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Art History of Photography
by Volker Kahmen.
The Viking Press/287pp./$15.95 (hb).

With the publication of Art History of Photography, Viking Press has taken (to adapt the cliche) “one step backward and two steps forward.” The net result is progress, but one has to do a lot of foot-shuffling to get anywhere. To be less cute and more to the point: there is value here, but for a combination of reasons the book is at various times obscure, confusing, false and/or narrow in outlook—which attributes, of course, make it difficult to extract the useful ideas.

To begin with, this is not a history of photography or of art, or even a history at all. It was published in Germany (in 1973) as Fotografie als Kunst, and the English edition carried the same title, translated literally: Photography as Art. In the United States, one assumes, the new title is expected to sell more books, but it certainly doesn’t help the reader to understand that what Volker Kahmen is attempting is the creation of a new critical framework which can help us to better understand photography as a whole and certain photographs in particular, and the place these pictures have in “art.”

This “creation” was not spontaneously generated, but is, like all modern inventions, based upon the pioneering thought of preceding investigators. The author acknowledges the essays of Walter Benjamin as the foundation of his theories, and indeed he has drawn heavily on—and quoted extensively from—Benjamin’s writings on photography. These include two major articles, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” 1936 (published in translation as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Benjamin’s Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1968.), and “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,” 1931 (not available in translation), and references to photography in a number of articles dealing mainly with other subjects.

Walter Benjamin was a literary critic and observer of social phenomena who died in 1940. It was many years before his contributions to literature were widely appreciated, even in his own Germany; his understanding of art and photography and their inter-relationship has yet to be recognized.

At the center of Benjamin’s thought on this subject (and of Kahmen’s essay) is his concept of aura. This is a rather difficult idea, but what it comes down to, basically, is the quality of uniqueness of a traditional work of art, or of nature itself. The aura of works of art is closely tied to what he sees as their “ritual value.” Thus, the earliest uses of art as magical symbols on cave walls or as religious icons—sometimes seen only by religious leaders or kept covered during all but the most particularly prescribed rituals—were invested with aura to a greater degree than works created to have “exhibition value” (which, presumably, is the main value modern people see in what they call art.) Mechanical reproduction of a work serves both to increase its exhibition value by disseminating it more widely and to reinforce the new tradition of works created for exhibition. Technical reproduction, in fact, rapidly all but destroyed aura in works of art by stripping them of their claim to a unique existence in time and space. We quickly reached and passed the point where art was created especially for reproduction, until now in photography and film we have done away with the “original” entirely. (What was not yet apparent to a writer in 1936 was that the limited number of prints made by a photographer would create a demand for “original” prints. He was correct only in theory when he wrote, “from a photographic negative… one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.”)

This grossly summarizes that portion of Benjamin’s article, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” used by Volker Kahmen in creating his argument. It is worth quoting one final passage from Benjamin’s article, which directly relates these points to photography and the presence of aura in photographs:

In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. But as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets.

One of the most serious problems with the Kahmen book is that it is very difficult to get even a rudimentary sense of what Benjamin is saying without referring to the original source. Even in expressing his own thoughts Kahmen is, at times, confusing, but the development of the notion of aura and its breakdown with today’s technology is spread across a number of different references and quotations throughout the introductory essay. But this fault is almost surely compounded by the translation of Brian Tubb. Compare the following lines from Tubb with the last few from Harry Zohn’s rendition (above): “When the human aspect is removed from the photograph, representative value begins to take precedence over mystique value. For this development we have to thank the unique contribution of Atget, who portrayed deserted Paris streets around the turn of the century.” It’s hard enough to deal with the undefined and unclear term “representative value,” but claiming Atget to be responsible for this change in values is misleading and confusing. (At another point in the book, a trial which occurred in 1862 is referred to as “a law suit involving Gisele Freund,” again probably a translator’s error.)

Beyond any problems with the writing and translation, however, it may be that Kahmen’s extensive quoting of Benjamin is not even intended to necessarily portray Benjamin’s views. For the master on whose work the style and content of the present volume is based, created, according to Hannah Arendt in her introduction to Illuminations, a “work (which) consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d’etre in a free floating state, as it were.” I make these points because those who will not read Benjamin himself (and, in the case of the as-yet-untranslated works, those of us who cannot read German) must rely on Tubb’s translation of Kahmen’s selective interpretation of Benjamin’s essays. We should at least be aware of this.

Volker Kahmen sees much of early photography as retaining the quality of aura (originally a characteristic of painting and other traditional media) by relying on portraiture, by using techniques that emphasized the mystique of the subject (Hill’s long exposures, Cameron’s lenses), and by consciously striving for the same “artistic effect” that photography was destroying in painting. With the proliferation of camera portraits, technical advances, and the advent of the snapshot, that quality was all but eliminated in photographs.

Photographs which are devoid of the emotional or formal qualities that seduce us in more conventional pictures—which carry a great deal of information, but are not “documentary” in the sense of being “about” a certain time or place—have been produced almost since 1839. Yet it is a relatively recent development that this type of picture (which Kahmen would say has eliminated the extraneous/intrusive quality of “aura”) has met with a widely appreciative response, or that any more than an occasional, isolated individual has deliberately pursued such pure objectivity as a goal. The significance of Art History lies in the author’s application of the Benjamin construct in an effort to understand certain work and working philosophies in the photographic medium which have not yet been adequately explained. (That he attempts also to make qualitative distinctions on the same basis is unfortunate, but more will be said about that further on.)

It is the absence of aura, or more accurately, one supposes, its analytical destruction, which attracts us in the truly “objective” photograph. Kahmen quotes some negative criticism of “creative” (one takes this to mean “subjective”) photography, in which he says “aesthetic pleasure becomes the be-all-and-end-all”:

Benjamin—”The more the crisis in today’s social order takes hold, and the more stubbornly its individual features confront one another in stark contrast, the more the creative element—in the profoundest sense a hybrid: contradiction is its father, and imitation is its mother—has become a fetish, the manifestations of which finally owe their existence only to developments in fashionable fighting techniques. The creative element in photography becomes its surrender to fashion. The world is beautiful—that is its slogan. It represents an attitude to photography which glorifies every soup-tin but which is incapable of placing it in its human context; and its fanciful themes are more a symptom of its saleability than its wisdom.”

Bertold Brecht—”The historical aspects of some early photographs seems to have gone. I do not mean only the choice of subjects, although I also mean that, but rather that expression of uniqueness and strangeness in time which artists are able to give to their pictures—artists who understand the essence of a document. But for this one must be interested in the subject-matter—an interest in lighting is not enough. Photography should by now be past the stage where artists were preoccupied simply with demonstrating what can be done with photographic apparatus.”

Siegfried Kracauer—”Photographic artists operate within those social areas which are concerned with a veneer of spirituality because they fear the true spirit…”

Finally, the author himself spells it out in writing about the work of Bernhard and Hilla Becher:

“In the Bechers’ pictures we are presented not with a subjective view of the object, but with the object in its totality. Their uncompromising involvement with the object recalls the aims of Atget and Sander, who also eliminated the element of aura. The objects stand, as it were, naked before the lens. What an objective picture around 1930 demanded, but only occasionally achieved, as in the work of Karl Blossfeldt, was that the object should be comprehended as an object, and that the photographer should come to terms with this, without first considering its artistic aspects: this is the point of departure for the Bechers.”

One of the more intriguing things to happen when we look at photographs in this way is the transformation undergone by much of the work of the 1930s, which we often think of as highly objective. Walker Evans fares pretty well, though, as Kahmen points out, his main concern was objective reportage. Edward Weston, pronouncements about “the thing itself” to the contrary, “almost exclusively,” to quote Kahmen, “pursued blantantly [sic] visual stimuli.” Even Albert Renger-Patzsch, for whom the term Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) was coined, was basically interested in creating formally beautiful images.

Certainly Kahmen’s ideas suggest an approach to a whole genre of photography which seems to be emerging as one of the most important of contemporary directions. (In addition to the Bechers, he cites Bruce Nauman and Ed Ruscha’s Thirty-Four Parking Lots as particularly apt examples.) It also provides a new ingress to the work of such masters as Sander and Muybridge, whom he discusses as exemplary, and points up the relative nature of the term, “objective,” as used in reference to Weston, et al. He makes a grave error, however, in strictly applying these observations as a critical yardstick to any number of workers of widely diverse backgrounds and concerns. Thus, the Dadaist photo-montage has a “disruptive alienation effect” which has “an immediate titillating quality,” but which “then dissipates into a stylized functionalism.” And those of the “artistic avant-garde” of today who are working with photography are said to “all have one thing in common: the conventional application of pictorial material.”

Positive criticism is doled out according to the same standards, and Kahmen boldly lists those he feels to have made the most important contributions. To quote the last paragraph of his essay:

Thus, once photography has shaken off its initial naivete, the work of a few artists runs through its historical development like a red thread—artists who have (in Benjamin’s words) the quasi-scientific systemic awareness of Muybridge, via Atget, Sander and Blossfeldt, up to the Bechers.

It seems problematic that the author would include Atget without any discussion of the possible overlay of the quality of aura on a photograph or body of photographs by succeeding generations of viewers. When Benjamin wrote of Atget in 1936, he could deal directly with the subjects of the pictures as recorded by Atget’s lens, because little had changed in Paris between when they were made and when the writer viewed them. Today, however, we value Atget’s work largely because it is such an incredible document of an age and place now almost out of memory, and also, to some extent, because of his quaintly simple technique and its visibility in the pictures. The photographs have acquired an aura which we can ignore only with the greatest conscious effort.

It was Walter Beniamin’s ambition to create a work of literary criticism which would consist solely of quotations. That this device is also heavily relied upon by Kahmen in his essay is self-evident. But it should be pointed out that the picture section of the book, comprising 232 pages, has been developed on this same principle, to good effect and bad.

The photographs used are “quotations” not only from the oeuvre of individual photographers, but often from earlier books. Even the 40 or so anonymous images have almost all been used by earlier authors. That Volker Kahmen did not do his own picture research is a disappointment, as “new” pictures are always a pleasure to see. However, in the lay out and editing we receive compensation. Wonderful, often witty, juxtapositions force new interpretations of even the most familiar images. More important, the picture section is a visual reiteration of the essay, though more clearly stated and more enjoyable.