Synonyms
Early Photography
Photography comes into existence in 1839, as the daguerrotype, invented by Jacques Daguerre (1787–1851), and writing about it in his novel Cousin Pons 10 years later, (1847–1848), Balzac speculates on the occult sciences, in which he was interested, which are spurned by skeptics or materialist philosophers, “that is to say by those who cleave solely to solid, visible facts,” in order to explain how the criterion of apparent absurdity rules out many inventions, for example:
the most recent great discovery of our time, the daguerrotype. If anyone had come and told Napoleon that a man or building is incessantly and continuously represented by a picture in the atmosphere, that all existing objects project into it a kind of spectre which can be captured and perceived, he would have consigned him to Charenton as a lunatic. (Balzac 1968: 131)
Balzac seems to have conceived photography as a...
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References
Balzac, Honoré de. 1968. Cousin pons. Trans. H. J. Hunt. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Barthes, Roland. 1982. Camera lucida.Trans. R. Howard. London: Fontana.
Benjamin, Walter. 1977. The origin of German tragic drama. Trans. J. Osborne. London: Verso.
Benjamin, Walter. 1996. In Selected writings vol 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999a. In Selected writings vol 2: 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999b. The arcades project. Trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 2002. In Selected writings vol 3: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 2003. In Selected writings vol 4: 1938–1939, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 2008. In The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. 2008. Benjamin’s aura. Critical Inquiry 34: 336–375.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. 2012. Cinema and experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Tambling, J. (2018). City Snapshots: Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography”. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_38-1
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