Walter Benjamin

In his essay, Walter Benjamin writes about a shift in the way the people perceive art as history moves on. He describes a certain quality of work that art once had but has now lost over time. This quality was and is originality. A painting is done and then can never be reproduced, where as a photo is an image of an image. Even in that small definition the photo can not be considered art at least in the classic meaning of the word. The "image" was immediately reproduced the second that the picture was taken. Where as if a person were to sit down and paint or draw that same scene it would not be an exact image of the scene no matter how close it got to being an exact copy due to the human error factor that is involved in using such mediums. 

However Benjamin doesn't just discount the photograph as a form of art, he also defends it. He says that the camera, though it does take out a sort of originality, does force us to perceive a scene in a way that a painting or drawing cannot. He states that an artist's eye, behind the lens of a camera, is forced to be directed toward a certain seen. His eye crops out the rest of the image and is allowed to tell only part of the story for once. Unless the painter is constantly looking through something that crops his view while he paints, he can never truly focus on only one part of the scene in front of him.

In this way he describes a kind of new originality, or rather the old originality that doubles back on itself. But whats confusing with this article in my opinion is that he also describes at some point in his essay as the originality being dead. To me though I think that photography is a form of art, maybe with just a bit of a slight change in the definition of the word. The fact that you can capture something exactly as it happens has to a thing of beauty. Never before has the art community been able to do this before.  

My thought on the essay is this, as times change so do the definitions that were created in early times. For example the definition of communication. This used to mean delivering letters that could take days to reach the person that you were trying to communicate with. Now the definition is a bit different, you still have the same option to mail a letter and it take days to get there, however you can also send an email that will reach the person in a matter of minutes after being sent. I believe that the definition of art is kind of the same way. Once upon a time it relied upon a piece being original itself. Where now I believe that the way in which the piece was constructed in the first place is all the originality that the said piece needs in order to be considered art.