CLASSIC ESSAYS

ON
PHOTOGRAPHY

Edited by Alan Trachtenberg

Notes by Amy Weinstein Meyers

Leete's Island Books

New Haven, Conn.

Foreword and Notes 1980 by Leete's Island Books, Inc.

Ubrary of Congress Catalogue Card Number. 78-61844

ISBN, ll-918172-07-1 (cloth); ll-918172-08-X (paper)

Published by Leete's Island Books,lnc., Box 3131, Stony Creek, Cf0640S
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Susan McCrillis Kelsey

Third Printing
The following articles have been reprinted with permission:
"Photography at the Crossroads," by Berenice Abbott, from Univusal Photo AlmanQC
1951, with permission of Berenice Abbou.
"Report,' by Dominique Fran~ois Arago, from History ofPhotography, by Josef Maria
Eder, with permission of Columbia University Press.
"Rhetoric of the Image," from Image, Music, Text, by Roland Bacthes, with
permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux,lnc.
"The Modem Public and Photography," by Charles Baudelaire, from Art in Paris
/845-/862, with permission of Phaidon Press, Ltd.
"The Ontology of the Photographic Image," from What Is Cinema?, by Andre Balin,
1967 by The Regents of the University of California; reprinted by permission of the
University of California Press.
"A Short History of Photography, .. by Walter Benjamin. Aus "Gesammelte Schriften"
\ Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main 1977. Trans. by P. Pat~on, reprinted from
Artforum. vol. IS, Feb. 1m.
"Understanding a Photograph," from The Look of Things. by John Berger, with
permission of the author.
"Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image," by Hubert Damisch.
reprinted from October 5, Photography: A Special Issue, Summer 1978. with
permission of The MIT Press.
"The Reappearance of Photography," by Walker Evans, from Hound and Horn, vol. 5,
no. I, 1931, with permission of the publishers.
"New Reports and New Vision: The Nineteenth Century," [rom Prints and Visual
Communication, by William M. Ivins, Jr., with permission of Da Capo Press. Inc., and
Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd.
"Photography," from Theory of Film: The Redempt ion ofPhysical Reality, by Siegfried
Kracauer, Oxford University Press. Inc. 1960. Reprinted by permission.
"Photography," from Painting, Photography. Film, by Laszlo MoholyNagy, with
permission of Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd.
"Memoire on the Heliograph," by Joseph Nicephore Niq> ceo from HistOry of
Photography, by Josef Maria Eder, with permission of Columbia University Press.
"Mechanism and Expression: The Essence and Value of Photography," by Franz Roh,
reprinted from Photo-Eye: 76 Photos of the Period, edited by Franz. Roh and Jan
Tschichold, with permission of Juliane Roh.
'
"The Centenary of Photography," from Occasions, vol. I I of The Collected Work.! in
English, Paul Valery. 1970 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission
of Princeton University Press and Roudedge and Kegan Paul, Ltd.
"Seeing Pholographically," by Edward Weston, from Encyclopedia of Photography,
vol. 18, with permission of Singer Communications Corp.

Andre Bazin (1918-1958) and Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966)

Many critics of the cinema have found that to develop critical
methods for film analysis they must first define the nature of the
photographic image. Both the noted French film critic Andre Bazin
and the German-born American Siegfried Kracauer have written on
photography in the course of their careers.
While serving in the French army, during World War II. Bazin
began to express his inte~nrranalyzing film for its cultural'l
sociological. and historical significance. and when the war ended,
he formally began his career as the film critic for Le Parisien Libere. As one of the first published film critics, Bazin attempted
both to reach a mass audience through his journalistic critiques
and to create a scholarly field of film analysis through his more
specialized writings. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image,"
which is reprinted here, is one of his earliest pieces.
Siegfried Kracauer's earliest interests were in architecture and
urban space. But after earning a doctorate in engineertrrg1ii Berlin
in 1915, he turned, in the Weimar period in the 1920s, to
philosophy, sociology, and eventually cinema. He served on tha
editorial staff of the prestigious Frankfurter Zeitung from 1920 to
1933, when the rise of Nazism forced hiS sufJden departure from
Germany. He arrived in 1iii3 United States in 1941, received a
Guggenheim Foundation award, and produced hiS major study of
German film, From ealigari to Hitler (19). His other books includa studies oTNazi propaganda films, Offenbach, and History:

The Last Things before the Last (1969).

The Ontology of the Photographic

Image
Andre Bazin

If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of

embalming the dead might tum out to be a fundamental factor in
their creation. The process might reveal that at the origin Of '\
painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex. The religion
of ancient Egypt, aimed against death, saw survival as depending on the continued existence of the corporeal body. Thus, by
providing a defense against the passage of time it satisfied a basic
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psychological need in man. for death is but the victory of time.

To preserve, artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it
from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the
hold of life. It was natural, therefore, to keep up appearances in
the face of the reality of death by preserving flesh and bone. The
first Egyptian statue, then, was a mummy, tanned and petrified
in sodi . But pyramids and labyrinthine corridors offered no
certain guarantee against ultimate pilla e.
Other forms of insurance were therefore sought. So. near the
sarcophagus, alongside the com that was to feed the dead, the
Egyptians placed terra cotta statuettes, as substitute mummies
which might replace the bodies if these were destroyed. It is this
religious use, tben, that lays bare the primordial function of
statuary,
namely, the preservation o~y a representation of
)
life. Another manifesta Ion of the same kind of thing is the
arrow-pierced clay bear to be found in prehistoric caves. a magic
identity-substitute for the living animal, that will ensure a successful hunt. Tbe evolution. side by side, of art and civilization
has relieved the plastic arts of their magic role. Louis XN did
not have himself embalmed. He was conte t to survIve in his
Le Brun. Civilization cannot, howeve ,entirely cast
portrai
out the bogy ohime. It can only su .mate our concern with it to
the level of rational thinking. No n believes any longer in the
otological identity of model and mage, ut all are agreed that
the unage-helps us iO"iemember tM subject and to preserve him
from a second spiritual ea . Today tbe making of images DO
longer shares an anthropocentric. utilitarian purpose. It is no
longer a question of survival after death, but of a larger concept,
,the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real. with its
'own temporal destiny. "How vain a thing is painting" if underneath our fond admiration for its works we do not discern man's
primitive need to have the last word in tbe argument with death
by means of the form that endures. If the history of the plastic
arts is less a matter of their aesthetic than of their psychology
then it will be seen to be essentially the story of resemblance, or,
if you will, of realism.

Seen in this sociological perspective photography and cinema

would provide a natural explanation for the great s iritual and
technical crisis that overtook modern painting around the middle
of the las
ntury. Andre Malra~as described the cinema as

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the furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism, the beginnings of which were first manifest at the Renaissance and which
found a limited expression in baroque painting.
It is true that painting, the world over, has struck a varied
balance between the symbolic and realism. However, in the ftfteenth century Western painting began to tum from its age-old
concern with spiritual realities expressed in the form proper to it,
towards an effort to combine this spiritUal expression with as
complete an imitation as possible of the outside world.
The decisive moment undoubtedly came with the ~very of
the first scientific and already, in a sense, mechanical system of
reproduction, namely,
rs ective: the camera obscura o(J)a
Vinci foreshadowed the camera of Niepce. The artist w;;S;ow in
""ii'j)Osition to create the illusion oft r e-dimensional space within
which things appeared to exist as our eyes in reality see them.
Thenceforth painting was tom between two ambitions: one,
primarily aesthetic, namely the expression of spiritual reality
wherein the symbol transcended its model; the 0 er, purely
psychological, namely the duplication of the world outside. The
satisfaction of this appetite for illUSion merely served to increase
it till, bit by bit, it consumed the plastic arts. However, since
perspective had only solved the problem of form and not of
movement, realism was forced to continue the search for some
way of giving dramatic expression to the moment, a kind of
psychic fourth dimension that could suggest life in the tortured
immobility of baroque art.'
.
The great artists, of course, have always been able to combine
the two tendencies. They have allotted to each its proper place in
the hierarchy of things, holding reality at their command and
molding it at will into the fabric of their art. Nevertheless, the
fact remains that we are faced with two essentially different
phenomena and these any objective critic must view separately
if he is to understand the evolution of the pictorial. The ~
illusion has not ceased to trouble the heart of painting since the
siXteenth century. It is a purely mental need, ofitselfnonaesthetie, the origins of which must be sought in the proclivity of the
mind towards magic. However, it is a need the puU of which has
been strong enough to have seriously upset the equilibrium of
the plastic arts.
The quarrel over realism in art stems from a misunderstand239

mg, from a confusion between the aesthetic and the psychological; between true realism, the need that is to give significant
expression to the world both concretely and its essence, and the
pseudorealism of a deception aimed at fooling the eye (or for that
matter the mind); a pseudoreaiism content in other words with
illusory appearances. 2 That is why medieval art never passed
through this crisis; simultaneously vividly realistic and highly
spiritual, it knew nothing of the drama that came to light as a
consequence of technical developments. Perspective was the
original sin of Western painting.
It was redeemed from sin by Niepce and Lumihe. In achieving the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic
arts from their obsession with likeness. Painting was forced, as it
turned o.ut, to offer us illusion and this illusion was reckoned
sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other
hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very
essence, our obsession with realism.
No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee
to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image. Again, the essential factor in the transition from the baroque to photography is
not the perfecting of a physical process (photography will long
remain the inferior of painting in the reproduction of color);
rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely
satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction
in the making of which man plays no part. The solution is not to
be found in the result achieved but in the way of achieving it. 3
This is why the conflict between style and likeness is a relatively modern phenomenon of which ere is no trace before the
invention ofthe sensitized plate. Clearly the fascinating objectivity of Chardin is in no sense that of the photographer. The
nineteenth century saw the real beginnings of the crisis of
realism of which Picasso is now the mythical central figure and
which put t tl1e"test at one and the same time the conditions
determining the formal existence of the plastic arts and their
sociological roots. Freed from the "resemblance complex," the
modern painter abandons it to the masses who, henceforth, identify resemblance on the one hand with photography and on the
other with the kind of painting which is related to photography.
Originality in photography as distinct from originality in paint-

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ing lies in the essentially objective character of photography.

[Bazin here makes a poinfbC the fact that the lens, the basis of
photography, is in French called th " 'ectif," a nuance that is
lost:n English. - TR.] For the first time, between the originating
object and its reproduction there intervenes only-the-iostrumentality of nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the
world IS fomed au omatically, without the creative intervention
of man. The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection of the object to be photographed
and by way of the purpose he has in mind. Although the final
result may reflect something of his personality, this does not
play the same role as is played by that of the pabter. All the arts
are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an
advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a
phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.
This production by automatic means has radically affected our
psychology of the image. The objective nature of photography
confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other
picture-making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may
offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object
reproduced, actually, re-presented, set before us, that is to say,
in time and space. Photography enjoys a certain advantage in
virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its
reproduction.'
A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the
model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it
will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear
..-------~away our faith.
Besides, painting is, after all, an inferior way of making
likenesses, an ersatz of the processes of reproduction. Only a
photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that
is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it
( something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or
transfer. The photographic image is the object itself, the object
freed from the conditions of time and spacethaigovem it_ No
mailer how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no mailer how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, .by virtue
~he-.Y!lry process of its becoming, the being of the' model of
which it is the reproduction; it is the model.

.::-l-

S:z

241

Hence the charm of family albums. Those grey or sepia

shadows, phantomlike and almost undecipherable, are no longer
traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of
lives halted at a set moment in their duration, ree<t"from their
destiny; not, however, by the prestige of art but by the power of
an impassive mechanical process: for photography does not
create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply
from its proper corruption.
Viewed in this perspective, the cinema is objectivi . me.
The film is no longer content to'preserve the objec , enshrouded
as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved
intact, out of the distant past, in amber. The fUm delivers
baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy. Now, for the first
time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration,
change mummified as it were. Those categories of resemblanc~
which determine the species photographic image likewise, then,
determine the character of its aesthetic as distinct from that of
painting.>
The aesthetic qUalities of photography are to be sought in its
power to Jay bare the realities. It is not for me to separate off, in
the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a
damp sidewalk, there the gesture of a child. Only the impassive
lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those
piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with
which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its
virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love. By
the power of photography. the natural image of a world that we
neither know nor can know, nature at last does more than imitate
art: she imitates the artist.
Photography can even surpass art in creative power. The aesthetic world of the painter is of a different kind from that of the
world about him. Its boundaries enclose a substantially and es\ sentially different microcosm. The photograph as such and the
object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a
fingerprint. Wherefore, photography actually contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it. The surrealists had an inkling of this when they
looked to the photographic plate to provide them with their
monstrosities and for this reason: the surrealist does not consider his aesthetic purpose and the mechanical effect of the

242

image on our imaginations as things apart. For him, the logical

distinction between what is imaginary and w at is real tends to
dis~ EVery mage is to be seen as an obect and every
object as an image. ence photography ran s high in.the order
of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a
reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact. The
fact that surrealist painting combines tricks of visual deception
with meticulous attention to detail substantiates this.
So, photography is clearly the most im ortant event in the
history of plastic arts:-Simultaneously a liberation and an ac- ,
compl~, 1 as freed Westem-I!ilinting, once and for all,
from its obsession with realism and allowed it to recover its
aesthetic lmtoifcimy. I;;;p;:essionist realism, offering science as ,
an i I, is at the opposite extreme from eye-deceiving trickery. I
Only when form ceases to have any imitative value can it be
swallowed up in color. So, when form, in the person of Cezanne,
once more regains possession or-the canvas there is no on er
any question of the illu'Sions of the&eometry of perspective. The
painting, being confronted in the meclianlcaIly produced image
with a competitor able to reach out beyond baroque resemblance
to the very identity of the model, was compelled into the category of object. Henceforth Pascal's condemnation of painting is
itself rendered vain since the"iilfotograp
ows us on the one \
hand to admire in reproduction something that our eyes alone
could not have taught us to love, and on the other, to admire the
painting as a thing in itself whose relation to something in nature
has ceased to be the justification for its existence.
On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language.
I. It would be interesling from this point of view to study, in the
illustrated magazines of 1890-1910, the rivalry between photographic
reporting and the use of drawings. The latter, in particular, satisfied the
baroque need for the dramatic. A feeling for the photographic document developed only gradually.
2. Perhaps the Communists, before they attach too much importance to expressionis~m, should stop talking about it in a way
more suitable to the eighteenth century, before there were such things
as photography or cinema. Maybe it does not really rna t . Russian
painting is second-rate rovide<j ;ussi ve s ",st-rate cinema.
Elsenstem IS herTintoretto.

243

3. There is room, nevertheless, for a study of the psychology of the

lesser plastic arts, the molding of death masks for example, which
likewise involves a certain automatic process. One might consider photography in this sense as a molding, the taking of an impression, by the
manipulation of light.
4. Here one should really examine the psychology of relics and
souvenirs wbich likewise enjoy the advantages of a transfer of reality
stemming from the "mummy-complex." Let us merely note in passing
that the Holy Shroud of Turin combines the features alike of relic and
photograph.
5. I use the term category here in the sense attached to it by M.
Gouhier in his book on the theater in which he distinguishes between
the dramatic and the aesthetic categories. Just as dramatic tension has
no artistic value, the perfection of a reproduction is not to be identified
with beauty. It constitutes rather the prime maller, so to speak, on
which the artistic fact is recorded.

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