Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

                          Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

                 Ernst Junger and Walter Benjamin’s expressed their views on photography in somewhat divergent ways. Junger’s views tended to focus on the visual and perceptual examination of photography while Benjamin’s views had a more psychoanalytic focus. Vision the most frequently studied of our five senses is an important factor necessary for perception the process by which the brain organizes and interprets sensory information to take place.

                Junger describes photographs as standing outside the zone of sensitivity, visualized by an insensitive and invulnerable eye and having a telescopic quality. He further states that photographs grant us a peculiar way of seeing and is consequently an instrument of our peculiar nature. According to Junger we are able to detach our feelings because we do not look at photographs as closely associated to ourselves but only a medium which allows us to see details of things the naked eye would not enable us to see e.g. capturing a bullet in midflight and a man at the moment a bullet tears him apart. Technology’s fast pace he further states have made us so tolerant that it is as if we look at photographs with a fixed gaze that registers but does not really see and our eyes have been transformed into a neutral instrument that registers movement but with  an empty gaze.

                Junger states that because of this build up of tolerance for cruelty and subsequent  detachment from what we visualize, photography can be described as an expression of our peculiarly cruel way of seeing, which is ultimately a kind of “evil eye “or magical possession.

                Walter Benjamin on the other hand states that photographs allow us access to the optical unconscious because the camera introduces us to unconscious optics in the same way as psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. “Psychoanalysis is a method of psychotherapy originally formulated by Sigmund Freud that emphasizes unconscious motives and conflicts.”  According to Benjamin when we look at photographs the eye is likely to encounter images that exceed its capabilities of reading. These images are not just mere representations but allow us to experience new image worlds that need interpreting in the same way that psychoanalysts interpret our unconscious selves.