Something else must be done if we wish to gain a due appreciation of the huge impact daguerrotypy had at the time of its discovery: we need to bear in mind that, during those years, plein-air painting had begun to open up wholly new perspectives for the more advanced among its practitioners. Aware that, precisely in this area, photography would soon be called upon to take the baton from painting, even Arago, looking back historically at the early experiments of Giovanni Battista Porta,10 says expressly, ‘As regards the effect that derives from the imperfect transparency of our atmosphere (and that has also been characterized by the improper term “air perspective”), not even experienced painters expect the camera obscura’ – he means copying the images appearing in it – ‘to help them bring out the same with exactitude.’ The moment Daguerre succeeded in fixing camera obscura images, painting had in this respect been supplanted by technology.

  The real victim of photography, however, was not landscape painting but the portrait miniature. Things developed so rapidly that as early as 1840 most miniature painters (and there were vast numbers of them) were practising photography – only as a sideline at first but soon full-time. In this they found that the experience they brought from their original trade came in handy, and it was not their artistic training so much as their training as craftsmen that accounted for the high standard of their photographic work. Very gradually this transitional generation disappeared; in fact, a kind of biblical blessing appears to have been bestowed on those early photographers: Nadar, Stelzner, Pierson, and Bayard all lived into their [late eighties or] nineties or even passed the hundred mark. Eventually, though, the ranks of professional photography came to be dominated by businessmen, and when later the retouched negative (with which the incompetent painter took his revenge on photography) became commonplace there was a steep decline in taste.

  That was the time when photograph albums began to fill up. The favourite places for them were the coldest in the home, on console or pedestal tables in the parlour. There they lay, leather-bound tomes with repulsive metal clasps and pages with gold edges as wide as your finger on which absurdly draped or beribboned figures (Uncle Alex and Auntie Becca, Trudi as a little girl, dad in his first year at uni) were arranged and finally, to complete the disgrace, oneself: as fake Tyrolean, caught in mid-yodel, waving a hat against a painted backcloth, or in a smart sailor-suit, properly posed, one leg taking the weight, the other leg free, leaning against a shiny mast. The props used in those portraits with their pedestals, balustrades, and oval tables are a further reminder of an era when, because of the long exposure times required, models had to be given supports to keep them still. Initially, the ‘headrest’ or ‘knee brace’ had sufficed, but before long ‘other accessories followed such as could be seen in famous paintings and therefore must be “artistic”. First came the column and the curtain.’ The more capable operators were having to combat this nonsense as early as the 1860s. In an English manual of the period we read, ‘In painted portraits the column has a semblance of plausibility, but the way in which it is used in photography is ridiculous; since as a rule it rises from a carpet. Everyone is going to know for a fact that you do not build marble or granite columns on the foundation of a carpet.’ It was the era of those studios full of drapery and palm trees, tapestries and easels, those interiors that fluctuate so ambiguously between site of pompous display and place of execution, torture chamber and throne room, one deeply distressing example of which has come down to us in the form of an early portrait of Kafka. There, in a tight-fitting, somehow humiliating child’s outfit overloaded with lace trimmings stands the approximately six-year-old boy in a kind of conservatory landscape. Palm fronds rise stiffly in the background. And as if to make this upholstered version of the tropics even more suffocating and sultry, the model holds in his left hand a disproportionately large, broad-brimmed hat of the kind Spaniards have. The child would no doubt disappear in this arrangement were it not for the immeasurably sad gaze of a pair of eyes commanding this landscape laid out for their benefit.

  The image, in its infinite sorrowfulness, forms a counterpart to earlier photography, where people did not yet look out into the world with the same divulsed, utterly forlorn look as is worn by the boy here. There was an aura about them, a medium that in permeating their gaze gives it a fullness and confidence. And once again the technological equivalent is obvious; it consists in the absolute continuum from the brightest light to the darkest shadow. Here too, incidentally, we find further confirmation of the law of the heralding of fresh achievements in an earlier technology – in this case the way in which, prior to its decline, the former fashion for portrait painting ushered in a unique flowering of the mezzotint process. Granted, mezzotint was a reproductive technology that only subsequently combined with the new technology of photography. As in mezzotint engravings, with someone like Hill light struggles to emerge from darkness: Orlik speaks of ‘the use of light to bring things together’ [zusammenfassende Lichtführung] that resulted from the long exposure times and accounted for ‘the size of these early photographs’. And among contemporaries of the invention [daguerrotypy], Delaroche himself noted the ‘unprecedented, delightful’ general impression that ‘in no way disturbed the calm of the masses’.

  So much for the dependence of the auratic phenomenon on technology. Certain group shots in particular recapture a lively togetherness such as appears here on the plate for a brief while before being destroyed by the ‘original photograph’. It is this gossamer circle that is beautifully and meaningfully described, sometimes by the henceforth old-fashioned oval shape within which a picture was framed. That is why to stress the ‘artistic perfection’ or ‘good taste’ of these incunabula of photography is to misinterpret them. Such pictures were taken in interiors where the photographer that the client faced was primarily a technologist of the latest school; for the photographer, however, the client belonged to a rising class and was possessed of an aura that had found its way into every fold of the bourgeois coat or of the cravat. That aura is not, you see, just the product of a primitive camera. On the contrary, in this early period subject and technology are as perfectly matched as in the ensuing period of decline they drift apart. The fact is, it was not long before advances in optics made cameras available that wholly overcame obscurity and recorded appearances with mirror-like precision. Photographers, however, in the years after 1880, saw their job as being rather to feign the aura that, with the ousting of obscurity through the medium of more light-sensitive lenses, was in and of itself being ousted from the picture in precisely the same way as, through the increasing degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie, it was being ousted from reality. They saw their job as being to feign that aura with the aid of all the tricks of retouching, notably the so-called ‘flexograph’. Hence, particularly during the art nouveau period, the fashion for a dimly lit tone shot through with artificial reflections; yet for all the half-light one pose emerged with mounting clarity, a pose whose stiffness betrayed the powerlessness of that generation in the face of technological progress.

  Nevertheless, the crucial thing about photography is again and again the relationship of the photographer to his technology. Camille Recht characterized this in a very nice image. ‘The violin player,’ he said, ‘has to shape the note, he has to look for it, locating it in an instant, while the piano player strikes the key – and the note sounds. Painter and photographer alike have their instruments. For the painter, the processes of drawing and colouring correspond to the note-shaping of violin-playing, while the photographer and the piano player have the advantage of the mechanical dimension, which is subject to restrictive laws that place nothing like the same compulsion on the violinist. No Paderewski will ever garner the fame or exert the almost legendary magic of a Paganini.’ There is, however (staying with the image), a Busoni of photography, and that is Atget. Both were virtuosos, but at the same time they were both precursors. An unparalleled absorption in the matter in hand, coupled with the greatest precision, is common to both men. Even their features show an element of similarity. Atget was an actor who, repelled by the acting business, stripped off the mask and proceeded to remove the make-up from reality, too. Poor and obscure, he lived in Paris, unloading pictures on amateurs who can have been scarcely less eccentric than himself, and shortly afterwards died, leaving behind him an oeuvre of more than four thousand photographs. Berenice Abbott of New York collected these images, and a selection of them has just been published in an extremely handsome volume, edited and introduced by Camille Recht.11 Contemporary journalism ‘knew nothing of the man, who would tour the studios flogging his images for a few pence each, often simply for the price of one of those picture postcards that used, around 1900, to depict the city’s sights so beautifully, bathed in blue night with a retouched moon. He stood at the pole of supreme mastery; however, with the obstinate modesty of a major talent who lived his life in the shadows he omitted to plant his flag there. As a result, others have been able to believe they found the pole first, though Atget had been there before them.’ And it is true: Atget’s images of Paris are the forerunners of Surrealist photography; the advance guard of the only truly massive column that Surrealism has managed to mobilize. Atget is the first to disinfect the stuffy atmosphere exuded by the conventional portrait photography of the age of decadence. He cleanses that atmosphere; he clears it away completely: Atget is the man who ushers in the liberation of object from aura that is the least questionable service performed by the latest school of photography. When Bifur or Variété, two avant-garde journals, published mere details (part of a banister, say, or the leafless crown of a tree whose branches repeatedly intersect a gaslight, or maybe a house wall, or a candelabrum with a lifebelt bearing the name of the city) captioned ‘Westminster’, ‘Lille’, ‘Antwerp’, or ‘Breslau’, these are simply heightened literary references to motifs discovered by Atget. He sought out the mislaid, the abandoned, making even images such as these turn against the exotic, bombastic, Romantic resonance of city names; they suck the aura out of reality like water out of a sinking ship.

  What is aura, in fact? A gossamer fabric woven of space and time: a unique manifestation of a remoteness, however close at hand. Lying back on a summer’s afternoon, gazing at a mountain range on the horizon or watching a branch as it casts its shadow over the beholder, until the moment or the hour shares in the manifestation – that is called breathing in the aura of those mountains, that branch. Well, ‘bringing things closer’ (not simply to oneself but to the masses) is as passionate an inclination on the part of present-day man as overcoming the uniqueness in every situation by reproducing it. We see more cogent evidence daily of the need to apprehend an object in an image (or rather in a copy, a reproduction) from very close to. And there is no mistaking the difference between the reproduction (such as illustrated papers and weekly news round-ups always have to hand) and the image. Uniqueness and duration are as tightly intertwined in the latter as are transience and reiterability in the former. Stripping the object of its sheath, shattering the aura – these characterize a kind of perception where a sense of all things similar in the world is so highly developed that, through reproduction, it even mines similarity from what happens only once. Atget, almost invariably, ignored ‘the major sights and so-called landmarks’, simply passing them by; but not a long line of boot-lasts; not the Parisian courtyards where from dusk to dawn rows of handcarts stand waiting; not the uncleared tables and stacks of washing-up seen in simultaneous profusion; not the brothel at no. 5, Rue…, the ‘5’ appearing at four different points on the façade of the building, hugely magnified. Remarkably, though, most of these pictures are empty: Porte d’Arcueil with its fortifications, the grand staircases, courtyards, café terraces – all empty; Place du Tertre, empty as it should be. They are not lonely, just devoid of feeling; the city in these pictures is like an empty apartment that has yet to find new tenants. These are the works in which Surrealist photography prepares a salutary alienation between the surrounding world and the human being, clearing the field for the politically schooled eye to which all intimacy falls away in favour of the illumination of detail.

  One thing is clear: this new way of seeing has least to gain where people normally proceeded most loosely: in professional, prestige portrait photography. On the other hand, doing without people is, for photography, the least doable thing of all. And if anyone was unaware of this, the finest Russian films have shown that milieu and landscape too become accessible only to the photographer capable of capturing them in the nameless manifestation presented in their features. However, the possibility of that happening is again largely determined by the subject being photographed. The generation that was not obsessed with being handed down to posterity in photographs but rather, when photographs were being taken, withdrew somewhat shyly into its living space (like Schopenhauer in that picture taken in Frankfurt around 1850, sunk in an armchair) but for that very reason arranged to have the living space included in the photograph – that generation did not pass its virtues on. Then, for the first time in decades, the motion picture gave the Russians the opportunity to have people who had no use for their photo appear before the camera. And immediately the human face appeared on the plate with a fresh, immeasurable significance.

  But this was no longer a portrait. What was it? To his eternal credit, a German photographer (August Sander) promptly answered the question.12 Sander assembled a series of heads to rival the tremendous gallery of physiognomies begun by men like Eisenstein and Pudowkin, and he did so from the viewpoint of science. ‘His work, which is structured in seven groups corresponding to the existing social order, is to be published in some 45 portfolios of 12 photographic plates each.’ So far we have a selection comprising 60 reproductions and providing an inexhaustible source of material for consideration. ‘Taking as his starting point the peasant farmer, man bound to the soil, Sander leads the viewer through all strata of society and types of occupation, up to representatives of the highest civilization and down to the level of idiots.’ The author approached this mammoth task not as a scholar, enjoying the advice of racial theorists or social researchers, but rather, as the publisher remarks, ‘from direct observation’. It was certainly a very unprejudiced, not to say bold, approach, but at the same time one that was delicate, specifically in the sense of Goethe’s observation, ‘There is a delicate empiricism that identifies deeply with the object and in that way becomes genuine theory.’

  Accordingly, it is entirely right that such an observer as Döblin, pouncing on the scientific elements in the work, should remark [in his Introduction to Sander’s volume]: ‘Just as there is a comparative anatomy, on the basis of which one first attains a view of nature and the history of organs, in the same way this photographer practises comparative photography, thus reaching a scientific standpoint beyond that of detail photographers.’ It would be a shame if economic circumstances were to prevent further publication of this extraordinary body of work. For the publisher’s ear, however, in addition to this general word of encouragement we can cite one that is more specific. Works like Sander’s could become unexpectedly topical overnight. Shifts of power (such as are currently due in Germany) usually cause some development and sharpening of the physiognomic approach to become vitally necessary. Whether one is from the right or from the left, one will have to get used to being judged by one’s origins. One will need, for one’s own part, to judge others likewise. Sander’s work is more than just a picture book; it is an atlas of practical instruction.

  ‘There is in our era no work of art that receives closer attention than the portrait photograph of oneself, one’s closest relatives and friends, one’s lovers,’ Lichtwark wrote as early as 1907,13 thus shifting the investigation out of the realm of aesthetic distinctions and into social functions. Only from this point can it make further progress. Significantly, in fact, the debate became most turgid where it concerned the aesthetics of ‘photography as art’, while the so much less dubious social circumstance of ‘art as photography’, for example, was scarcely deemed worthy of a glance. Yet the effect of the photographic reproduction of works of art is very much more important as regards the function of art than the greater or lesser artistic quality of photography, for the benefit of which experience has become ‘camera fodder’. The fact is, the amateur photographer returning from a walk with a stack of artistic originals is no more welcome a sight than the hunter bringing back from the hide huge quantities of game that are of use only to the dealer. The day does indeed seem almost upon us when there will be more shops selling illustrated journals than there are game and wildfowl dealers. So much for ‘taking snaps’.

  However, things look quite different as soon we turn from photography as art to art as photography. Everyone will have had the opportunity to observe how much more easily an image (but above all a piece of sculpture, and now even architecture) can be grasped in a photograph than in reality. The temptation, certainly, is simply to put this down to the collapsing feeling for art, to blame it on a failing on the part of modern man. Against this, though, is the recognition of how, at approximately the same time as the development of reproductive technology, the reception of great works of art has changed. No longer can they be seen as having been produced by individuals; they have become collective constructs – so enormous that assimilating them is now virtually conditional on reducing them in size. In the final analysis, mechanical methods of reproduction are a technology of reduction; they help people to achieve that degree of mastery of artworks without which the works never find a use.