- Person
- Walter Benjamin
- Lived
- 1892–1940
- Field
- Criticism & philosophy
- From
- German
The story
Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin in 1892 into a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family. He earned his doctorate in 1919, but his academic career was blocked and he made his living as a critic, essayist and translator. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he left Germany and lived in exile, mostly in Paris.
There, in 1935, he began the essay usually known in English as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He rewrote it substantially over the winter of 1935 to 1936 and kept revising it until 1939. It first appeared in 1936, in a French translation by Pierre Klossowski, in the journal of the Frankfurt School's Institute for Social Research.
Benjamin asked what happens to art when it can be copied endlessly by cameras and printing presses. He argued that an original work has an aura, a presence tied to its uniqueness and its place in time and space, and that mass reproduction weakens it. Art shifts from being an object of ritual to something made to be shown to as many people as possible. Film, he suggested, changes the way audiences perceive the world, and in a mass culture the making and showing of images is bound up with politics. Writing as fascism rose, he wanted to offer ideas that could not be used by fascism.
The essay reached English readers in 1969 through Harry Zohn's translation in the collection Illuminations. It became a founding text of film theory, art history, cultural studies and media studies. John Berger built on it in his 1972 television series and book Ways of Seeing, and its ideas inform Susan Sontag's On Photography.
Benjamin did not live to see this influence. Fleeing the German advance in 1940, he died at Portbou on the Spanish border in September of that year.
Why it matters
Students, artists and critics still use Benjamin's ideas to understand how photographs, films and now digital media shape public opinion and how images can be used to manipulate it.
About Walter Benjamin
Berlin-born critic and philosopher who rethought art, memory and history in the age of mass media, and who died fleeing the Nazis at the Spanish border in 1940.
More about Walter Benjamin
Sources
- The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Wikipedia
- Walter Benjamin Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Walter Benjamin Wikipedia
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