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In "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" (1935-39), Benjamin's most programmatic analysis of modern media culture, the relationship between aura and photography is presented as one of clear-cut opposition. As a medium of mechanical reproduction, photography is one of the main forces behind the decline, and indeed destruction, of aura.
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Benjamin's famous definition of the aura as "the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be" refers to natural scenes, such as the shadow of a branch or the sight of a distant mountain range.
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... the main purpose of photography, according to this essay, is not the (primary) representation of reality but rather the (secondary) replication of preexisting, traditional artworks which are made widely available through the technique of photographic reproduction.
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"A load of mysticism, although his attitude is against mysticism . . . it is rather horrid." Bertolt Brecht's (1993: 10) dismissive remark about Benjamin's concept of the aura
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in Hill's Newhaven fishwife, her eyes cast down in such indolent, seductive modesty, there remains something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer's art, something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to being wholly absorbed in "art." (Benjamin 1999c: 510; 1977b: 370)
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While emphasizing photography's representational realism, Benjamin simultaneously stresses its indexical nature—the fact that every photograph bears the physical trace of its referent. For Benjamin, it is this trace of the real inherent in every photograph that accounts for its particular, enduring appeal beyond individual styles, schools, or movements, for the fascination it holds for the viewer, who is drawn to explore the image in an almost compulsive fashion.
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The description of aura as a "medium" implies a sense of distance but also of mediation and encounter. Indeed, the Blick (gaze) encapsulated by the photographic aura might not be solely that of the sitter, but this dynamic might, as Marleen Stoessel (1983: 28) has argued, extend beyond the picture into the space of its reception, whereby the picture's sight, or An-Blick, is experienced by the observer. In this earliest definition, then, Benjamin's concept of a photographic aura is not simply based on static historical or technological categories but implies a process of encounter between viewer and image.
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In an argument which anticipates Barthes's opposition between studium and punctum, between a photograph's fixed cultural semiotics and its unpredictable, personal appeal, it is no longer the entire picture which captures the viewer's imagination but rather a detail—Kafka's eyes—whose unfathomable, auratic appeal is highlighted by the formulaic sameness of the surrounding context.
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it is Benjamin's evocative description of the childhood portrait which most radically challenges his own explicit claims about the decline of aura. As a result, his engagement with all of the three portraits, but with the Kafka photograph in particular, gestures toward a second, alternative conception of aura, one which is not bound up with a picture's photographic style, conventions, and sociohistorical context but which emerges from the encounter between viewer and image.
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this conception of aura as rooted in the act of beholding is most strikingly put into practice in Benjamin's writings on photography, where the aura of particular pictures emerges as the result of a (textual) strategy of empathetic exploration.
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In his essay on the French poet [Baudelaire], which takes the form of a wide-ranging cultural-historical investigation, Benjamin once again returns to the inter-personal dynamic between viewer and object which he holds to be a central feature of photography. As in his engagement with photographic portraiture, and with the Kafka portrait in particular, Benjamin here posits the gaze as the site of a reciprocal, auratic encounter:
"Inherent in the gaze, however, is the expectation that it will be returned by that on which it is bestowed. Where this expectation is met . . . , there is an experience of the aura in all its fullness. . . . Experience of the aura thus arises from the fact that the response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate or natural objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us." (2003a: 338; 1974c: 646-47
...In the "Baudelaire" essay in turn, this model of the aura is projected onto the world at large, where it invests even inanimate objects with the capacity to return the viewer's gaze.
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Rather than contradicting his earlier reflections, Benjamin's "Baudelaire" essay thus further underlines the turn away from aura as a fixed historical category toward its reconceptualization as a transhistorical model for interpersonal encounter. As Benjamin's argument suggests, it is only in the subsequent (in relation to the recording process, retrospective) act of viewing that this aura, which is absent in the sitter's confrontation with the apparatus, can be (re)established. Indeed, just as the aura of Kafka's photograph emerges only in retrospect, as a result of the anti-auratic conditions of its recording, so does Benjamin's conception of the aura—whether in its historical or its interpersonal dimension—only arise with the hindsight of theoretical engagement.
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Photography made it possible for the first time to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being. The detective story came into being when this most decisive of all conquests of a person's incognito had been accomplished. Since that time, there has been no end to the efforts to capture [dingfest machen] a man in his speech and actions. (2003b: 27; 1974b: 550)
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Benjamin's explorations of photographic portraiture, and of Kafka's child-hood portrait in particular, illustrate the auratic potential of photography in the face of reifying sociocultural dynamics and conventions. The empathetic engagement with particular images breaks down rigid boundaries between self and other, creating a play of identification between viewer and image. Benjamin's writings on photography are thus groundbreaking in several respects. On one level, they anticipate subsequent contributions to photography theory, such as Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, where the critic's detached analytical stance gives way to a more intuitive, emotive form of engagement. Both Benjamin and Barthes stress the power of individual photographs to disturb and affect the viewer in ways which break down any sense of critical distance and detachment. More specifically, Benjamin's strategy of singling out particular photographic details, such as Kafka's melancholy eyes, which are said to "reign over" the formulaic backdrop, prefigure Barthes's opposition of studium and punctum, that is, a mode of photographic interpretation which privileges an inherently personal encounter with particular images over a concern with photography's general stylistic, semiotic, or cultural dimensions.
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By transplanting the discussion of the Kafka photograph from his "Photography" essay into his memoirs, Benjamin illustrates that the detailed engagement with particular images can change the relation not only between viewer and photograph but also between the discursive categories of theory and literature, autobiography and fiction.
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