Walter Benjamin, the archive and early photography

Duncan Forbes (Senior Curator of Photography, National Galleries of Scotland) [BIO] and Alex Law (Lecture University of Abertay) [BIO]

Email: duncanforbes@nationalgalleries.org and a.law@abertay.ac.uk

 

ABSTRACT:

Against the persistence of the ‘eternal image of the past’ favoured by ‘epic’ historicism and the ‘facticity’ of archival fetishism, Walter Benjamin advocated a constructivist form of historical materialism that violently wrenches the unique artwork out of its quasi-naturalistic immersion in an immediately given environment ? one premised not on the harmonious evolution of humanity or civilisation but on the destructive barbarism of class violence, including ‘the destructive energies of technology’. As a new technology the reception of technology was ‘bungled’, as Benjamin said about positivism in general, but not before a moment in the 1840s when, with the first photography, class and technology entered into an entirely appropriate relationship. Once the ambiguity of class relations is named as an operative force in the ‘landscape’ of ‘bungled photography’, it alters its reception. This requires the construction of a constellation through, first, incorporating a ‘delicate empiricism’ in the factual ‘genesis’ of the early photography in Scotland of Hill and Adamson and, second, relating its subsequent history to the present – inquiring how a frozen ‘stream of tradition’ of ‘creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery’ can – from a critical contemporary perspective – be detonated to allow an incomplete ‘stream of becoming’ to flow into the pressing concerns of our own time.