Walter Benjamin: History from Photography

Abstract

Walter Benjamin’s work stands out because of the different topics he collects and presents as pieces of a puzzle that cannot always reach the same image. This paper collects his approach to photography in an effort to show the relation between this topic and his concept of history. In other words, we are regarding the space of photography as a source able to unbend –according to Benjamin’s dialectics– new forms of telling, perceiving and studying history. For this purpose, three key moments are proposed: First, the achievement of a method that, through a narrative instrument, privileges the concept glance for its development; second, the presentation of the topic photography and its characterization in Benjamins’s thinking, and finally, the exposition of the relation between photography and history, in an attempt to point out the possibilities of the photographic glance to provide images with historical sense.