Wolkenwandelbarkeit: Benjamin, Stieglitz, and the Medium of Photography
2015; Wiley; Volume: 88; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/gequ.10237
ISSN1756-1183
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Politics, and Modernism
ResumoIn his essay on photography, Walter Benjamin repeatedly employs atmospheric, cloud‐like rhetoric in order to describe the decline of aura that accompanied the rise of camera technology. At approximately the same time that Benjamin published this piece, his contemporary Alfred Stieglitz was concluding his own decade‐long study of photography: a series of cloudscapes that highlighted the ungrounded character of the photographic image. This article provides an examination of Benjamin's and Stieglitz's respective attempts to develop an emphatically medial understanding of photography via the figure of the cloud. In perpetually drifting away from itself and harboring the potential to assume myriad forms, the cloud marks an uncontainable state of alterity and multiplicity, and therefore serves for Benjamin and Stieglitz as an apt figure for exploring the non‐self‐identical medium of photography itself.
Referência(s)