura” (p. 517) that immediately communicated it-
self to the photochemical emulsion, entirely without the photographer’s
intervention. Explaining the period of decline, Benjamin contended that
this aura “was being banished from reality by the deepening degenera-
tion of the imperialist bourgeoisie” (p. 517), such that the photographer
now had to intervene manually and “simulate this aura using all the arts
of retouching” (p. 517).
Viewed against the background of the latest photo-historical re-
search, this historical model would no longer hold good. As the history
of photography can no longer (or at least not yet again) be sketched
out within the limited framework of an essay, unlike in Benjamin’s day,
a few remarks must be made on the problems behind Benjamin’s rise-
and-fall model.
If the “deepening degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie

(p. 517),” which was supposed to have initiated the decline of the early,
auratic period of photography, began around 1880,37 then at least one
very awkward question remains unanswered: how are we to consider
colonialism in this context, the colonialism to which the history of
photography, precisely in its “heyday,” owes some of the greatest mas-
terpieces of landscape and architectural photography through the work
of photographers like Maxime du Camp, John Green, Francis Frith,
James Robertson and many others? Without the help of civil servants,
trades people and military officers, these traveling photographers would
not have been able to embark on foreign expeditions and bring back
such masterpieces. Many authors, like Gustave Flaubert and Maxime
du Camp, traveled through foreign parts as official representatives of

the colonial power. We would therefore be better advised to heed one of
Benjamin’s later theses on the philosophy of history:
Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the

triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those
who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the
spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural
treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious
detachment.38
Such “cautious detachment” was evidently not familiar to Benjamin

when he wrote his “Little History of Photography.” Indeed, the bour-
geois citizens portrayed in their surrounding “auras” of self-assurance
by Hill, Nadar, Carjat and others undoubtedly belonged to the victors.
Benjamin’s periodization of the “rise and fall of photography” (p. 507)
becomes altogether abstruse if we cast our eyes beyond the boundaries
of portraiture and focus them on the genre of scientific photography,
which made its most significant progress—in rendering the “optical
unconscious” visible—during precisely that period of photography
characterized by Benjamin as one of decline (chronophotography, X-ray
photography and aerial photography).
Benjamin labored so much under the spell of the disastrous social
consequences of the Great Depression that whenever he approached
the history of photography from the standpoint of the historical ma-
terialist, he invariably ventured assumptions about industry without
any factual knowledge of its underlying economic structure. It was the
industrialization of photography that Benjamin blamed for the decline
in taste in portrait photography during the last quarter of the nineteenth
century. Even the contemporary practitioners of New Objectivity, who,
while demanding the most exact rendering possible of the subject mat-
ter, “were harking back to the preindustrial heyday of photography”
(p. 507), were suspected by Benjamin as having “an underground
connection with the crisis of capitalist industry” (p. 507). Measured
against Benjamin’s later writings, this link between economic crisis and
cultural development seems unusually mechanical. It did in fact distort
his view of broad areas of contemporary photography. The crisis of
capitalist industry had nothing at all to do with the photography of
New Objectivity. On the contrary, the sectors of industry least hit by the
crisis were the material driving forces behind the experimentation and
originality of photography during the 1920s, these being such rapidly
expanding sectors as the illustrated press and advertising. They were
the decisive material backbone of the revolution that took place in
photography between the two World Wars. As Benjamin categorically
rejected significant aspects of this new photography because they were
in the service of capitalist consumer advertising—his frequently quoted
polemic against Albert Renger-Patzsch’s book Die Welt ist schön (The
world is beautiful; p. 526) sums up this standpoint rather than analyzes
it39—he never considered them worthy of any thorough investigation,
which meant that his “Little History of Photography” has handed
down hardly anything in the way of enlightening information on the
photographic developments of his own time, neither on the changes
that actually took place in capitalist industry nor on the concomitant
changes in work, life and culture as visualized by the photographers of
the Bauhaus and New Objectivity.40 In the face of the acute social crisis
of capitalism toward the end of the 1920s, Benjamin was resolutely bent
on placing his intellectual work at the disposal of the socialist revolu-
tion, which to him seemed to offer the only way out of the crisis.41
It is in this same context that we must understand Benjamin’s spirited
interest in the works of the Russian Constructivists and the French
Surrealists. Viewed in retrospect, the “Little History of Photography” is
a recognizable attempt at fusing two extremes: the vulgar materialism of
the cultural policy of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD)—which
was significantly marked by Stalinism—with the radical aestheticism
of avant-garde art and photography. It is precisely this contradiction
that makes for this essay’s breadth of scope and renders it unique in the
theoretical debate in Germany in 1931.
Benjamin was defending the Constructivist approach to art and
photography, for example, whenever he expanded on the fundamen-
tally technical contingency of perception or made pointed reference to
technology’s part in the taking and printing of historical photographs
(pp. 510–12). It is also to Benjamin that we are indebted for that
model of symmetrical thought that, historically, saw the photographic
process first as a technique of diminution, enabling an understanding
of what was “so vast it can be assimilated only through miniaturiza-
tion” (p. 523) and then, in its role as a modern medium, as an optical
means of enlargement that makes the detail speak instead of the whole.
Indeed, Benjamin’s construction of the history of photography was
guided by the idea of a continual change in perception and experience
brought about by the invention of ever new photographic techniques.
The eloquence and succinctness with which he put this idea across still
inspire researchers today.
The same cannot be said of Benjamin’s political comments at the
very end of his essay. They belonged entirely to his own time. While
Benjamin made a point of keeping a low profile politically, his contem-
poraries could tell from his diction which party he sympathized with,
and nowhere else did he come closer to the Communist diction than at
the end of his “Little History of Photography.” Cleverly disguised as
questions, his assertions that the photograph, as an autonomous image,
is no longer of importance and that the inscription will “become the
most important part of the photograph,” as it is the photographer’s
task to “reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures” (p. 527),
were known standpoints in 1931. They were the cornerstones of KPD

policy in matters concerning photography. Was it pragmatic indeci-
sion, political doubt or simply the wish to appear original that induced
Benjamin to make no mention whatsoever of a photographic book that
not only conformed exactly to his recommendations but was already
enjoying wide popularity at that time? The book in question was Kurt
Tucholsky’s and John Heartfield’s compilation of juxtaposed texts and
photomontages that had been published two years previously by the
Communist publishing house Neuer Deutscher Verlag under the title
Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.42 If Benjamin’s politics of photog-
raphy came close to anyone’s way of thinking at all, it was Tucholsky’s
more than anyone else’s. Tucholsky had already argued, in an article
published in 1929 in Das Deutsche Lichtbild, that one should imitate
“the Russians” and “adopt the class standpoint in photography too.”43
And then, in May 1930, he had pleaded in the Weltbühne for precisely
that “new technique of captions” that Benjamin was to propagate a
year later as the quintessence of his historical reflections of photogra-
phy. “What matters,” writes Tucholsky:
is that we use photography … in a completely different way: as

the underlining of a text, as a humorous contrast, as ornament, as
endorsement—the image must no longer be an end in itself. The
reader must be taught to see with our eyes, and the photo will not
just speak: it will scream.44
The suggestion—implicit both in Benjamin’s sympathies with Con

structivism and Surrealism and in his empathetic analyses of photo-
graphs—that the photographer should not confine himself to simple
agitprop photography but rather explore the effects of the new film
and photographic techniques on the human unconscious and to use
them to political ends was nowhere heeded at that time. Neither among
the photographers around the Communist newspaper AIZ (Arbeiter
Illustrierte Zeitung) and the magazine Der Arbeiter-Fotograf nor in the
Constructivist circles of the photographic avant-garde did Benjamin
attract any attention. For his part, Benjamin recognized only a very
few photographers of his time who did justice to his demands, naming
August Sander, Germaine Krull and Karl Blossfeldt as photographers
whose work he saw in the service of enlightenment on physiognomics,
politics and science respectively. 45
What is quite remarkable is that Benjamin, for all the contemporane-
ity of the arguments he puts forward in his essay, makes mention of not
one single manifesto, not one important book on modern, contemporary
photography. He mentions neither Erich Mendelsohn’s Bilderbuch eines
Architekten of 1926,46 which El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko and
Bertolt Brecht had reviewed so enthusiastically,47 nor Germaine Krull’s
photographic book Métal, with its markedly Constructivist photo-
graphs of modern iron and steel architecture;48 neither Helmar Lerski’s

Köpfe des Alltags,49 a book of portraiture dedicated to the beauty of
the unknown, everyday face, entirely in the style of an Eisenstein or
Pudovkin and particularly revered in leftist liberal culture magazines,
nor Werner Graeff’s Es kommt der neuer Fotograf!,50 nor Franz Roh’s
and Jan Tschichold’s anthology Foto-Auge. 76 Fotos der Zeit,51 nor—
last but not least—the very source of his Constructivist concept of pho-
tography, Moholy Nagy’s Bauhaus book Malerei Fotografie Film.52 In
this regard we cannot really say that Benjamin “sided with the new way
of seeing,” which are the words Roland Berg uses in his reflections on
the “Little History of Photography.”53 On the contrary, Benjamin de-
voted his attention to precisely three photographic books that were not
in the center of aesthetic debate at that time. His reasons may perhaps
have had as much to do with his own biography as with his theoretical
standpoint. As we can read in his “Berliner Chronik” (Berlin Chronicle),
which was published in 1932, only a short time after the publication of
the “Little History of Photography,” Benjamin was at that time busy
writing his reminiscences of the years of his childhood and youth.54
The fascination that Blossfeldt’s, Sander’s and Atget’s worlds of images
held for Benjamin must have been inextricably bound up with these
reminiscences, for all of these photographs had one thing in common:
they belonged to the first two decades of the century. They were not
modern in the sense that they mirrored the reality of life in 1930 and/
or the latest aesthetic practices in photography. They were photographs
taken by New Photography’s pioneers, photographers whose style was
still that of the period before the First World War. Their sober, objective
approach to their subject matter only just anticipated the form and con-
tent of the modern photography that was yet to come. Benjamin sought
in them the same canon that he perceived in Surrealism: its discovery
of “the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded,’ the first
iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the
objects that have begun to be extinct.”55 Sander’s great work of social
portraiture had its beginnings in 1911–14,56 while Atget captured the
rapidly changing face of Paris at the turn of the century and Blossfeldt
documented nature from a perspective oriented toward Art Nouveau,

namely that world of plant and tendril inspired images that entered
pre-1914 urban life as ornamentation for house facades, candelabras,
street lamps and wrought iron subway gates. These images struck a
nostalgic chord with Benjamin in 1931, busy as he was in that year
with his recollections of life in Berlin and the mark its people and milieu
had made on his childhood and youth. When Benjamin evokes in his
“Berlin Chronicle” his childhood encounter with a “completely desert-
ed stretch of road” around 1900, we cannot help seeing in our mind’s
eye a photograph by Atget.57 Social reasons, too, may have accounted
for Benjamin’s highly selective approach to the photography and pho-
tographic publications of his time. If we lump together Benjamin’s
anti-industrial invectives, his love of the “preindustrial heyday” of pho-

tography, and his enthusiasm for Atget’s Paris, with its small craftsmen
and retailers, we can readily imagine that Benjamin’s own social status
as a freelance writer wholly dependent on a hard-earned income from
the sale of his writings to book and magazine publishers made him side
instinctively with the small tradesman and craftsman. Their respective
perceptions of the world were in parts identical.
From no photographic movement of his time did Benjamin expect
more than from that of Surrealism. The disinfection of “the stifling at-
mosphere generated by conventional portrait photography in the age of
decline” and the “emancipation of object from aura” were its greatest
achievements (p. 518). Curiously enough, Benjamin makes mention in
his essay of not one single Surrealist photographer by name. He speaks
only of one of “the forerunners of Surrealist photography” (p. 518), the
Paris photographer Atget, who had died in 1927. Benjamin had famil-
iarized himself with Atget’s work through the monograph Eugène Atget.
Lichtbilder, which had been published in Leipzig in 1930 with a fore-
word by Camille Recht. Almost all of Benjamin’s judgments and those
of his “authority,” Camille Recht, were later to be reversed by historical
research. The picture of a marginal personality, a photographer deemed
“eccentric” (p. 518) by reason of his mercilessly sober gaze, a photog-
rapher who set about destroying the aura that surrounded the conven-
tional picture of Paris (pp. 518, 519) of his time, is a wishful invention
of Benjamin’s and Recht’s. Historical research today presents quite a
different picture of the photographer Atget, namely as a documenter of
the picturesque “vieux Paris.”58 The task of capturing and preserving
views of the doomed, preindustrial city of Paris, with its still busy popu-
lace of small tradesfolk, was this photographer’s life’s work. His legacy
of tens of thousands of photographs constituted a topography of those
quartiers populaires of Paris that no other photographer deemed wor-
thy of recording for posterity. However, the resulting portrait of Paris,
albeit recorded by the truthful and unconditionally objective medium
of photography, is a figment of the imagination, a nostalgic construct.
It was precisely this contradiction that had triggered the enthusiasm
of the Surrealists. Here Paris was a city of loners, a city of flâneurs, a

city from which the modern masses, the traffic, the hustle and bustle,
and all industrialization had vanished as if by magic. There were two
aspects in particular that appealed to the Surrealists: first, Atget’s scenes
of Paris were “without mood,” as Benjamin observes (p. 519), and con-
trasted conspicuously with the atmospheric images of “Pictorialism,”
the fashionable movement of artistic photography around the turn of
the century; second, Atget’s images manifested an objectivity based on
an exact photographic rendering of the subject, an objectivity that had
inspired Camille Recht and, in turn, Walter Benjamin to draw com-
parisons with “photographs of a crime scene” (p. 527). But these two
aspects had less to do with Surrealism than with Atget’s documentary
intentions and his circle of clients, for his main sources of business were
not the few “photographic enthusiasts” to whom he sold his pictures
“for a trifle” (p. 518) but rather the city’s large archives and libraries,
which purchased his photographs in their hundreds if not thousands for
their topographical departments.
Let us now turn to the historical influence of Atget’s photographs,
from which Benjamin had hoped for “a salutary estrangement between
man and his surroundings” giving “free play to the politically educated
eye, under whose gaze all intimacies are sacrificed to the illumination of
detail” (p. 519). If we consider the reception of Atget’s photographs by
the Parisian photographers who followed him, such as André Kertész,
Germaine Krull, Brassaï, René Jacques, among others—Benjamin refers
to publications of their work in the avant-garde periodicals Varietés59
and Bifur—it immediately becomes obvious that Atget’s photographs
had in no way “cleansed” or “dispelled” (p. 518) the romantic atmos-
phere we associate with Paris. On the contrary, they had enriched this
mental picture of Paris with images of new, hitherto unspoken-of places,
of scenes and views way off the tourists’ beaten track. The changing
expectations of visitors to Paris, their dwindling interest in the monu
ments historiques and their growing fascination with everyday life in
the quartiers populaires had become evident by the end of the 1920s. In
1930, the Parisian art critic André Warnod, for example, had already
made strategic use of photographs by Atget, Kertész and Krull in his
book Visages de Paris60 in order to nudge future visitors to Paris in
completely new directions: into the nocturnal, bustling streets around
Les Halles, to the flea markets in the banlieues, to the arcades tucked
away between the main thoroughfares, to the clochards underneath the
bridges, to the bouquinistes along the Seine, to the supposedly pictur-
esque life of the gypsies on the fringe of the city, in the zone at Bagnolet.
The Berlin photographer Sasha Stone,61 a close friend of Benjamin’s,
obviously had the same intention when, in that same year, he chose his
photographs for Paul Cohen-Portheim’s small yet excellent illustrated
book on Paris,62 as did the authors of two large, influential photograph-
ic books of the mid-1930s: Brassaï’s Paris de nuit of 1933 and Paris vu
par André Kertész of 1934.63 Germaine Krull, praised by Benjamin for

her enlightening approach to photography (p. 526), was in the year of
publication of “Little History” mainly active as a reporter on modern
motor car travel.64 Thus it was not so much a historically analytical
picture that the melancholic photographs of Eugene Atget and the
topographical photographs of his successors presented to the viewer but
rather a touristically attractive one, quite irrespective of whether or not
the eye of the reader or viewer was “politically educated.” Indeed, these
photographs were certainly not capable—on their own—of educating
the eye politically in any conceivable way at all.
If one could speak of the existence of Surrealist photography at all in
1931, it was thanks first and foremost to Man Ray. It was Man Ray who
was the author of most of the photographs published in the magazines

La Révolution surrealiste (1924–29) and Le Surréalisme au service de la
révolution (1930–33).65 He himself, however, categorically rejected the
political exploitation of art and photography. He felt put under pres-
sure when faced with demands of the kind published by Benjamin in
1931, though it was not Benjamin that expressed these demands in his
circle of friends but André Breton, Louis Aragon and others. It was not
least for this reason that he began his first and most important essay
on photography, “The Age of Light,” which was published in 1934
in the monograph Man Ray. Photographs 1920–1934 Paris, with the
challenging assertion:
In this age, like all ages when the problem of the perpetuation of a
race or class and the destruction of its enemies is the all-absorbing
motive of civilized society, it seems irrelevant and wasteful still
to create works whose only inspirations are individual human
emotion and desire.66
Man Ray, whose political persuasions had been formed during his years
as a young man in the circles of the New York anarchists, was convinced
that the experiences and concerns of the individual had precedence over
those of class and race, even in—and especially in—times of revolution:
All progress results from an intense individual desire to improve

the immediate present, from an all-conscious sense of material
insufficiency. In this exalted state, material action imposes itself
and takes the form of revolution in one form or another. Race and
class, like styles, then become irrelevant, while the emotion of the
human individual becomes universal.
As Man Ray saw it, the task of the artist—“the creator dealing with
human values”—consists in allowing “the subconscious forces to filter
through him, colored by his own selectivity, which is universal human
desire, and [in exposing] to the light motives and instincts long repressed,
which should form the basis of a confident fraternity.” The subconscious

forces in Man Ray’s case were almost always erotic. It was the sexual
liberation that interested Man Ray far more than the political.67
Adopting the diction of the Communist press, Benjamin had empha-
sized the importance of the inscription, “without which all photograph-
ic construction must remain arrested in the approximate” (p. 527).
Constructivist photography in the style of Moholy-Nagy, the enlighten-
ing impetus of which relied wholly on the “hygiene of the optical”68 and
was thus closely akin to the New Objectivity photography rejected by
Benjamin, was here to be extended by a literary dimension: bringing the
inscription “into play” made Constructivist photography “constructive
photography” (p. 526) too.69
Among the other Surrealists, too, the way photography was used had
taken a completely new turn. The Surrealist practice of incorporating
photography into literary texts was in no way in line with Benjamin’s
notion of “photographic construction,” for its aim was ambiguity
rather than clarity. The issues of La Révolution surréaliste are full of
blurred, enigmatic photographs of people and objects that are meant
to give visual reinforcement to the hallucinatory mood conjured up in
one’s mind’s eye when reading the periodical’s dream narrations and
“automatic texts.” All of these photographs are uncaptioned, as are the
photographs in the Man Ray monograph of 1934. Indeed, who today
would deny that the attraction of the “Rayographs,” views and still-
lifes in this book lies precisely in the mood of uncertainty they evoke?
When Benjamin realized this five years after writing “Little History
of Photography,” he declared the Surrealist project as having “failed”
and reproached the Surrealists for making the same error as the pho-
tographers of New Objectivity, who photographed reality according
to the philistine creed of “The World is Beautiful”: “They failed to
recognize the social impact of photography, and therefore the impor-
tance of inscription—the fuse guiding the critical spark to the image
mass (as is seen best in Heartfield).”70 Benjamin would not—or could
not—see that Surrealist photography did not for one moment seek to
bring about “the destruction of the aura” (p. 519) of things.71 On the
contrary, the Surrealists were concerned with regaining precisely the
auratic phenomenon of the world. Indeed, it was Surrealism’s recog-
nized historical purpose to liberate photography from the shackles of
rationalism and positivism. Its artistic aim was not clarity but rather
the photographic construction of the enigmatic.72 This was particularly
the case with one literary project that had, like no other, brought about
a literarization of photography within the Surrealist movement. This
was Paul Nougé’s Subversion des images of 1929/30, a work that was
to remain a fragment and was not published until 1968, shortly after
his death.73 Photographers like Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, Raoul Ubac
and Paul Nougé sought to give back to photography something of the
magic that had pervaded the early days of the medium and had been
lost in the course of its increasing perfection. This magic, however, no

longer lay in the authenticity of an apparent self-depiction of nature
(“the pencil of nature” was the term used by Henry Fox Talbot, the
inventor of negative/positive photography, to describe the new process)
but rather in techniques used to alienate the automatism of the photo-
graphic process and make visible the artificiality and contingency of the
process. These were the techniques with which the Surrealists began to
undermine—just as they also undermined every form of media-political
optimism—the notion that there were “lessons inherent in the authen-
ticity of the photograph” (p. 527) that were conducive to “objective
seeing” (Moholy-Nagy) or were capable of exposing untoward social
conditions (Tucholsky, Brecht, Benjamin).
Benjamin’s conclusions about Surrealist photography and his pro-

posals for a literarized, constructive photography were in no way
dispassionate observations on past historical events. They were the
expression of a deeply emotional involvement in a current open debate
on aesthetics that had been triggered by the common hope of a social
revolution. Without their emphatic embrace of the revolutionary ac-
tion of the masses—which for a literary figure means as much as being
without prospects of a new public, new tasks and purposes—Benjamin’s
perspectives would have forgone much of their emotional impetus. As
an individual expression of the historically unique and never-to-be-re-
peated synthesis of bourgeois intelligence and the Marxism of the labor
movement, Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” remains
a sketch that cannot, to my mind, ever be finished, an intellectual torso
in which the unfinished forever resides as an aesthetic form.74
Notes
1. Karl Blossfeldt, Urformen der Kunst. Photographische Pflanzenbilder

(edited and prefaced by Karl Nierendorf, Berlin 1928); Albert
Renger-Patzsch, Die Welt ist schön. Einhundert photographische
Aufnahmen, edited and introduced by Carl Georg Heise (Munich:
Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1928); August Sander, Antlitz der Zeit. Sechzig
Aufnahmen deutscher Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts, with an
introduction by Alfred Döblin (Munich: Kurt Wolff/Transmare
Verlag, 1929); Eugène Atget, Lichtbilder, introduced by Camille
Recht (Paris and Leipzig: Verlag Henri Jonquières, 1930); Helmuth
Theodor Bossert and Heinrich Guttmann, Aus der Frühzeit der
Photographie, 1840–70 (Frankfurt/Main: Societäts-Verlag, 1930);
Heinrich Schwarz, David Octavius Hill. Der Meister der Photo
graphie (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1931).
2. For background information on Benjamin’s work on this text cf.
Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. II.3 (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), p. 1130ff.
3. C. Schiendl, Geschichte der Photographie (Vienna: A. Hartleben,

1891).
4. Josef Maria Eder, Geschichte der Photographie, 3rd edn (Halle/
Saale: W. Knapp, 1905).
5. Erich Stenger, Geschichte der Photographie (Berlin: VDI Verlag,
1929).
6. The essay appeared in the three issues of September 18, September
25 and October 2. For an account of the circumstances of its deliv-
ery cf. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (note 2), p. 1133ff.
7. László Moholy-Nagy, “Die beispiellose Fotografie,” in: Das
Deutsche Lichtbild 1927, edited by H. Windisch (Berlin: R&B
Schulz, 1927), pp. X–XI; Albert Renger-Patzsch, “Ziele,” in:
ibid., p. XVIII; Peter Panter [Kurt Tucholsky], “Neues Licht,” in:

Das Deutsche Lichtbild 1930 (Berlin: R&B Schulz, 1929), n.p.;
Heinrich Kühn, “Lichtbildnerei und Fotografie,” in: Das Deutsche
Lichtbild 1931 (Berlin: R&B Schulz, 1930), n.p.
8. Lucia Moholy, A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939
(Harmondsworth Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1939).
9. Gisèle Freund, La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siè
cle (Paris: La Maison des Amis des Livres, A. Monnier, 1936).
Benjamin’s essay is quoted several times by the author (pp. 48, 60f.),
but not mentioned at the end of the book under the “ouvrages à
consulter.” Cf. the German edition: Photographie und bürgerliche
Gesellschaft (Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1968), pp. 47f., 60
(here the Benjamin quotation is not indicated as such).
10. Cf. Benjamin’s review of Freund’s book in the Zeitschrift für Sozial
forschung, No. 7 (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1938) in: Benjamin,
Gesammelte Werke (note 2), pp. 542–4.
11. Thomas Neumann, Sozialgeschichte der Photographie (Neuwied,
Berlin: Luchterhand Verlag, 1966). This book was preceded
by Neumann’s essay “Über Photographie. Gedanken zu Walter
Benjamin,” in: Frankfurter Hefte, Vol. 19 (Frankfurt: Kogon &
Dierks, 1964), pp. 261–8.
12. Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit (Frankfurt/Main: Edition Suhrkamp, 1963),
pp. 65–94. English-language source: Walter Benjamin, Selected
Writings. Vol. 4, 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and
Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2006). All the following quotations have been taken from this
source.
13. On Benjamin’s effect on the student movement cf. Detlev Schöttker,
“Walter Benjamin und seine Rezeption. Überlegungen zur Wirk
ungsgeschichte,” Leviathan, No. 2 (Cologne: Leviathan: Zeitschrift
für Sozialwissenschaft, 1992), p. 272f.
14. See illustrations in: Benjamin, Gesammelte Werke, p. 384ff. These
eight photographs are also featured in Walter Benjamin, Selected
Writings, Vol. 2. Part 2, 1931–1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings,

Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: First Harvard
University Press, 2005), p. 509ff.
15. Cf. Rolf H. Krauss, Walter Benjamin und der neue Blick auf die
Photographie (Stuttgart: Cantz, 1998), p. 3ff.
16. Cf. Wolfgang Kemp, “Über Landschaftsphotographie,” Foto-Essays
zur Geschichte und Theorie der Fotografie (Munich. Schirmer &
Mosel, 1978); Herbert Molderings, “Film, Photographie und ihr
Einfluß auf die Malerei in Paris um 1910. Marcel Duchamp—
Jacques Villon—Frank Kupka,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, Vol.
37 (Cologne: DuMont, 1975), pp. 247–86; Molderings “Franz
Hanfstaengls ‘Album der Zeitgenossen’. Porträtfotografien von
1853 bis 1863,” Kritische Berichte 3.4 (1975): 30–4; Molderings

“August Sander, Rheinlandschaften, Photographien 1929–1946,”
Kritische Berichte 3.5/6 (1975): 120–32; Molderings “Über die
photographische Methode August Sanders,” in Stadt und Land.
Photographien von August Sander, exhib. cat., Westfälischer
Kunstverein (Münster, 1975), pp. 5–15; idem, “Florence Henri.
Aspekte der Photographie der 20er Jahre,” in Florence Henri.
Aspekte der Photographie der 20er Jahre, exhib. cat., Westfälischer
Kunstverein Münster, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (Münster,
1976), n.p.; idem, “La seconde découverte de la photographie,” in
Paris—Berlin. Rapports et contrastes France-Allemagne 1900–1933,
exhib. cat., Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou
(Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1978), pp. 250–60; Ulrich Keller,
Herbert Molderings and Winfried Ranke, Beiträge zur Geschichte
und Ästhetik der Fotografie (Lahn-Giessen: Anabas Verlag, 1977);
Winfried Ranke, “Heinrich Zille Photographien,” Heinrich Zille
Photographien, Berlin 1890–1910 (Munich: Schirmer-Mosel,
1975), pp. 7–42; Ranke Joseph Albert—Hofphotograph der bay
erischen Könige (Munich: Schirmer-Mosel, 1977); Ulrich Keller,
August Sander. Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Schirmer-
Mosel, 1980); Hans-Georg Puttnies, “Photographie,” in Edward
Lucie-Smith, Sam Hunter and Adolf Max Vogt (eds), Kunst der
Gegenwart. Propyläen Kunstgeschichte, Suppl. Vol. II (Frankfurt/
Main, Berlin, Vienna: Propyläen, 1978), pp. 225–32.
17. Detlev Schöttker has quite rightly described Benjamin as a
“founder of discursivity.” Cf. Schöttker, Walter Benjamin und seine
Rezeption, p. 272.
18. See André Gunthert’s remarks accompanying his French transla-
tion of Benjamin’s essay in: Études photographiques 1 (November
1996): 30ff.
19. Benjamin could indeed have learned from the book by Bossert and
Guttmann (note 1) that “the flowering of photography—the work
of Hill and Cameron, Hugo and Nadar” (p. 507)—did not come
in its first decade but later, but then such chronological exactitude
would have undermined his assertion that the “preindustrial hey-

day” of photography came precisely in that first decade.
20. Benjamin’s first direct contact with the Berlin Constructivists is evi-
denced by his translation of Tristan Tzara’s essay “Die Photographie
von der Kehrseite” (La photographie à l’envers) in the June issue of
the journal G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung No. 3 (1924):
39f. It was in this essay, which first appeared in 1922 as a foreword
to the album Les Champs délicieux with twelve Rayographs by
Man Ray, that Benjamin first came across the Dadaists’ criticism of
painting and their plea for a renewal of art through technology. On
this question both the Dadaists and the Constructivists were agreed.
Tzara’s idea that photography has replaced figurative art because it
is “more progressive” is cited by Benjamin at the end of his es-

say (pp. 525–6). On Benjamin’s connections with the “G” Group
cf. Eckart Köhn, “Die Intelligenz des Fotografierenden. Zu Leben
und Werk Sasha Stones,” in Sasha Stone. Fotografien 1925–1939,
exhib. cat., Museum Folkwang Essen, Berlinische Galerie Berlin,
Photographische Sammlung (Berlin: Nishen-Verlag, 1990), p. 8f.
21. László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Fotografie Film, 2nd edn (Munich:
Albert Langen, 1927). English-language version: László Moholy-
Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (1927), translated by Janet
Seligman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969).
22. The significant influence of Moholy-Nagy’s theories on Benjamin’s
concept of photography has largely been ignored to date. His book
Malerei Fotografie Film is not even mentioned, for example, in Rolf
H. Krauss’s treatise Walter Benjamin und der neue Blick auf die
Photographie as one of the inspirational sources of “Little History
of Photography”; cf. Krauss (note 5), p. 14ff. Ronald Berg alone
has related Benjamin’s concept of photography to Moholy-Nagy’s
theories, arriving at the conclusion that the latter, “both practi-
cally and theoretically, anticipated much of what served Benjamin
as the basis of his reflections on photography.” Cf. Ronald Berg,
Die Ikone des Realen. Zur Bestimmung der Photographie im Werk
von Talbot, Benjamin und Barthes (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag,
2001), p. 160. Quoted here in translation.
23. Cf. Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Fotografie Film, p. 26f. Even the term
“das Optisch-Unbewusste” (the optical unconscious) itself seems
to have been inspired by Moholy-Nagy, who in many places in his
book uses such constructions as “das Optisch-Zeitliche” (p. 19)
and “das Optisch-Kinetische” (p. 20). In his own construction, “the
optical unconscious” (p. 512), Benjamin combines Moholy-Nagy’s
notion of the camera lens as the extension of the eye with ideas of
psychoanalysis and surrealism, two fields of artistic research that
remained alien to Moholy-Nagy’s thinking.
24. Walter Benjamin, “Berliner Chronik,” with an epilogue by Gershom
Scholem (Frankfurt /Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 47. English-
language version: Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle,” in: Walter

Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2. Part 2, 1931–1934, edited by
Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge,
MA: First Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 595–637.
25. Benjamin had known Müller-Lehning since April 1926. Cf. Arthur
Lehning, “Walter Benjamin und i 10,” Für Walter Benjamin.
Dokumente, Essays und ein Entwurf, edited by Ingrid and Konrad
Scheurmann (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), pp. 56–67. It is
not clear when Benjamin first met Moholy-Nagy in person. In a
letter to Gershom Scholem dated February 14, 1929 he writes: “A
man with an altogether pleasing physiognomy—but perhaps I have
written this before—is Moholy-Nagy, the former teacher of pho-
tography (sic) at the Bauhaus.” Quoted, in translation, from Walter

Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. 3, 1925–30 (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 438. Although Moholy-Nagy had never been
a “teacher of photography at the Bauhaus” (a department of pho-
tography had not yet been established there), Benjamin associated
him exclusively with photography. This was entirely in keeping
with the public image that Moholy-Nagy had acquired through
his countless publications on photography since his Bauhaus book
Malerei Photographie Film.
26. Walter Benjamin, Neues von Blumen, in: idem (note 2), Vol. III, pp.
151–3.
27. Bauhaus 2.1 edited by Walter Gropius (January 1928): 5. The
wording is almost identical to the passage in Moholy-Nagy’s article
“Die Fotografie in der Reklame” in the magazine Photographische
Korrespondenz 9 (September 1, 1927): 259.
28. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (note 2), Vol. III, p. 153. English-
language source of quotation: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings.
Vol. 2: 1927–1934, edited by Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland
and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: The Bellknapp Press of Harvard
University Press, 1999), p. 155.
29. László Moholy-Nagy, “Diskussionsbeitrag zu Kállais Artikel
‘Malerei und Fotografie’” in i 10.6 (1927): 233f., in: Krisztina
Passuth, Moholy-Nagy (Weingarten: Kunstverlag Weingarten,
1986), p. 318.
30. Benjamin quotes here from: Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Fotografie Film
(note 21), p. 25. Moholy-Nagy also wrote the following on the
same theme in his essay “Fotografie ist Lichtgestaltung” in bauhaus
1 (January 1928), p. 8: “The Dada photomontage … wanted too
much: it already sought to operate kinetically in its static state, on
the two-dimensional surface, while this was the prerogative of the
film. The task was stretched beyond measure, such that the eye
failed” (quoted in translation). Moholy-Nagy’s thoughts here were
later to be echoed in Benjamin’s essay on mechanical reproduc-
tion. Cf. Benjamin Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit (note 12), Vol. I.2, pp. 500–1. English-language

source: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
in: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings (note 12), Chapter 14.
31. Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Fotografie Film (note 21), p. 5.
32. Quoted from: László Moholy-Nagy, “How Photography Revolu
tionizes Vision,” The Listener 8 (November 1933): 688. Cf. the
similarly worded passages in: László Moholy-Nagy, “Fotografie,
die objektive Sehform unserer Zeit” (1932), in: Passuth (note
29), p. 343; see also: Brigitte Werneburg, “Ernst Jünger, Walter
Benjamin und die Fotografie. Zur Entwicklung der Medienästhetik
in der Weimarer Republik,” in: Ernst Jünger im 20. Jahrhundert,
edited by Hans-Harald Müller and Harro Segeberg (Munich:
Wilhelm Fink, 1995), pp. 39–57.

33. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (note 2), Vol. II.2, p. 480. English-
language source: Walter Benjamin, Collected Writings, Vol. 3,
1935–1938, edited by Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 270.
34. On Benjamin’s literary sources cf. Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften
(note 2), Vol. II.3, p. 1133. Besides the illustrated books of Bossert/
Guttmann and Schwarz mentioned in his essay, Benjamin referred
above all to Fritz Matthies-Masuren’s Künstlerische Photographie.
Entwicklung und Einfluß in Deutschland, with a foreword and
introduction by Alfred Lichtwark (Leipzig, Marquardt & Co.,
1907). Whether he ever consulted Josef Maria Eder’s voluminous
Geschichte der Photographie of 1905, as argued by the editors of
the Gesammelte Schriften by reason of the Arago citation (p. 508
in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings), is doubtful, as the passage
in question is worded differently in Eder’s book, which means that
Benjamin must have cited it from another source. The literary
source of the Sasha Stone citation “Photographie als Kunst ist ein
sehr gefährliches Gebiet” (Photography-as-art is a very dangerous
field) (p. 526), which had not been verified by Benjamin in his es-
say, was the article “Photo-Kunstgewerbereien” published by Sasha
Stone in Das Kunstblatt 3 (1928): 86.
35. Reprinted in: Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1963), p. 21ff.
36. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (note 2), Vol. I.2, p. 696. Page 517
in Benjamin, Selected Writings.
37. In another place in his essay, Benjamin dates the beginning of the
period of decline to the 1860s, cf. p. 515.
38. Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. I. 2, p. 696. English-language source:—Walter
Benjamin, Selected Writings. Vol. 4, 1938–1940, edited by Howard
Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006), pp. 391–2. [This note is not included in the
original German text.]
39. Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photography, which was oriented toward

the ideal of scientific photography, was in fact entirely in keeping
with that notion of “another nature which speaks to the camera
rather than to the eye” (p. 510), which Benjamin had analyzed as a
genuine photographic rediscovery. For purely ideological reasons,
however, Benjamin rejected Renger-Patzsch’s photography. Cf.
H. Molderings, “Albert Renger-Patzsch. Reflexionen und Remin
iszenzen”, Die Moderne der Fotografie (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts,
2008), pp. 407–18.
40. Cf. H. Molderings: “Amerikanismus und Neue Sachlichkeit in
der deutschen Fotografie der zwanziger Jahre”, Die Moderne
der Fotografie (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, 2008), pp. 71–92;
Molderings, Fotografie in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Nishen

Verlag, 1988).
41. Benjamin’s essay “Berliner Chronik” (Berlin Chronicle), written
almost immediately after the “Little History of Photography,” tes-
tifies in several places to his growing class struggle and communist
convictions. He observes, for example, that the pre-1914 aim of
the radical bourgeois Youth Movement to “change the attitudes of
people without changing their circumstances,” which he himself
had championed, was bound to fail because “no one can improve
his school or his parental home without first smashing the state that
needs bad ones.” Benjamin, “Berliner Chronik” (note 24), pp. 28,
30; Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle” (note 24), pp. 605, 606.
42. Kurt Tucholsky, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, photo mon-
tage by John Heartfield (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1929).
43. Peter Panter [Kurt Tucholsky] (note 7), n.p. Quoted in translation.
44. Quoted, in translation, from: Peter Panter [Kurt Tucholsky], “Auf
dem Nachttisch,” Die Weltbühne 21 (May 20, 1930): 770.
45. On Benjamin’s reception of August Sander cf.: Jochen Becker,
“Passagen und Passanten. Zu Walter Benjamin und August Sander,”
Fotogeschichte, 32 (1989): 37–48.
46. Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika. Bilderbuch eines Architekten (Berlin:
Rudolf Mosse Buchverlag, first edition, 1926; second edition,
1928).
47. Cf. Herbert Molderings, “Mendelsohn, Amerika und der ‘Amer
ikanismus’,” in: Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika. Bilderbuch eines
Architekten (Reprint Braunschweig: Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn Verlag
1991), pp. 83–91.
48. Germaine Krull, Métal (Paris: Librairie des Arts Décoratifs, 1928).
49. Although the colophon of the book published by Hermann
Reckendorf in Berlin indicates 1931 as the year of publication, the
book was in fact already available at the end of 1930, as a review
in the December 1930 issue of Das Kunstblatt (pp. 375–7) clearly
states, which means that Benjamin could easily have familiarized
himself with it prior to writing his essay.
50. Werner Graeff, Es kommt der neuer Fotograf! (Berlin: Verlag

Hermann Reckendorf, 1929).
51. Foto-Auge. 76 Fotos der Zeit. Œil et photo. 76 photographies de
notre temps (Photo-Eye. 76 Photos of the Period) edited by Franz
Roh and Jan Tschichold (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Dr. Fritz
Wedekind, 1929).
52. Two books that also ought to be mentioned in this context are
L. Moholy-Nagy. 60 Fotos and Aenne Biermann. 60 Fotos (Berlin:
Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1930), both edited by Franz Roh and pub-
lished in the series “Fototek (Bücher der neuen Fotografie).”
53. Berg, Die Ikone des Realen (note 22), p. 160.
54. Benjamin (note 24).
55. Walter Benjamin, “Der Surrealismus. Die letzte Momentaufnahme

der europäischen Intelligenz,” in Benjamin (note 2), Vol. II.1, p. 91.
English-language source: Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism—The Last
Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Walter Benjamin,
Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 1, 1927–1930, edited by Michael W.
Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: First
Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 210.
56. Cf. Keller (note 16), pp. 25, 71.
57. Cf. Benjamin (note 24), p. 13. Page 597 in Selected Writings.
58. Cf. Hans-Georg Puttnies, “Die Atget-Legende, die Surrealisten,
Walter Benjamin und der zweifelhafte Nachruhm eines Altstadt-
Photographen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (September 29,
1978): 23; John Szarkowski and Maria Morris Hambourg, The
Work of Atget, 4 volumes (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
1982–1985); James Borcoman, Eugène Atget 1857–1927 (Ottawa:
National Gallery of Canada, 1984); Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven
Albums (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992).
59. The photographs “showing only details” mentioned by Benjamin
on page 518 and captioned “Westminster,” “Lille,” “Antwerp”
or “Breslau” were published in: Variétés 8 (December 15, 1929):
582f, under the title “Mélancholie des villes.” They were taken by
Germaine Krull, Berenice Abbott, Herbert Bayer, Lux Feininger,
among others.
60. André Warnod,Visages de Paris (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1930).
61. Benjamin’s Text “Berliner Kindheit” (Berlin Childhood) was origi-
nally dedicated to, among other friends, the Berlin photographer
Sasha Stone, “whom Benjamin frequented a great deal during those
years” (cf. Scholem’s editorial postscript in: Benjamin [note 24],
p. 98). This postscript is not included in the English-language ver-
sion. Stone had designed the cover for Benjamin’s book of apho-
risms, Einbahnstraße (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1928). Cf. Köhn (note 20),
p. 8f.
62. Paul Cohen-Portheim, Paris (Berlin: Klinkhardt und Biermann,
1930). This intention is also evident in Germaine Krull’s
photographic book 100 × Paris (Berlin: Verlag der Reihe, 1929),

which combined conventional views of the “great sights and so-
called landmarks” of the city (p. 519) with picturesque photographs
of the quartier des Halles, poverty in the banlieue, the flea markets
and the clochards.
63. Cf. H. Molderings: “Der Mythos von Paris in fotografischen
Bildern”, Die Moderne der Fotografie (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts,
2008), pp. 219–44.
64. Cf. Paul Morand, Route de Paris à la Méditerranée (Paris: Firmin-
Didot, 1931) and La Route Paris-Biarritz. Vue et photographiée
par Germaine Krull (Paris: Haumont, 1931).
65. Benjamin possibly counted André Kertész, Eli Lotar, Germaine
Krull and Maurice Tabard among the photographers of Surrealism

as well, as these photographers were the authors of most of the
photographs published in the avant-garde periodical Bifur, which
Benjamin, writing in Die Literarische Welt in 1930, had lauded
as the “most important among those periodicals of Surrealist ten-
dency which through their international circle of contributors …
are recommendable to a wider audience.” Cf. Benjamin (note 2),
Vol. IV.1, p. 595f. Quoted in translation.
66. Man Ray, “The Age of Light,” in Man Ray: Photographs 1920–
1934 Paris, edited by James Thrall Soby (Paris and Hartford, CT:
Skira/Random, 1934).
67. Cf. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L’Amour fou. Photo
graphy and Surrealism (Washington, New York: Abbeville Press,
1985); David Bate, Photography & Surrealism. Sexuality, Colonial
ism and Social Dissent (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004).
68. Moholy-Nagy (note 21), p. 36. English-language version: p. 38. Cf.
Herbert Molderings, “Lichtjahre eines Lebens. Das Fotogramm in
der Ästhetik László Moholy-Nagys,” László Moholy-Nagy. Foto
gramme 1922–1943 (Munich: Schirmer Mosel, 1996), pp. 8–17.
69. Responding, in 1980, to Susan Sontag’s critique of photography,
I attempted to make this idea relevant to the present. I leave it
to future historians to decide whether this attempt shared not
only Benjamin’s perspective but also his illusions. Cf. Herbert
Molderings, “Argumente für eine konstruierende Fotografie / In
Favor of a Construing Practice of Photography,” Camera Austria
2.4 (1980): Symposion on Photography II, pp. 80–5.
70. “Pariser Brief II. Malerei und Fotografie” (1936), in: Benjamin
(note 2), Vol. III, p. 504. English-language source: Walter Benjamin,
“Second Letter from Paris,” in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art
in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility and Other Writings on
Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas
Y. Levin, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone,
Howard Eiland and others (Cambridge, MA and London: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 305.
71. On the concept of the aura cf. Mary Price, The Photograph: A
Strange, Confined Space (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1994) and the relevant essays by Dirk Baecker, Richard Shiff, Jürgen
Link and Ursula Link-Heer in Mapping Benjamin, The Work of Art
in the Digital Age, edited by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael
Marrinan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 9ff.,
63ff., 98ff., 114ff.
72. Cf. H. Molderings: “Evidenz des Möglichen. Fotografie und
Surrealismus”, Die Moderne der Fotografie (Hamburg, Philo Fine
Arts, 2008), pp. 93–144.
73. Paul Nougé, Subversion des images (Brussels: Les Lèvres Nues,
1968).
74. On the fragmentary aspects of Benjamin’s writings cf. Detlev

Schöttker, Konstruktiver Fragmentarismus, Form und Rezeption
der Schriften Walter Benjamins (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,
1999), especially p. 145ff.
Translator’s Notes
1. In this version, the title of the essay has been translated as “Little
History of Photography.” Other known translations read either “A
Small History of Photography,” “A Short History of Photography”
or “A Brief History of Photography.”
2. At the end of his essay, Benjamin concludes his argument for the
literarization of photography with the question: “Won’t inscription
become the most important part of the photograph?” Benjamin used
the German term Beschriftung, translated here as “inscription.”
Other translators of Benjamin’s essay have used the term “caption”:
“Will not captions become the essential component of pictures?”
(Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” translated by
Phil Patton, Artforum 15.6 (1977): 46–61)
“Will not the caption become the most important component of
the shot?” (Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,”
translated by Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13.1 (1972): 24)
3. German publications containing the word “photography” are spelled
either with an “f” or with a “ph” (Photographie/Fotografie). Both
spelling forms are still acceptable and are still used, the spelling with
“f” being considered more modern. As an example, the first edition
of Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus book was titled Malerei Photographie
Film, the second Malerei Fotografie Film (1927).

Photographic History in The Spirit of Constructivism Reflections On Walter Benjamin's "Little History of Photography"

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Art in Translation

ISSN: (Print) 1756-1310 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfat20

Photographic History in the Spirit of

Herbert Molderings & John Brogden

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/175613114X14043084853074

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Download by: [Tufts University] Date: 03 December 2015, At: 17:07

Art in Translation, Volume 6, Issue 3, pp. 317–344

KEYWORDS: Bauhaus, Constructivism, historical materialism, indus-

Introduction by Clara Masnatta

Few have approached Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photo­

the beginning of the critical discourse on photography, by tracing its

Photographic History in the Spirit

Great intellects guess well. (Edgar Allan Poe)

If we read Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography” against

of some of history’s great perspectives and horizons, its linearity at no

tle use of photography in advertising and political reportages—seemed

the “reification of human relations” (p. 526). In order to bring things

But how do things stand with regard to Benjamin’s theories in his

Photographische Pflanzenbilder” (Archetypes in art. Photographic im-

The last sentence of this quotation, which was already to be found in

What is perhaps most revealing here is that Benjamin, while going on to

almost amounts to a psychological transformation of our eye-

Moholy-Nagy into the model of historical materialism and to come

by new photographic beginnings in the form of Surrealist photography,

gated the ennoblement of photography as art. Their conscious resort to

If the “deepening degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie

du Camp, traveled through foreign parts as official representatives of

Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the

Such “cautious detachment” was evidently not familiar to Benjamin

were known standpoints in 1931. They were the cornerstones of KPD

is that we use photography … in a completely different way: as

The suggestion—implicit both in Benjamin’s sympathies with Con­

graphs of modern iron and steel architecture;48 neither Helmar Lerski’s

documented nature from a perspective oriented toward Art Nouveau,

anti-industrial invectives, his love of the “preindustrial heyday” of pho-

of the Surrealists. Here Paris was a city of loners, a city of flâneurs, a

par André Kertész of 1934.63 Germaine Krull, praised by Benjamin for

was the author of most of the photographs published in the magazines

All progress results from an intense individual desire to improve

which should form the basis of a confident fraternity.” The subconscious

lost in the course of its increasing perfection. This magic, however, no

Benjamin’s conclusions about Surrealist photography and his pro-

1. Karl Blossfeldt, Urformen der Kunst. Photographische Pflanzenbilder

3. C. Schiendl, Geschichte der Photographie (Vienna: A. Hartleben,

ibid., p. XVIII; Peter Panter [Kurt Tucholsky], “Neues Licht,” in:

Writings, Vol. 2. Part 2, 1931–1934, edited by Michael W. Jennings,

1853 bis 1863,” Kritische Berichte 3.4 (1975): 30–4; Molderings

would have undermined his assertion that the “preindustrial hey-

is “more progressive” is cited by Benjamin at the end of his es-

language version: Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle,” in: Walter

tography (sic) at the Bauhaus.” Quoted, in translation, from Walter

Reproduzierbarkeit (note 12), Vol. I.2, pp. 500–1. English-language

Wilhelm Fink, 1995), pp. 39–57.

39. Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photography, which was oriented toward

Molderings, Fotografie in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Nishen

50. Werner Graeff, Es kommt der neuer Fotograf! (Berlin: Verlag

55. Walter Benjamin, “Der Surrealismus. Die letzte Momentaufnahme

­photographic book 100 × Paris (Berlin: Verlag der Reihe, 1929),

Krull and Maurice Tabard among the photographers of Surrealism

Few have approached Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photo

The suggestion—implicit both in Benjamin’s sympathies with Con

photographic book 100 × Paris (Berlin: Verlag der Reihe, 1929),