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WALTER BENJAMIN’S AURA Walter Benjamin, an acclaimed scholar and writer, has contributed greatly to the world of modern art theory, through his essays and critical studies of photography, and its relation to the traditional art world and to modernity. A Small History of Photography and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction are two essays by Benjamin, which address the issues surrounding the advent of photography and its social and cultural impact. Both texts work to question the place and relevance of photography with traditional art making practice as well as the overall authenticity and originality of the work that emerges from this medium. Benjamin’s most complex concept in these two texts is that of ‘aura’ and its relationship to art, which will be looked at in greater detail in this essay. In addition to an analysis of these texts, scholarly writers including Mary Price, Diarmuid Costello, Helmut Schmitz and Carolin Duttlinger will also be analysed and evaluated in their critiques and own approaches the Benjamin’s theories. Benjamin defines his concept of aura in A Small History of Photography as:

“A strange weave of space and time: the unique semblance of distance, no matter how close that object may be.”1

Aura, as Benjamin sees it, refers to the presence and unique existence of a thing within a singular time and space. Furthermore, he emphasises that an auratic object is fixed in one permanent place. It is this definition of aura that initiates Benjamin’s discourse on photography. In an attempt to clarify this theory for his audience, Benjamin leans on the example of a mountain range; it is permanent, fixed and unwavering in time and space:

“[…] To trace a range of mountains on the horizon […] until the moment or the hour become a part of their appearance.” 2

Diarmuid Costello’s critiques and analyses of several of Benjamin’s texts offer an interesting and contrasting discourse concerning the concept of aura. Of particular significance is his work, Aura, Face, Photography: Re-Reading Benjamin Today. Costello argues that Benjamin acknowledges that his analogy of the mountains, of nature, seeks to illuminate the aura of an historical, cultural artefact, being the photographic image, as Costello points out, by in fact referencing a natural object.3 As Costello explains:

“Indeed the image Benjamin conjures is nothing if not a traditional, even Romantic, one of the aesthetic appreciation of nature.”4

Costello makes an interesting point in this analysis of aura, as he emphasises Benjamin’s later proclamations surrounding its demise. Costello remarks that considering the ‘withering’ of aura in a mass society, Benjamin’s Romantic attribution appears significantly appropriate. Costello clarifies by stating:

                                                                                                               1 Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography in One Way Street and Other Writings, transl. Edmund Jepcott and Kingsley Shorter, London, 1979, page 250 2 Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography in One Way Street and Other Writings, transl. Edmund Jepcott and Kingsley Shorter, London, 1979page 250 3 Diarmuid Costello, Aura, Face, Photography: Re-Reading Benjamin Today in Andrew Benjamin (Ed), Walter Benjamin and Art, Continuum, London and New York, First Ed. 2005, Page 172 4 Ibid page 172

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“[…] For what could be more alien to modern urban existence than the leisure to pause on a summer afternoon to immerse oneself in a distant vista?”5

Therefore, aura was never meant to be contingent with the transient nature of modernity; they appear, in this sense, to be two separate entities. An interesting element of Costello’s analysis, however, is when he draws his conclusions regarding Benjamin’s perceptions of aura. According to Costello, ‘aura’ reveals itself to be Benjamin’s term for aesthetic experience, or, a mode, as he explains, of experience that is typically described as transcending our everyday ways of engaging with the world.6 Thus, as Costello writes, ‘aura’ can therefore be defined as aesthetic immersion in a transcendent object.7 Fellow Benjamin critique and theorist, the author Mary Price, highlights the notable difference between Benjamin’s earlier definition of ‘aura’. Price emphasises that Benjamin’s original definition addressed issues of uniqueness and sacredness of art; that is, art in the traditional sense of the word. In his writings, Benjamin is largely consumed by the demise of the aura in art. He strongly emphasises the developments in technology and the swift rise of industrialisation as the key perpetrators in this regard. Specifically, Benjamin associates the advances in photography as responsible for the ‘withering’ of the aura. In accordance with Benjamin’s theories, it can be argued that the reproducibility of the photographic image directly correlates to the demise of the aura in relation to art, and this in turn relates directly to industrialisation and the fleeting and transient nature of the late nineteenth century. Benjamin addresses this idea in A Small History of Photography:

“Uniqueness and duration are as intimately conjoined in the latter as are transience and reproducibility in the former. The stripping bare of the object, the destruction of the aura, is the mark of a perception whose sense of the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness – by means of its reproduction.”8

Price, in response to this remarks that this identifies as a return to Benjamin’s original definition of aura, which specifies the object as original work of art intertwined with uniqueness and duration.9 Price outlines that the reproduction is similarly linked with transience and reproducibility. She explains that the removal of aura discloses homogeneity in the world increased by means of reproduction,10 where replications substitute for the original. Therefore, aura in this regard correlates to ideas of the original, the sacred and the unique. With reproducibility, comes sameness and therefore signifies a loss of an ‘auratic identity’, or the presence of aura in modern life and culture.                                                                                                                5 Diarmuid Costello, Aura, Face, Photography: Re-Reading Benjamin Today in Andrew Benjamin (Ed), Walter Benjamin and Art, Continuum, London and New York, First Ed. 2005, Page 172 6 Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography in One Way Street and Other Writings, transl. Edmund Jepcott and Kingsley Shorter, London, 1979, Page 173 7 Ibid page 173 8 Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography in One Way Street and Other Writings, transl. Edmund Jepcott and Kingsley Shorter, London, 1979, Page 250 9 Mary Price The Photograph, A Strange Confined Space, Stanford University Press, Stanford California, 1994, Page 47 10 Ibid page 47

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Helmut Schmitz writes in accordance with Benjamin’s notions of the demise of aura being associated with a rise in technological advancement in relation to photography. Schmitz argues that the technical reproducibility of artworks undermines the distinct authority of the original.11 He further demonstrates this argument by explaining:

“The technically reproduced artwork destroys what Benjamin refers to as the ‘aura’ of the work, its unique presence in time and space. The aura is not only tied to the authenticity of the work, but also to the origin of art in myth […]”12

Schmitz makes the interesting point in this statement, where he identifies that mediums of creating intended for mass reproduction from the outset, conversely have no aura. He continues by emphasising that the ‘withering’ of the aura Benjamin discusses thus corresponds to the destruction of the depth of subjective experience in modernity.13 This, in turn can be appropriately read in conjunction with Costello’s explanation of Benjamin’s theory. Both explanations by these authors recognise the inability for aura to survive in the age of modernity and industrialisation. Though Benjamin initially likens the decline of aura in the art world as a direct outcome of the technological development of photography, he ultimately creates a paradox by creating exemptions from this seemingly fixed definition. Benjamin, throughout his exploration of aura, has since argued that there is a semblance between aura and early portrait photography. Carolin Duttlinger emphasises this in her essay, Imaginary Encounters: Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography. Duttlinger highlights this through the important example of a portrait of the photographer, Karl Dauthendey and his fiancée [See figure 1]. Benjamin states:

“Here she can be seen with him. He seems to be holding her, but her gaze passes him by, absorbed in an ominous distance.”14

Duttlinger explains that the distance into which the sitter’s gaze is directed is reminiscent of Benjamin’s definition of aura as ‘apparition of a distance’.15 Similar noteworthy examples are identifiable through the photographs of David Octavious Hill and Robert Adamson. The tangible distance of which Benjamin, and Duttlinger describe in these portraits are clearly identified, through the stark contrast and use of chiaroscuro and the unengaging, indirect gaze, which consumes all of the subjects. The most prominent example from Hill and Adamson is The Adamson Family, (c 1844-1845) [See Figure 2], where the subjects are separated from familiar surroundings. This distance from reality is where Benjamin draws similarities to his theory of aura. Furthermore, it can be argued that the employment of what can be deemed ‘traditional’ artistic technical devices in these photographs, namely the use of chiaroscuro, can further associate these images with ideas of aura. In addition to Benjamin’s re-working of aura to incorporate early forms of portrait photography, he also opens the discussion to incorporate the earliest technical form of

                                                                                                               11 Helmut Schmitz, “Walter Benjamin 1929-1940” Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery (Eds), Oxford, Berg, 2007, Page 161 12 Ibid, Page 161 13 Ibid, page 162 14 Walter Benjamin in Carolin Duttlinger, Imaginary Encounters: Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography, in Poetics Today, Duke University Press, Oxford, 2008, Page 84 15 Carolin Duttlinger, Imaginary Encounters: Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography, in Poetics Today, Duke University Press, Oxford, 2008, Page 84

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photography: the Daguerreotype. In an attempt to liken the Daguerreotype with Benjamin’s initial definition of aura, one can argue that as the earliest forms of photography were indeed originals and unable to be reproduced, they too encompass the necessary framework to be considered ‘auratic’. Duttlinger emphasises in her essay that Benjamin viewed the sitters of the earliest Daguerreotypes as embodying aura: “There was an aura about them, a medium that lent fullness and security to their gaze as it [their gaze] penetrated that medium.” 16 This, in turn links to Benjamin’s initial definition of aura, as an expression of the unique and sacred. It is in this sense, that the most primitive photographs exemplify aura. Duttlinger further explores Benjamin’s theoretical contradiction by emphasising that he reads these examples of early portrait photography as attractions in their own right, rather than examples of more general schools, styles, or historical configurations. It is, as Duttlinger explains, the highly specific and immediate fascination of these images, which guides him to devise a more generalised theoretical comprehension of photographic reception.17 In order to fully comprehend this stance, Duttlinger uses Benjamin to further articulate her argument:

“Immerse yourself in such a picture long enough and you will realise to what extent opposites touch, here too: the most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted picture can never have for us. No matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible compulsion to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has […] seared the subject”18

Duttlinger stresses that this statement by Benjamin directly contradicts his original definition of aura. Duttlinger further outlines that though the term ‘aura’ was not specifically used, this excerpt prefigures Benjamin’s later conception of the auratic work of art.19 In this instance, however as Duttlinger explains, these auratic characteristics are credited to the medium, which is later blamed for the aura’s disappearance.20 In her essay, Duttlinger further explores some of the challenges that arise in reading Benjamin, furthermore in trying to apply his theories to specific artworks. Through an overall unspecified and imprecise point in time of the demise of aura, it can appear that we can deduce that the ‘withering’ of aura did not occur instantaneously, but rather gradually, as the technology itself, and society as a collective evolved. Benjamin himself amended in his later writings his prior definition of the term to incorporate these earlier instances of portrait photography, of which Duttlinger so adequately analyses. In considering these contradictions and amendments to Benjamin’s theory, it is pertinent to address the work of French photographer, Eugène Atget. Benjamin, in his work remarks Atget’s images as insightful as he:

                                                                                                               16 Carolin Duttlinger Imaginary Encounters: Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography, in Poetics Today, Duke University Press, Oxford, 2008, Page 86 17 Ibid page 85 18 Carolin Duttlinger, Imaginary Encounters: Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography, in Poetics Today, Duke University Press, Oxford, 2008, Page 85 19 Ibid page 85 20 Ibid page 85

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“He looked for what was unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift, and thus such pictures too work against the exotic, romantically sonorous names of the cities […]” 21

Costello also argues that Benjamin championed the work of Atget, as the first photographer to break the pretence that afflicted photography once it sought to imitate painting.22 Costello highlights that Benjamin attributes this groundbreaking achievement to the absence of people in Atget’s images. Costello cites Benjamin, who writes:

“[…] Almost all these pictures are empty […] They are not lonely, merely without mood; the city in these pictures looks cleared out, like a lodging that has not yet found a new tenant.” 23

As one is able to identity from the following example by Atget, Coin de la Rue Valette et Pantheon (1925) [See Figure 3], his somewhat ghostlike photographs consist of architectural detailing and empty Parisian street corners; in other words, “a city bereft of its inhabitants”.24 Costello thus deduces that Benjamin’s ideas concerning the presence and power of aura within the realm of photography directly correlates to the presence of people within the structural framework of the image itself. For Benjamin, Atget’s impersonal, almost documentary approach to photography signifies the direct loss of aura in Atget’s work. Costello explains that it is in Atget’s intention to capture his historical moment through the lens by focussing his camera on Parisian city streets, in conjunction with the photographic medium that this intention expresses, rather than the actual medium, which hence makes the work anti-auratic.25 Regardless, it is in Atget’s ability to capture a fleeting moment of what is normally a bustling city centre that emphasises the move from earlier forms of photography. In accordance with Benjamin and Costello, Atget’s decision to move away from traditional portraiture enabled the separation of aura from within photography. Through attempting to decipher Walter Benjamin’s highly complex theories surrounding photography, art and modernity, one is able to arrive at an understanding of his writings regarding aura. Though his definition of the term may have wavered throughout his writing career, Benjamin has created a discourse that brings to light some of the more complex issues regarding art and technology, including authenticity, uniqueness and originality. In addressing the critiques of several authors, including Mary Price, Carolin Duttlinger, Helmut Schmitz and Diarmuid Costello, the concept of aura is expanded and is therefore more readily comprehended in relation to art, cultural and social history. © Emily Sinclair 2011

                                                                                                               21 Walter Benjamin, A Small History of Photography in One Way Street and Other Writings, transl. Edmund Jepcott and Kingsley Shorter, London, 1979, Page 250 22 Diarmuid Costello, Aura, Face, Photography: Re-Reading Benjamin Today in Andrew Benjamin (Ed), Walter Benjamin and Art, Continuum, London and New York, First Ed. 2005, Page 170 23 Walter Benjamin in Diarmuid Costello, Ibid, Page 171 24 Diarmuid Costello, Aura, Face, Photography: Re-Reading Benjamin Today in Andrew Benjamin (Ed), Walter Benjamin and Art, Continuum, London and New York, First Ed. 2005, Page 171 25 Diarmuid Costello, Aura, Face, Photography: Re-Reading Benjamin Today in Andrew Benjamin (Ed), Walter Benjamin and Art, Continuum, London and New York, First Ed. 2005, Page 171-172

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Bibliography Benjamin, Walter, A Small History of Photography in One Way Street and Other Writings, transl. Edmund Jepcott and Kingsley Shorter, London, 1979 Schmitz, Helmut “Walter Benjamin 1929-1940” Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery (Eds), Oxford, Berg, 2007 Duttlinger, Carolin Imaginary Encounters: Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography, in Poetics Today, Duke University Press, Oxford, 2008 Costello, Diarmuid Aura, Face, Photography: Re-Reading Benjamin Today in Andrew Benjamin (Ed), Walter Benjamin and Art, Continuum, London and New York, First Ed. 2005 Price, Mary The Photograph, A Strange Confined Space, Stanford University Press, Stanford California, 1994

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Figure 1:

Karl Dauthendey (self portrait) Portrait of Karl Dauthendey and Fiancée c1857 Image Sourced From: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_X_7ox7_6sao/SlJihvTpA1I/AAAAAAAAGF8/_NhcGK6ivxs/Karl%20Dauthendey%20y%20su%20mujer%20Mlle%20Friedrich_thumb%5B2%5D.jpg 16.03.2011

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Figure 2:

David Octavious Hill and Robert Adamson The Adamson Family c1844-1845 Image Sourced From: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/The_Adamson_Family_by_Robert_Adamson.jpg 16.03.2011

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Figure 3:

Eugène Atget Coin de la Rue Valette et Pantheon 1925 Image Sourced From: http://www.masters-of-photography.com/images/full/atget/atget_pantheon.jpg 16.03.2011