blog.benstones.net

…Benjamin was not the only one to express ambivalence about the camera, of course. The endless battles over the artistic status of photography and the larger question of whether the photographic image has a special ‘ontology’ reflect similar contradictory feelings. Is photography a fine art or a mere industry? Is it `Rembrandt perfected,’ as Samuel Morse thought, or a new distraction for the ‘idolatrous multitude,’ Baudelaire characterized it? (‘An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah.’) Does the camera provide a material incarnation of objective, scientific representation by mechanizing the system of perspective, as Gombrich argues? Or is it an instrument of ‘contemplative materialism,’ ‘a purely ideological apparatus’ whose ‘monocular’ vision ratifies ‘the metaphysical centering on the subject’ in bourgeois humanism, as Marcel Pleynet contends?