Frankfurt School Theorists

Post |01 Frankfurt School Theorists

 I found Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” very engaging primarily because I disagreed so fully with his view of photography and film as lesser art forms produced for the uneducated masses. I harbor a deep love for photography and the role it played in my education. As one of eight children growing up on a farm in Southern Idaho, I was immersed in poverty. We had very little money for the necessities of life making access to travel, art museums and plays impossible. The opportunity for me to experience the “aurora” of a painting was non-existent.

Pictures became my only means of discovering anything about the outside world. I cut them out of any National Geographic I could get my hands on and saved my money to buy books about travel and art that contained photographs of places and things I only imagined in my dreams. I still have these collections and as a result of my fascination with photos my Grandfather willed me his photographs from WWII.

While Benjamin views photography as a medium that doesn’t require “free-floating contemplation” (p. 6), I can attest to a lifetime of exactly the opposite. Photography has been at the center of the deepest contemplations of my life. I was shown the following picture at the age of 8:

 

 

 

This photograph taken by my Grandfather at the Dachu Concentration Camp and started my life-long quest for education. At 13, this picture inspired my first essay on freedom which was chosen to be read by me at the Utah State Capitol during the bicentennial celebration of the U.S. Constitution. In turn, I was introduced to Mark Tenhove who offered me a Presidential scholarship to USU. If not for the contemplation invoked by this single photograph I could never have gotten an education.

In addition to its educational value, I also view photography as a medium that allows art to be enjoyed by the masses and provides people with opportunities that were unavailable prior to its invention. I also believe the distribution of art to the masses to be a positive act not a political act lead by fascists. Art isn’t something that should be available only to upper classes and mechanical reproduction has allowed the uneducated poor like me to see the Mona Lisa.