If one thing characterizes the current relationship between art and photography, it is the unresolved tension introduced between the two by the fact of works of art being photographed. Many of those who, as photographers, give the technology its current face originally came from painting. They turned their backs on painting after trying to shift its means of expression into a living, unambiguous relationship with present-day life. The more alert they became to signs of the times, the more problematic their starting point gradually came to seem in their eyes. Because once again, as first happened eighty years ago, photography has allowed painting to pass it the baton. ‘The creative possibilities of the new,’ says Moholy-Nagy, ‘are usually revealed slowly by such ancient forms, antiquated instruments and areas of creativity, which have already, in principle, been rendered obsolete by the emergence of the new but which, under pressure from the gathering new, allow themselves to be forced into a euphoric flowering. In this way, for instance, Futurist (static) painting came up with the clearly outlined problem area of simultaneity of movement, how to give physical form to the time-moment, which was later to provoke its own destruction – and this at a time, remember, when film was already known of but still very inadequately grasped […] Similarly, it is possible, proceeding with care, to regard some of the painters working nowadays with objectively representational means (Neoclassicists and Verists) as precursors of a new representational mode of visual design that will soon be making use of purely mechanical techniques.’ And here is Tristan Tzara, writing in 1922: ‘With everything calling itself art now gouty, the photographer lit his thousand-candlepower lamp and gradually the light-sensitive paper absorbed the blacks of various utensils. He had discovered the scope of a frail, still-virgin flash of light that was weightier than all the constellations that present themselves to our feasting eyes.’ Those photographers who came to photography from the fine arts not through opportunism, not by chance, and not for the sake of convenience now constitute the avant-garde among their new colleagues, for their path of development shields them to some extent from the greatest threat facing photography today, namely the arty-crafty angle. ‘Photography as art,’ says Sasha Stone, ‘is a very dangerous area.’14

  Where photography has moved away from contexts imposed upon it by practitioners such as Sander, Germaine Krull, or Blossfeldt,15 where it has emancipated itself from physiognomical, political, or scientific concerns, it becomes ‘creative’. The lens is now concerned with the ‘survey’ [Zusammenschau]; the photographic smock appears. ‘Mind, surmounting mechanics, reinterprets the precise findings of the latter as allegories of life.’ The more the crisis affecting the present-day social order widens out and the more rigidly its individual elements confront one another in lifeless opposition, the more the creative dimension (variant in its very essence; contradiction its father and emulation its mother) has become a fetish, the features of which owe their existence only to changes in fashionable lighting. The creative dimension of taking photographs consists in its being handed over to fashion. ‘The world is beautiful’ – that is its motto, precisely. In it stands revealed the attitude of a kind of photography that is able to make any tin of food look as if it is floating in space but cannot grasp a single one of the human contexts in which that tin features. It is a kind of photography that, however dreamy the subject, heralds more the marketability of that subject than its apprehension. But since the true face of this photographic creativity is advertising or association, for the same reason its proper counterpart is exposure or construction. Because the situation, as Brecht says, ‘becomes so complicated as a result that less than ever does a simple “reflection of reality” say anything about that reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or of AEG yields virtually nothing about the relevant organization. True reality has shifted into the domain of functionality. The reification of human relations (the factory, for instance) no longer gives expression to those relations. So there really is something to be built, something “artificial”, something “posed”.’ To have trained up forerunners for such photographic construction work is the achievement of the Surrealists. A further stage in this clash between creative and constructive photography is marked by the Russian film. It is no exaggeration to say that the great achievements of its directors were possible only in a country where photography proceeds not from stimulus and suggestion but from experiment and instruction. It is in this sense (and only in this sense) that the impressive greeting with which the barbaric ideas painter Antoine Wiertz hailed photography in 1855 can meaningfully be construed even today. ‘Not many years ago the great glory of our age, namely a machine, was born to us that daily constitutes the stupefaction of our thoughts and the consternation of our eyes. In less than one hundred years that machine will have become the brush, the palette, the paints, the skill, the experience, the patience, the deftness, the accuracy, the tone, the glaze, the exemplar, the perfection, the synopsis of painting […] Let no one think that daguerrotypy is the death of art […] When the giant child that is daguerrotypy has grown up, when all its art and strength have reached maturity, then genius will one day seize it by the scruff of the neck and shout, “Come here. You’re mine now. We’re going to work together.” ’ By contrast how sober, how pessimistic are the words with which four years later Charles Baudelaire, in ‘Le Salon de 1859’, announces the new technology to his readers! Like those just quoted, they can no longer be read today without a slight shift of emphasis. Yet as the counter-argument to Wiertz they retain their good sense as the most incisive rebuttal of all the pretensions of artistic photography. ‘In these wretched times a new industry has emerged that has done much to strengthen dull stupidity in its belief […] that art neither is nor can be anything other than the precise reflection of nature […] A vengeful deity granted the wishes of this throng. Daguerre was his Messiah.’ Again: ‘If photography is permitted to make good a deficiency in art in certain functions, it will soon supplant and corrupt art entirely thanks to the natural ally it will find in the stupidity of the crowd. Photography must therefore return to its proper task, which is to be a servant to the sciences and to the arts.’

  Yet there was one thing that both men (Wiertz and Baudelaire) failed to grasp at the time: the instructions contained in the authenticity of photography. These will not always be avoidable in an illustrated article, where the photos merely have the effect of evoking verbal associations in the viewer. Cameras are getting smaller and smaller, more and more able to capture fleeting, secret images, the impact of which stalls the viewer’s association mechanism. This needs to be replaced by the caption, which includes photography in the literarization of all life and without which all photographic construction must inevitably remain no more than an approximation. Not for nothing have photographs by Atget been likened to those of a crime scene. But is not each square centimetre of our cities a crime scene and every passer-by a criminal? Is it not the photographer’s job (as heir to augurs and haruspices) to reveal guilt in his images and finger the culprit? ‘It is not the person who cannot read or write but the person who cannot interpret a photograph,’ someone has said, ‘who will be the illiterate of the future.’ However, surely equally illiterate is the photographer who cannot read his own images? Is not the caption going to become the key ingredient of the shot? Those are the questions with which the gap of ninety years16 separating present-day man from the invention of daguerrotypy discharges its historical tensions. It is in the light cast by those sparks that the first photographs emerge with such loveliness, such unapproachability, from the obscurity of our grandparents’ day.

  [1931]

  Franz Kafka

  On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death

  Potemkin

  The story goes: Potemkin was afflicted by severe, more or less regular fits of depression, during which no one was allowed to go near him and access to his room was most strictly barred. This affliction was not mentioned at court; people were aware, above all, that any allusion to it incurred the displeasure of Empress Catherine. One of these fits of depression on the Chancellor’s part lasted for an unusually long time. Grave irregularities resulted; in the registries files piled up that the Empress demanded should be dealt with, but without Potemkin’s signature this was not possible. Top civil servants were at their wits’ end. One day, a minor clerk named Schuwalkin happened to enter the anteroom of the Chancellor’s palace, where the members of the government were as usual standing around moaning and complaining.

  ‘What’s up, Excellencies? How may I be of service?’ the zealous Schuwalkin asked. The matter was explained to him and regret expressed that his services could not be used. ‘If that’s all it is, gentlemen,’ Schuwalkin replied, ‘give the files to me. I beg of you.’ The councillors of state, having nothing to lose, let themselves be persuaded, and with the bundle of files under his arm Schuwalkin set off through galleries and along corridors to Potemkin’s bedchamber.

  Without knocking – indeed, without pausing – he pushed down the door handle. The door was not locked. In the gloom Potemkin, wearing a tattered nightshirt, sat in bed biting his nails. Schuwalkin marched over to the desk, dipped the pen in the ink and, without a word, thrust it into Potemkin’s hand, having first placed a document (picked up at random) on his knee. After an absent-minded glance at the intruder, Potemkin sleepily executed the first signature, then a second, and eventually all of them.

  With the last document safely signed, Schuwalkin left the apartment without ceremony, as he had entered it, his bundle under his arm. Returning to the anteroom, he waved the files in triumph as he entered. The councillors fell upon him, snatching papers from his hands. Breathlessly, they bent over them. No one said a word; the group stood frozen. Once again, Schuwalkin approached, once again he inquired zealously: what was the reason for the gentlemen’s consternation? Then his glance too fell on the signature. Document after document was signed: Schuwalkin, Schuwalkin, Schuwalkin…

  The story is like a messenger, heralding Kafka’s work two hundred years in advance. The riddle that clouds its heart is Kafka’s. The world of chancelleries and registries, of stuffy, shabby, gloomy interiors, is Kafka’s world. The zealous Schuwalkin, who makes light of everything and is ultimately left empty-handed, is Kafka’s K. Potemkin, however, who leads a brooding existence, half asleep, neglecting his appearance, in a secluded chamber that none may enter, is an ancestor of those persons of authority who in Kafka pass their time as judges in attics or secretaries in castles and who, no matter how elevated, are invariably sunken or rather sinking figures, but may suddenly, be they the lowest-ranking dregs of the earth (doorkeepers and clerks worn down with age), appear without warning in their full panoply of power. What are they brooding about? Are they perhaps descended from those atlantes who bear the globe on their shoulders? Possibly that is why they hold their heads ‘sunk so low on the breast that very little could be seen of the […] eyes’ [The Castle, 1],1 like the castle governor in his portrait or Klamm when alone? But it is not the globe they bear; only the fact that even the most ordinary detail carries weight: ‘His exhaustion is that of the gladiator after combat, but his work was painting a corner of a clerks’ room white’.2 Georg Lukács once said: to make a decent table nowadays, a person must have the architectural genius of a Michelangelo. Where Lukács thought in centuries, Kafka thinks in aeons. It is for aeons that the man painting must endure. And so on, down to the least significant gesture. Many times, often for some odd reason, Kafka’s figures clap their hands. Once, however, it is said in passing that those hands are ‘really steam hammers’ [‘In the Gallery’].

  In steady, slow movement (sinking or ascending) we get to know these persons of authority. But nowhere are they more terrible than where they rise up out of the deepest decrepitude: out of fathers. To reassure the impassive, age-enfeebled father whom he has just gently put to bed, the son says:

  ‘Don’t worry, you’re well covered up.’ ‘No, I’m not!’ his father shouted, slamming the answer down on the question, and he threw the quilt back with such force that for a moment it opened out completely in flight. He stood up in bed, one hand pressed lightly to the ceiling. ‘You wanted to cover me up, you scoundrel, I know you did, but I’m not covered up yet. If it’s my last ounce of strength it’s enough for you – more than enough for you. […] But luckily for your father he doesn’t need anyone to teach him to see through his son.’ […] And he stood without holding on at all and kicked his legs in the air. His eyes blazed with insight. […] ‘So now you know what else there was apart from you. You were an innocent child, to tell the truth – though to tell the whole truth you were the devil incarnate!’ [‘The Judgement’]

  In throwing off the burden of the bedcover, the father is throwing off the weight of the world. He must set aeons in motion if he is to bring the age-old father–son relationship to life, render it fraught with consequences. But what consequences they are! He sentences the son to death by drowning. The father is the punisher. He is drawn to guilt like the officers of the court.

  There is much to suggest that for Kafka the world of officialdom and the paternal world are similar. The similarity is not kind to either. Impassiveness, decrepitude, and filth characterize it. The father’s uniform is badly stained; his underwear is soiled. Filth is the vital element of officialdom. ‘She could not understand why there was this coming and going of parties at all. “To dirty the front steps,” an official had once answered her, probably in irritation, but to her that had been most enlightening […]’ [The Castle, 21]. To such an extent is uncleanness the attribute of officials that they might almost be thought of as giant parasites. Not in an economic sense, of course, but as regards the forces of good sense and humanity from which this species draws life. But so, in Kafka’s peculiar families, does the father draw life from the son, squatting on him like some monstrous parasite, sucking away not only at his strength but at his right to be there. The father, the punisher, is at the same time also the prosecutor. The sin of which he accuses the son is apparently a kind of original sin. Because whom does the definition that Kafka gives of it affect more than the son? ‘The original sin, the ancient wrong that man committed, consists in the reproach that man persistently levels that a wrong has been done him, that the original sin was committed against him’ [Heft 12]. But who stands accused of that original, hereditary sin (the sin of having made an heir) if not the father by the son? The sinner, in that case, would be the son. Not that we should conclude from Kafka’s sentence that the accusation is sinful because false. Nowhere does Kafka say that it is wrongly levelled. It is a never-ending trial that is pending here, and no case can appear in a worse light than the one in which the father enlists the solidarity of this officialdom, these judicial chambers. Their boundless corruptibility is not the worst thing about them. The fact is, at heart they are so constituted that their venality offers the only hope to which humanity can cling in their regard.

  The courts, of course, have access to law books. But they may not be seen. ‘ “[…] It’s characteristic of this judicial system that a man is condemned not only when he’s innocent but also in ignorance” ’ [The Trial, ‘In the Empty Assembly Hall – The Student – The Offices’], K. surmises. Laws and defined standards are still, in former times, unwritten laws. A person may overstep them unsuspectingly, thus falling into sin. But however unfortunately they affect the unsuspecting, their occurrence is not, in the sense of right, mere chance but rather fate – here showing itself in its ambiguous aspect. In a brief consideration of the old idea of fate, Hermann Cohen called it an ‘insight that becomes inescapable’ that it is its ‘dispositions themselves that appear to prompt and bring about this emergence, this apostasy’. It is the same with the jurisdiction whose proceedings are directed against K. This goes back long before the era of the Law of the Twelve Tables into a primordial world that saw one of the first victories of written law. Here, the law may be written down in law books but it is still secret, and on this basis the primordial world exercises its dominion with all the less restraint.

  Circumstances in official and family life touch in many different ways in Kafka. In the village on Castle Hill they have an expression that sheds some light here. ‘ “There’s a saying here, perhaps you know it: ‘Official decisions have the shyness of young girls.’ ” “That’s a good observation,” K. said […], “a good observation, the decisions may also have other properties in common with girls” ’ [The Castle, 16]. The most remarkable thing about them is that they lend themselves to everything, like the shy young girls who meet K. in The Castle and The Trial and who entrust themselves to fornication in the bosom of the family as in a bed. He comes across them at every step of the way; the rest follows as casually as the conquest of the barmaid:

  […] They embraced, the little body burning in K.’s hands, in a state of oblivion from which K. tried repeatedly yet vainly to extricate himself they rolled several steps, thudding into Klamm’s door, then lay in the little puddles of beer and the rest of the rubbish covering the floor. There hours passed […] in which K. constantly had the feeling he had lost his way or wandered farther into a strange land than anyone before him, a strange land where even the air held no trace of the air at home, where a man must suffocate from the strangeness yet into whose foolish enticements he could do nothing but plunge on, getting even more lost. [The Castle, 3]

  We shall hear more about this strangeness later. What is remarkable, though, is that these whorish women are never seen as beautiful. Instead, beauty in Kafka’s world crops up only in the most secret places: among defendants, for instance. ‘ “In fact, this is a remarkable, almost a scientific, phenomenon […]. It can’t be guilt making them handsome […]; nor can it be future punishment beautifying them in advance […], so it must have something to do with the proceedings instituted against them rubbing off on them in some way” ’ [The Trial, ‘Merchant Block – Dismissal of the Advocate’].