Imaginary Encounters
Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4375589 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Carolin Duttlinger (0000-0002-2877-8434, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 79-101 |
| Publication date | 2008-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/03335372-2007-018 |
| OpenAlex | W2036143857 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 12 |
| References cited | 8 |
This article explores Walter Benjamin's famous concept of the aura in relation to his writings on photography. Although Benjamin's "Artwork" essay charges photography with the decline of the aura of the traditional artwork, his essay on photography complicates this historical narrative, associating aura with early portrait photography but also with its successor, the commercial studio portrait. The childhood photograph of Franz Kafka, whose melancholy air serves Benjamin as an example of a paradoxical, post-auratic aura, recurs in his childhood memoirs, where the narrator projects himself into this picture. Benjamin's writings on photography thus develop an alternative concept of aura, one which transcends fixed historical or technological categories through the model of an imaginary encounter between viewer and image. This conception has far-reaching consequences not only for the theory of photography but also for its role within literature, as is suggested by Benjamin's empathetic engagement with the Kafka photograph and its incorporation into his own life story
Art · Art history · Aura · Literature · Memoir · Narrative · Photography · Portrait · Psychoanalysis · The Imaginary · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Franz Kafka Literary Studies · Psychology · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation
Modern Time
Through the Lens of Loss
A Portrait of a ‘Selfie’ in the Making
Inanimate Nature. Pondering the Reproductive Daguerretype
Mundane Myths
What is Called Presence
Of benches and rubble
Work of art in the Age of Its AI Reproduction
Larger Than Life
Transforming Archaeology, Transforming Materiality
Photographing Dura-Europos, 1928-1937
"Re-Imagining the "Loss of Place
| Unique citing works | 12 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,71 |
| Citation span | 2009 - 2025 (17) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 10 |