Walter Benjamin. A Little History of Photography

Walter Benjamin’s early attempt to understand a still young technology, remarkably prescient and topical even today.

“The illiterate of the future […] will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.” Benjamin’s essay, published in two parts in the periodical Literarische Welt in 1931, was one of the earliest essays on this technology and precedes his better-known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”(1935).