PHOTOGRAPHY THEORY #3: Walter Benjamin

From a beginner's guide to photography by The Telegraph 

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin (1936), digested by Lewis Bush 

What's it about? 

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish critic and essayist. In his lifetime he was relatively unappreciated but since his suicide in 1940 he has been reappraised as one of the 20th century’s most important writers. Published in 1936 and originally aimed at a small group of Marxist intellectuals this essay has rather surprisingly become Benjamin’s best known, partly helped by its prominence in John Berger’s influential 1972 television series Ways of Seeing.
Benjamin packs a remarkably wide ranging discussion into a relatively short space, but a key concept is the idea that unique works of art such as paintings possess an "aura" that copies and reproductions like photographs do not. Even though works of art have always been reproducible, whether by hand or through semi-mechanical processes such as stamping, modern forms of reproduction such as photography represent something new, allowing the artwork to be seen in very different contexts to the original, potentially changing how the work of art is understood.
For photography this essay is significant in two main respects. Firstly because it explores the belief that photographs are inferior to traditional forms of art such as painting. Secondly because it’s a very specific example of the way the context of a photograph alters the way a viewer understands the thing that it shows.  

In his own words: 

"Objects made by humans could always be copied by humans….but the technological reproduction of artworks is something new."
"In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art, its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence and nothing else that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject."
"What withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art."  

How to sound as if you've read it: 

The infinitely reproducible photograph lacks the aura of the unique work of art.