On Photography

German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, and historian Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) died by suicide while fleeing the Nazi invasion of France. Many of his most famous works were either published posthumously or translated into English after the war ended. Benjamin’s work caught on in the English-speaking world in the late 1960s and early 1970s and contributed greatly to the burgeoning field of cultural studies. Benjamin’s ideas resonated profoundly with academics and scholars in the 1970s and was viewed as cutting edge when Sontag wrote On Photography. Benjamin still remains highly relevant in cultural studies and systemic critiques of society in part because his unfinished magnum opus, The Arcades Project, wasn’t translated into English until 1999.

Benjamin pulled from a myriad of traditions, including Marxism, Jewish theology, and German Idealism. His methodology predates the creation of cultural studies yet performs many of its functions. Benjamin is often hailed as a forerunner in postmodern critical theory and historical criticism. Sontag’s work reflects many of his ideas about history, objects, and economics. In one of his most famous passages in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin writes:

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress (Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Schocken Books, 1968).

Benjamin compares the historian, the collector, and the ragpicker to the Angel of History. He imagines these figures as engaged in a futile war against industrial society’s progress to preserve history and culture. Sontag compares the photographer to Baudelaire’s ragpicker while being fully steeped in Benjamin’s ideas and frameworks, implicitly comparing the photographer to the Angel of History. The “pile of debris” is directly echoed in the “garbage-strewn plenitude” (54) of modern American society. Sontag presents photography as another means of collecting and interacting with Benjamin’s wreckage of history. Photography’s use as a tool of consumerism offers a bleak and cynical perspective on how photographers interact with the wreckage of the past. Benjamin’s ideas on history and art in modernity are essential to Sontag’s own explorations within On Photography.

French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) wrote lyrical poetry focusing on the urban environment and his observations from strolling the city. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) gave unflinching insight into city life in Paris, including many of the disreputable activities and marginalized communities inherent in Parisian life. Les Fleurs du Mal caused a great moral scandal because of its focus on unconventional eroticism and a blunt view of the city’s extreme social inequity.

Baudelaire coined the term “modernity” as a way to describe the kaleidoscopic and often jarring experience of city living. His poetry was foundational for the Modernist movement, which aimed to portray reality through increasingly abstract and impressionistic artistic means in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Baudelaire believed that the only true way to explore and capture modernity was through expressive art and impressions of reality filtered through the artist. He conveyed what he saw as the truths of living within the city through art and not through nonfiction writing, such as reporting. For Baudelaire, artistic impression was the only way to understand life in the city and people living on the margins.

Baudelaire’s favorite figure in urban living was the ragpicker. A ragpicker is someone living in severe poverty whose only means of subsistence was to literally pick through discarded rags and find ends of cloth worth salvaging and selling. The figure of the ragpicker appears in many of Baudelaire’s writings, such as the poem “The Ragpickers’ Wine,” in which he compares the ragpicker to a “poet lost in dreams” (Line 7). The ragpicker is an emblematic figure of modernity who subsists in harsh conditions of social inequity while inherently understanding the city in ways that the upper classes cannot.

Sontag compares photographers and photograph consumers to a gentrified version of the ragpicker in “Melancholy Objects” (61). Her use of the ragpicker is sardonic and paints photographers as cynical ragpickers who, unlike those of the past, are ragpickers by choice in the name of profit and prestige. Notably, Baudelaire despised photography and denounced it. He believed that photography should never be more than a device for science and art. Instead, photography became a full-fledged discipline on its own. Sontag’s reliance on Baudelaire’s notion of the ragpicker, and his importance to Walter Benjamin’s work, makes his position as a contemporary with the early photographers significant. Baudelaire exemplifies a non-photographer artist living through the rise of photography and its encroachment on the realm of painting. Together with Benjamin’s wreckage of history, Baudelaire’s ragpicker is integral to Sontag’s view of the photographer.