A Short History of Photography

Walter Benjamin's seminal essay A Short History of Photography, originally published in Literarische Welt in 1931, declared that the illiterate of the future would not be those who cannot read but those who cannot take a photograph. Beginning with the early experiments of Louis Daguerre and Nicéphore Niépce and concluding with the work of August Sander and Germaine Krull, Benjamin moved beyond the medium itself to address the artistic, societal, and political capabilities that photography foretold.

This text contains the early inklings of Benjamin's thoughts on reproducibility that he would later develop in his best-known work, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin's view of photography gave early credence to the medium and its practitioners, shaping the methodology by which it continues to be analyzed today.