Walter Benjamin on photographic melancholy

Authors

Keywords:

Melancholy, Photography, Benjamin, Aura, Barthes, Time

Abstract

The goal of this article is to analyse the different meanings of melancholy in photography following Walter Benjamin’s book Kleine Geschichte der Photographie. The main idea that I am going to develop is that, following Benjamin’s text, there are three different ways of understanding melancholy in photography, even if we understand melancholy just as a lost or a missing phenomenon. Firstly, photography is considered by Benjamin as a melancholic phenomenon because it shows a temporal loss: the course of time is unstoppable, even if images try to fasten time. Secondly, Benjamin introduces Barthes later concept of punctum in his book La Chambre Claire: photography would be melancholic because it would be a kind of premonition able to foresee the destiny of its characters. Thirdly, Benjamin shows that not only photography but also the history of photography is melancholic, because its history does not follow the theory of progress but is determined by the loss of aura.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

  • Victoria Mateos de Manuel

    Victoria Mateos de Manuel is currently independent researcher. She is a member of the Research Project of the Center for Social and Human Sciences of the Spanish Scientific Research Council (CCHS-CSIC) “A History of Dance in Spain, 1836-1936” (PGC2018-093710-A-100). She holds a European PhD on Philosophy (2017), which was awarded with the Complutense University Award for Doctoral Research on Philosophy and funded by the FPU scholarship of the Spanish Ministry of Education. She is also M.A. on Gender and Diversity Studies by the Freie Universität Berlin (2011). She has developed study and research stays at Humboldt Universität Berlin (2007-09), Technische Universität Berlin (2019), Institut für Theaterwissenschaft (Freie Universität Berlin) (2015) and Département Danse (Université Paris 8-Saint Denis) (2014-15). She is author of the book Salome’s Silence. Choreographic Essays on the Dionysian in Modernity (CSIC/ Plaza y Valdés, 2019) and editor of Coreoteque. An Archive on Dance Philosophy (Editorial Complutense, 2021).

References

Downloads

Published

2022-01-24

Dimensions

PlumX

Issue

No. 24 (2022): Images and sounds of urban geopolitics

Section

Miscellany

License

All contents published in Fotocinema Revista científica de cine y fotografía are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. All about this license is available in the following link: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0>

Users can copy, use, redistribute, share and exhibit publicly as long as:

  • The original source and authorship of the material are cited (Journal, Publisher and URL of the work).
  • It is not used for comercial purposes.
  • The existence of the license and its especifications are mentioned.

There are two sets of authors’ rights: moral and property rights. Moral rights are perpetual prerogatives, unrenounceable, not-transferable, unalienable, imprescriptible and inembargable. According to authors’ rights legislation, Fotocinema. Revista científica de cine y fotografía recognizes and respects authors moral rights, as well as the ownership of property rights, which will be transferred to University of Malaga in open access. The property rights are referred to the benefits that are gained by the use or the dissemination of works. Fotocinema. Revista científica de cine y fotografía is published in an open access form and it is exclusively licenced by any means for doing or authorising distribution, dissemination, reproduction, , adaptation, translation or arrangement of works.

Authors are responsable for obtaining the necessary permission to use copyrighted images.

How to Cite

Walter Benjamin on photographic melancholy. (2022). Fotocinema. Revista científica De Cine Y fotografía, 24, 377-396. https://revistas.uma.es/index.php/fotocinema/article/view/14165