Issue: Reproduction / Selection

Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" stands as one of the most influential essays of its kind, celebrating the liberatory potential of the image. With its ability to provide copies of images on a mass scale, the camera promotes access to the work of art, stripping it of its "aura," its fetish value as the product of an elite culture. Poster (1995) makes much of this argument in The Second Media Age, championing Benjamin as a prescient thinker, one capable of peering into the future.

However, Benjamin also perceives a drawback to the proliferation of images, a position he outlines in his essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Here Benjamin discusses the danger of the isolated, iconic image replacing the work of art, taking on a fetish value of its own as an idealized conception of history (e.g., the personality cult of Mao Zedong, the raising of the U. S. flag at Iwo Jima, Riefenstahl's pictures). In such a case, he argues, we need to "explode" the image by asking questions about its origins: who took the picture, and with what purpose in mind? Otherwise, he fears, the photograph may simply become another tool in the hands of the state, a means of strengthening the "official" account of events through selection.

"A historical materialist . . . regards it as his task to brush history against the grain."

"Theses on the Philosophy of History"