Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION
photography but rather in a relatively independent manner by the
appeal of art works to the masses. 48
This mass audience, he held, in its modern conditions of life, actually requires
new forms like illustrated papers and films, for which a way is cut through the
cultural detritus of the past by the “aura”—destroying work of photographic
reproduction.
It is far from obvious, however, that photographic reproduction of artworks
contributed to art’s loss of “aura” by depreciating “the quality of [their] presence.”
49 To the contrary, as Ivins points out, “the photograph made it possible for
the first time in history to get such a visual record of an object or work of art that
it could be used as a means to study many of the qualities of the particular object
or work of art itself.” 50 Here it may be noted that Benjamin’s emphasis on the
element of “reproduction” in photography missed that which distinguishes this
from earlier graphic techniques, which is not its inherently multiple character but
its relative independence from the copyist’s hand and eye as a means of depiction.
51 The rise of photography as a reproductive medium in part reflected the
circumstance that by the mid-nineteenth century “the sort of awe we now feel for
the status of the original made it necessary for there to be an ‘authentic’ or direct
relation between the reproduction and its original.” 52 (It should be remembered
also that it was not in earlier periods deemed essential that reproductions be
made after the original, copies being often substituted where more convenient.)
Photography made possible not only a relative gain in accuracy of reproduction,
but also a qualitative leap to the very possibility of documenting the material
character of artworks, such as details of facture. In this way photographic reproduction
became essential to the development of modern connoisseurship and the
discipline of art history, hardly loci of the desacralization of art. 53
48 Benjamin, “Work of art,” p. 234.
49 Benjamin, “Work of art,” p. 221.
50 Ivins, Prints, p. 136. That there was steady pressure on technology toward this goal is shown by
the development of mezzotint and similar non-linear methods of representation. By the late
eighteenth century, Crozat went to extraordinary lengths “to produce absolutely faithful records
of the paintings chosen for reproduction” in the volumes he had produced (Haskell, Painful Birth,
p. 32).
51 Ivins (in Prints, p. 177) was of course wrong to see photographic reproduction as pure depiction,
with no interfering visual syntax of its own; see Estelle Jussim’s critique in Visual Communication
and the Graphic Arts (New York: Bowker, 1974).
52 Lambert, Image, p. 196.
53 Although this development eventually gave rise to worries on the part of art historians that practitioners’
dependence on photographs might lead to their usurping the place of the originals as
objects of study, it is worth noting that the founding of an “imaginary museum” of photographic
reproductions was proposed already at the first International Congress of Art History in 1873
(see the discussion in Trevor Fawcett, “Graphic versus photographic in the nineteenth-century
reproduction,” Art History 9:2 (1986), p. 8.
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