Walter Benjamin on Photography and Fantasy

Critical Horizons 18 (4):295-306 (2017)
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Abstract

The essay provides a commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “News from Flowers”, a review of the album of plant photography of Karl Blossfeldt. I place Benjamin’s account of Blossfeldt’s achievement both in relation to Goethe’s studies of the vegetal realm as well as to the fantasy world of Grandville’s Animated Flowers. This juxtaposition allows me to interpret Benjamin’s understanding of the possibilities opened by photography and the transformation it brings to the relation of art to science and the imagination.

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10.1080/14409917.2017.1374912

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Eli Friedlander
Tel Aviv University

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References found in this work

Critique of the power of judgment.Immanuel Kant - 2000 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Paul Guyer.
The Arcades Project.Walter Benjamin, Howard Eiland & Kevin Mclaughlin - 1999 - Science and Society 65 (2):243-246.

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