A Brief History of Photography + Artworks in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Author: Walter Benjamin [Germany]
Publisher:
Publication Date: Not available
Features: Although images produced by machines have lost the artistic quality of painting, they possess an absolute advantage in precision, compelling the astonished human eye to follow them uncontrollably. Moreover, their irresistible effect can simultaneously reach an incalculable number of people. Nearly a century after the invention of such a machine, its revolutionary characteristics in human visual life were first recognized by Walter Benjamin, the German scholar who was among the earliest to sense the profound transformation in human visual life since then in the West. His writings on this subject, such as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and A Short History of Photography, have become some of the earliest classic texts on modern human visual life in the West. This book collects these two classic works by Benjamin and includes nearly one hundred carefully selected illustrations, which are believed to be beneficial to those in the Chinese-speaking world who are concerned with the issues of art and images in the age of technology. Walter Benjamin, one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century and a key member of the Frankfurt School, was one of the few Western intellectuals of the 20th century to fully recognize photography. His A Short History of Photography (1931) and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) are considered classic works in photography and cultural theory, as well as essential reading in the burgeoning field of cultural studies. Unlike his Frankfurt School colleagues Adorno and Horkheimer, who held a staunch critique of mass culture and the cultural industry, Benjamin's thought was full of paradoxes regarding the intervention of technology in the realm of art and the consequences it brought. His defensive views and perspectives on art reproduction and the cultural industry also allowed him to stand out among the Frankfurt School. In A Short History of Photography and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin focused on analyzing the profound impact of photography's emergence on modern civilization, particularly the revolutionary disruption of artistic activities. He argued that mechanical reproduction techniques, represented by photography (including film), had fundamentally changed the way humans perceive art and predicted that mechanical reproduction would ultimately dissolve the sublime status of classical art, liberating the right to art from the hands of "professionals" and making it a general right for the public. The concepts and perspectives he proposed in these two works, such as "shock experience," "the decay of the aura," and "reproduction/creation," have had a far-reaching influence on modern photography theory and cultural theory. Jiangsu People's Publishing House has now reissued these two classic works by Benjamin, accompanied by nearly one hundred carefully selected illustrations. The translation by Mr. Wang Caiyong, who translated directly from the German original, is even more convincing, making the excellence and classic status of this book undeniable.