Quote

What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.

Walter Benjamin

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Walter Benjamin
Age: 48 †
Born: 1892
Born: July 15
Died: 1940
Died: September 26
Art Critic
Essayist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Translator
Writer
Berlin
Germany
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin
Use
Revolutionary
Must
Photographer
Picture
Demand
Caption
Value
Ravages
Ability
Confer
Values
Rescue
Upon
Beneath

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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.
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I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays.
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.
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It is only for those without hope that hope is given.
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To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.
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The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
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True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.
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If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates if the former threatens, the latter strikes if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood
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The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.
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Literature tells very little to those who understand it.
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A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.
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We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector.
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Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock.
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He who observes etiquette but objects to lying is like someone who dresses fashionably but wears no vest.
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All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging... This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
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