The memories that come flooding in, each time one digs into the mound of packing cases in order to extract the books by a process of open-pit or should I say deep-pit mining! Nothing could better highlight the fascination of such unpacking than how hard it is to stop. I had begun at noon, and it was midnight before I had worked my way through to the last few cases. Here, however, right at the end, I came across two faded hardcovers that ought not, strictly speaking, to have been in a case of books at all: two albums with those little pictures we call Oblaten pasted in by my mother as a child, which I had inherited. They are the seeds of a library of children’s books that continues to grow all the time, albeit no longer in my garden.

  There is no living library that is not home to a number of book-related objects from fringe areas. These will not necessarily be Oblatenalben or family records, autographs or bound volumes of pandects or devotional texts: some will have to do with handbills and pamphlets, others with facsimile manuscripts or typewritten copies of untraceable books, and of course newspapers in particular may constitute the prismatic edges of a library. But to get back to those albums, actually inheritance is the soundest way of coming by a collection. For the collector’s attitude to his possessions derives from the feeling of commitment that the proprietor harbours towards his property. So it is in the highest sense the stance of the heir. The noblest title a collection can bear is therefore its inheritability. In saying this I am (and I want you to know this) fully aware of how much such expansion of the imaginary world enshrined in collecting will strengthen many of you in your conviction of the outmoded nature of this passion, in your suspicion of the collector as a type. Nothing is farther from my intention than to unsettle you here, either in that view or in that suspicion. Just remember: the collecting phenomenon, when it loses its subject, loses its point. Public collections may be less offensive from the social standpoint, more useful from the academic standpoint than private ones – but it is only in the latter that things, items, receive their due. Moreover, I know that as regards the type of person I have been talking about here, the type that, slightly ex officio, I have been championing in your eyes – well, his days are numbered. However, as Hegel says, only at nightfall does Minerva’s owl take wing. Only with the passing of the collector are people beginning to understand collecting.

  Now, with the last packing case still only half-empty, it is already well past midnight. Other thoughts fill me than those of which I have spoken. Not thoughts; images, memories. Memories of the cities where I found so many of these things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris; memories of the splendid premises of Rosenthal in Munich, of the Stockturm in Danzig, home to the late Hans Rhaue, of Süssengut’s musty book cellars in Berlin N; memories of the parlours where these books once stood, my student lodgings in Munich, my digs in Bern, the isolation of Iseltwald on Lake Brienz, and lastly my bedroom as a boy, from which come a mere four or five of the several thousand volumes that are starting to pile up around me. The bliss of the collector, the bliss of the private individual! No one has been less ferreted out and none felt better for it than the man who, behind his Spitzweg mask,4 has been allowed to pursue his disreputable existence. The fact is, inside him spirits (little ones, anyway) have taken up residence – with the result that, for the collector (a real one, I mean, a collector as he should be), ownership is the very deepest relationship a person can have with things: not that they live inside him; it is he who lives in them. In this talk I have shown you one of his houses, where the bricks are books, and now, fittingly, he disappears inside.

  [1931]

  Brief History of Photography

  The mist that lies over the early days of photography is not quite as thick as the one that still lingers over the beginnings of printing; more plainly, perhaps, than in the case of the latter, the invention’s time had come and more than one person had sensed its approach; people, namely, who were working independently of one another towards the same goal: capturing those images in the camera obscura that had been known about at least since Leonardo. When after some five years of striving Niépce and Daguerre both succeeded in this simultaneously, the state, aided by the inventors’ running into patent-law problems, intervened and turned those problems to advantage to make of this a public matter. Thus were created the conditions for a continuously accelerated development that for a long time ruled out any kind of looking back. As a result, years passed before anyone thought about the historical or, if you like, philosophical questions suggested by the rise and fall of photography. And if nowadays those questions are beginning to enter awareness, there is a precise reason why. The most recent literature takes up the striking circumstance that the heyday of photography, coinciding with the work of Hill and Cameron, of Hugo and Nadar, falls within its first decade.

  That, however, was the decade preceding its industrialization. Not that, even at this early stage, barkers and charlatans had not already seized upon the technology for commercial reasons; they did so, indeed, in vast numbers. Yet that had more to do with the skills of the fairground (where photography has in fact always felt at home) than with industry. Industry did not conquer the field until the ‘carte-de-visite’ photograph, the first producer of which significantly became a very wealthy man.1 It would come as no surprise to find the photographic practices that have today, for the first time, directed attention back to that pre-industrial heyday bearing a subterranean link to the upheaval affecting capitalist industry. However, that does nothing to ease the task of turning the charm of the images in the latest fine publications on early photography2 to account in order to furnish genuine insights into their essence. Attempts to master the subject theoretically have been rudimentary in the extreme. And for all the debates that were devoted to the subject in the last [nineteenth] century, they never, deep down, broke free of the nonsensical mould with the aid of which a chauvinist rag named the Leipziger Stadtanzeiger felt it must foil the devilry coming from France while there was still time. ‘Trying to capture fleeting reflections,’ we read there, ‘is not merely an impossibility, as intensive German examination has shown; the very wish to do so is blasphemous. Man is created in God’s image, and the image of God cannot be captured by any human machine. At most the divine artist, under the stimulus of heavenly inspiration, may venture to reproduce the divine/human features in moments of utmost dedication and in response to the supreme call of his genius, dispensing with any kind of mechanical aid.’ Here, with all the gravity of its own ungainliness, there appears that philistine concept of ‘art’ that will entertain no technological consideration whatsoever, feeling that the provocative advent of the new technology heralds its end. Yet it is this fetishistic, fundamentally anti-technological view of art that the theoreticians of photography have spent almost a century seeking to rebut – without ever, of course, coming close to a result. For what they were trying to achieve was to accredit the photographer before the very bench he had upturned. A quite different wind blows through the speech that the physicist Arago,3 advocating Daguerre’s invention, gave to the Chamber of Deputies on 3 July 1839. The beautiful thing about that speech is the way it embraces every sphere of human activity. The panorama it sketches is broad enough to make the dubious authentication of photography as against painting (present even here) appear unimportant, allowing a sense of the true scope of the invention to unfold instead. ‘When inventors of a new device,’ Arago says, ‘apply it to observing nature, what they themselves had expected of it is invariably trivial in comparison with the series of subsequent discoveries to which the device has led.’ In a sweeping arc the speech spans the entire field of new technology from astrophysics to philology: side by side with a look at star photography stands the idea of recording a corpus of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  Daguerre’s photographs were iodized silver plates exposed in the camera obscura. They had to be angled to and fro until in the right light a delicate grey picture could be made out. Each one was unique; the average cost of a plate in 1839 was twenty-five gold francs. Often they were kept in cases like pieces of jewellery. In the hands of certain painters, however, they became technical aids. Seventy years later Utrillo painted his fascinating views of houses and urban landscapes in the Parisian banlieue not from life but from picture postcards, while noted British portrait painter David Octavius Hill based his 1843 fresco of the first General Synod of the Church of Scotland on a major series of portrait photographs. But they were photographs he had taken himself. And it is such images (simple tools intended for personal use) that gave his name a place in the history books, while as a painter he is no longer remembered. Granted, some studies go even deeper into the new technology than this series of heads: anonymous pictures of people, but not portraits. Such heads had long existed in paintings. Where these were handed down within families, someone would occasionally inquire who was represented. But after two or three generations that kind of interest fell silent: the paintings, where they have survived, do so simply as testimony to the art of the person who painted them. In photography, however, we find something new and special: that Newhaven fishwife seen with a downward gaze of such casual, seductive modesty retains something that is not wholly accounted for as testimony to the art of Hill the photographer, something that cannot be silenced, asking intemperately after the name of the woman who was alive then, is still real here, and will always refuse to be entirely taken up in something called ‘art’.

  And I ask: how did the adornment of these locks

  And this gaze frame the former beings!

  How did it kiss, this mouth, desire for which

  Curls pointlessly towards it, smoke without fire!4

  Or turn to the picture of Dauthendey, the photographer, father of the poet, at the time of his engagement to the woman whom he then, one day soon after the birth of their sixth child, found lying in the bedroom of his Moscow house with her wrists slit. Here she can be seen at his side, he is holding her, apparently; but her gaze goes right past him, fixed on (almost sucking at) an ominous remoteness. Once one has spent long enough staring at an image like that, soaking it in, one sees to what extent, here again, opposites meet: faultless technique is capable of conferring on what is evoked a magical value such as, for us, a painting can no longer possess. For all the photographer’s skill and all the deliberation that has gone into his model’s pose, the viewer feels an irresistible urge to scan that image for the tiny spark of chance, of Here and Now, with which reality has, as it were, singed its pictorial character through and through, to identify the one barely perceptible spot where, in the suchness of that long-gone moment, the future still (and so eloquently) lodges today in a way that enables us, looking back, to locate it. The fact is, it is a different nature that speaks to the camera than speaks to the eye; different above all in that, rather than a space permeated with human consciousness, here is one permeated with unconsciousness. While it is quite normal for a person to have some idea (even if it is only a vague idea) of how people walk, for instance, that person will certainly know nothing (not any more) about their posture in the split second of their stepping out. Photography, with its aids (slow-motion sequences, close-ups), will tell him. Only photography can show him the optical unconscious, just as it is only through psychoanalysis that he learns of the compulsive unconscious. Structural features, cell tissue, things with which engineering and medicine deal daily – all this is by nature more closely related to the camera than the atmospheric landscape or the affecting portrait. At the same time, photography reveals the physiognomical aspects of this material, pictorial worlds that inhabit the tiniest dimensions, interpretable and sufficiently tucked away to have found shelter in daydreams but now, large and formulable as they have become, to render visible the difference between technology and magic as a thoroughly historical variable. In this way Blossfeldt,5 with his astonishing plant photographs, brought out the earliest column forms in horsetail, the bishop’s crosier in ostrich fern, totem poles in chestnut and maple shoots magnified tenfold, and Gothic tracery in fuller’s teasel. Surely that is why the models who posed for someone like Hill were themselves not far from the truth in feeling that, for them, ‘the phenomenon of photography’ was still an ‘extremely mysterious experience’; even if, so far as they were concerned, this was perhaps simply an awareness of ‘standing in front of a piece of apparatus that was capable of producing, in almost no time at all, an image of the visible world as full of life and truth as nature itself ’. It has been said of Hill’s camera that it exercises a discreet reserve. His models, however, are no less reserved; they evince a certain shyness in front of the camera, and the guiding principle of a later practitioner from the heyday of photography (‘Never look into the lens!’) might have been derived from the way they conduct themselves. Yet what was meant was not the ‘look at you’ of animals, people, and babies that involves the customer in so dishonest a fashion and that cannot be countered more effectively than by citing what Dauthendey Snr. said of daguerreotypy: ‘At first […],’ the older Dauthendey reported, ‘people were scared to spend long looking at the earliest pictures he [Daguerre] brought out. The clarity of the figures alarmed them, making them think the tiny faces of the people in the picture could see them, so extraordinary was the effect that the unwonted sharpness and unusually true-to-life nature of the first daguerrotype images had on all who saw them.’

  These first reproduced humans entered photography’s field of view very chastely or perhaps one should say uncaptioned. Newspapers were still luxury items that few actually bought for themselves, looking at them in cafés instead, and the photographic process had yet to become their tool. In the early days, very few people saw their names in print. The human face came wrapped in silence; it was a reposeful object for the eye. In short, the whole potential of this portrait art rested on the fact that no connection between actuality and photo had yet been drawn. Many of Hill’s portraits were taken in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirkyard – nothing is more characteristic of these early days, unless it was how much the models were at home there. And indeed, according to one picture Hill took, this cemetery is itself a kind of interior, a secluded, fenced-off space where, leant against an outside wall, rising from the grass is one gravestone that, recessed like a fireplace, has an inscription inside it where there should be leaping flames. Yet never would this location have been so hugely effective had its choice not been dictated by technical reasons. The low photosensitivity of the early plates called for a lengthy exposure in the open air. This in turn made it seem desirable that the subjects to be photographed should be placed in surroundings as secluded as possible, where nothing stood in the way of serene composure.

  ‘The synthesis of the expression imposed by the model’s keeping still for a long time,’ says Orlik6 of early photography, ‘is the chief reason (alongside a plainness resembling well-drawn or painted portraits) why these [early] photographs exert a more forceful, longer-lasting impression on the viewer than recent products of the medium.’ The process itself caused models to live not forth from the moment but out into the moment;7 during the lengthy exposure time required by these photos, they grew into the picture, so to speak, thus contrasting crucially with the figures in a snapshot, which latter corresponds to that altered environment in which (as Kracauer8 has aptly remarked) the same fraction of a second as the exposure lasts for will determine ‘whether a sportsman becomes so famous that photographers working for the illustrated press [continue to] expose him’.

  Everything about these early pictures was so constituted as to last; not only the incomparable groups into which people assembled (and the disappearance of which was undoubtedly one of the most specific symptoms of what was happening in society in the second half of the century) – even the folds into which a garment falls in these pictures last longer. Look at Schelling’s jacket: he can pass into immortality with complete confidence wearing that. The shapes it has assumed from its wearer are no disgrace to the lines on the man’s face. Briefly, it looks very much as if Bernhard von Brentano9 was right in supposing ‘that a photographer working in 1850 stood at the same elevation as his instrument’ – for the first and (for many years) last time.