The photographic image occupies a very prominent place in Walter Benjamin's reflection after his youth, appearing in the most heterogeneous texts and related to the most diverse themes. This volume brings together the pages dedicated to it by the German philosopher, some of which are little known, since they are found scattered in reviews and journalistic chronicles, while others are incorporated into literary essays or autobiographical writings ( without counting the annotations and quotes in this regard included in his great project on nineteenth-century Paris).
Benjamin thinks about photography historically. As an almost witness to him, she reconstructs his beginnings with entertaining and poetic erudition from the proximity of a still nineteenth-century childhood; he analyzes its development in relation to the avant-garde and, finally, turns it into a privileged example of those technically reproducible images that, by subverting the conditions for the reception of art, favored its massive dissemination with no less revolutionary consequences.