The Tourist and “The One Who Waits”
To consider photographs as historical objects is necessarily to rediscover them in one of those bifurcations where, as Walter Benjamin proposes, the conscious and the unconscious—lived and unlived—come face to face. In convolute D of The Arcades Project, the chronological milestones the philosopher...
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| Publicado en: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/am, |
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| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
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Anthropology + Materialism
2019
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| Acceso en liña: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | To consider photographs as historical objects is necessarily to rediscover them in one of those bifurcations where, as Walter Benjamin proposes, the conscious and the unconscious—lived and unlived—come face to face. In convolute D of The Arcades Project, the chronological milestones the philosopher assigns to the triumphal entry of boredom into culture coincide with the invention of photography. In contrast to boredom and monotony, however, the predominant topic in convolute D is not leisure or entertainment but rather “waiting.” Based upon this premise, the paper suggests that it is in this bifurcation, where modern photography is born, that we find, in dialectical tension, the viewfinder that frames the world and the shutter that interrupts the temporal flow, the “tourist” and “the one who waits.” |
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