In Walter Benjamin’s book Illuminations, you find the famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. This was and still is a seminal critical work, noting how the value of art corresponds to what he calls aura and how the absence of the latter, inherent in reproducibility, leads to loss of value. It’s a quintessential photographic analysis, even more pertinent in 2007, when digital methods erode even more the mystique of…
Part 2 of 3 1 here Every picture is taken from a temporal flux and created, according to Barthes in his book Camera Lucida, with regard to the poignancy of mortality. He famously pondered this in relation to his recently deceased mother and the unsatisfactory nature of his picture: there she was, but neither alive nor properly represented in the image. Photography is a kind of ‘shock’, in the sense in which it captures a concentration of…