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[Photography] has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, How beautiful!

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
Photography
Factories
Dams
Front
Incapable
Photographing
Modern
Electric
Heap
Results
River
Cable
Beautiful
Subtle
Cables
Become
Rivers
Rubbish
Without
Result
Factory
Tenement
Fronts
Mention
Tenements

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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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The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.
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To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was...It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.
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In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth.
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All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.
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If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.
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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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