The Archaic

For WB, too often photography failed to record “the essence” of everyday life, such as factories, even as they ceased being the motor of the city. What remained of this past existence, was rapidly disappearing. The expressway was quickly became the new gateway into the city, replacing the railway station.


The speed of modernity increased, the present-day became more fluid, and the “circle of what can be photographed” narrower. Yet, even as photography lost optical command on the city to film, the snapshot could still confront the modern impulse with a memory of the archaic and provide photography’s uncanny ability to capture the new wish images and to confront the forgotten:


"For the closer we come to its present-day, fluid, functional existence, the narrower draws the circle of what can be photographed; it has to be rightly observed that photography records practically nothing of the essence of, for example, a modern factory. Such pictures can perhaps be compared to railway stations, which, in this age when railways are beginning to be out of date, are no longer generally speaking, the “true gateways” through which the city unrolls its outskirts as it does along the approach roads for motorists. A station gives the order, as it were, for a surprise attack, but it is an outdated maneuver that confronts us with the archaic, and the same is true of photography, even the snapshot. Only film commands optical approaches to the essence of the city such as conducting the motorist into the new center”
Walter Benjamin, Berlin Chronicle