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May 6, 2009
I've turned to Walter Benjamin for my article for the One City: three views exhibition by altofotnet.org. I am interested in the role of the camera as a mode of viewing in modernity, the development of historical understanding, and a critical photography.
I've stumbled on this site, but many of the Benjamin links are broken. The most useful amongst them is that by Christopher Rollason. I also came across the special Benjamin issue of Transformations.
Rollaston points out in his Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project: Contemporary Cultural Debate in the West paper that for Benjamin the arcades have two faces:
The arcades are, certainly, a "primordial landscape of consumption"... temples of the commodity, with their seductively displayed, endlessly varied wares: "binoculars and flower seeds, screws and musical scores, makeup and stuffed vipers, fur coats and revolvers". ... They were created for purposes of profit, or indeed sheer speculation, offering the buildings' owners unrivalled financial opportunities by concentrating so many rent-paying undertakings within a small space. ... Seen from one point of view, then, they are archetypal manifestations of the expanding market economy - creations of private enterprise and sources of profit
The other face is that:
In their glass and steel design, they both reflect and inspire the utopias projected by the social visionaries of the nineteenth century, embodying the "anticipation and imaginative expression of a new world"... the utopian dimension of the arcades is implicit in the womb-like protection which they offered to the pedestrians who used them. The glass roofing and the insulation from the discomforts of the street created the sensation of an ideal, fairy-tale world existing in parallel to the muddy and noisy world outside. The shop-windows with their agglomerations of discrete objects on one level represented the apotheosis of the commodity as fetish, yet at the same time offered the passer-by images of a dream-world beyond the confines of the existing society:... The glass-roofed passages conjure up visions of utopia.
In the arcades the "desire for pleasure" becomes a "form of resistance". The arcades are both a source of deceptive illusion of a dream and the key to authentic historical understanding.
Fair enough. That was then. What of our time, when the arcades are historical form of consumption replaced by department stores and those that remain are surrounded by nostalgia and heritage? How does that authentic historical understanding help us now as we walk the city as photographers? Rollaston does address this as he says that he is interested to consider some of the ways in which Benjamin's Arcade book can shed light, not only on the nineteenth-century universe which is its declared subject, but also on some of the cultural phenomena and associated debates of our own time.
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Many thanks for your comment on my Benjamin article. If there are any aspects you would like to discuss, please email me. Do check out the rest of the Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate.
All best
Christopher Rollason, Ph. D.