The Past’s Threshold

Siegfried Kracauer

The Past’s Threshold

Essays on Photography

Edited by
Philippe Despoix and Maria Zinfert

Translations by Conor Joyce

diaphanes
 Contents

Philippe Despoix
Kracauer as Thinker
of the Photographic Medium 7

Photography (1927) 27

On Yesterday’s Border (1932) 47

Photographed Berlin (1932) 55

A Note on Portrait Photography (1933) 59

The Photographic Approach (1951) 63

Maria Zinfert
Curriculum Vitae in Pictures 79

Notes 105
Sources of the Texts 121
List of Illustrations and Photographic Credits 123
Acknowledgements 127
 Philippe Despoix

Kracauer as Thinker
of the Photographic Medium

It is no longer necessary today to introduce Siegfried Kracauer. The

major works of this transversal thinker who was at the same time
philosopher, novelist, essayist, sociologist and historian, film critic
and theoretician of the cinema, have already been re-edited or are
accessible in translation. His particular position begins to come into
view among the constellation of radical intellectuals from the Weimar
Republic who, like Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Leo Löwenthal or
Theodor Adorno, were his partners in discussion. The fact that he is
presented here as also a thinker of the photographic medium may
come as a surprise given that this volume brings together just five
essays and an archive document. This is, in fact, everything that, in
his highly varied writings, has directly to do with the photographic
medium.
There can be no doubt, however, that in Kracauer’s texts published
at the turn of the 1920s and the 1930s from his position as an editor
of the cultural pages at the daily newspaper Frankfurter ­Zeitung,
then in the 1950s during his American period, he sketches out a
theorisation of photography that can be described as groundbreak-
ing. But it is also true that most of his works overlap, in more than
one way, with this medium of reproduction or that they are even
conceived explicitly in relation to it. Facing the mass dissemination

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 Philippe Despoix

of photography to which he was a witness, Kracauer was one of the

first to grasp how necessary it was becoming to develop a critical
analysis of ­photography, and also to learn to think about modernity
as a whole via this new form of reproducibility. This reflection con-
tinues from his urban essays on the entertainment culture or on the
new strata of employees in the Weimar period to his studies on film
or on history characteristic of his American work.1

Facing Time

Published on the front page of the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1927, his

first eponymous text on photography belongs to a series of important
programmatic essays and will subsequently be included by Kracauer
in his collection The Mass Ornament (1963).2 This defining essay
weaves together striking themes – the ghost-like character of the
reproduced image, its relation to the present, its impact on memory,
its consequences for history – all taking their point of departure in
the confrontation of two photographic portraits: a contemporaneous
one, endlessly reproduced in the illustrated press, of the latest star
to be in fashion (Ills. 1–2), and then the old portrait of the deceased
grandmother, which is a unique item kept in the family album.3
By means of these two photographs of a young person of the same
age but taken at two generations’ distance, Kracauer homes in on
the new relation to time to which the new technique of reproduc-
tion contributes. For the latter disrupts not only the relation to the
visible world but also the relation to the human sense of time. The
revealing and definitive fixing of an ephemeral moment from which
photography proceeds is for Kracauer one of the sharpest indicators
of the crisis in the modern relation to transcendence and to eternal
time that religion promised. In the same way as new phenomena
like the craze for travel or for exotic dances, for speed or for sports
records, photographic reproduction, which favours all these sub-
jects, appears to reveal society’s un-mastered anguish in the face of
death. The quasi-ritual duplication and the endless ­dissemination of

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 Kracauer as Thinker of the Photographic Medium

Ill. 1. Drei Jahre Tillergirls in Berlin [Three Years of Tiller Girls in Berlin], ­
Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, No. 43, 1927.
Ill. 2. Keine Puppengesichter mehr! Individuelle Film-Schönheit [No More Dolls’
Faces! Individual Beauty at the Cinema], Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, No. 45, 1927.

the same conventional images would seem to be a way of banishing

this anguish.
Thus press photography seems to, paradoxically, obscure the
visible world more than allow it to be observed and known. For
Kracauer, the relation to the image that this new type of reproduc-
tion induces is of a ghost-like kind. In the old album, the deceased
grandmother resembles any young girl concealing herself behind her
crinoline and the chignons that were fashionable in her day (Ill. 3).
Nothing guarantees that the person in the photograph actually is
the ancestor in question, nothing, that is, other than the family lore.
What shows through is the trace of Time.
But it is no different with the press photo. Of the ephemeral star in
vogue today, the success of whose roles depends on her reproduc-
tion in the press, we know no other original than the projection of

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 Philippe Despoix

her image on the cinema screens. The photographic medium unfolds

a world of ghost-like copies, of strange phantoms, the originals of
which waver irremediably in the face of passing time. Every star of
the moment gives way inexorably to the next.
To the infinite accumulation of similar shots, which makes up
merely an external and chronological archiving, Kracauer opposes
the inner memory held of the photographed person, the last image
of it. This ultimate image, that he assimilates into a monogram,
refers to human finitude. Bergsonian memory can be tacitly made
out here, underpinned by qualitative duration (durée) and irreduc-
ible to the chronometric time to which photography is submitted.4
It is just such a remembering that Kracauer invokes in the face of
the potential loss of the capacity for memory of a humanity that is
without transcendental shelter and disorientated among its photo-
graphic ghosts.
In the conception of history particular to historicism, Kracauer
finds a striking parallel for this frightening accumulation of pho-
tographic documents which could set its sights on spatial conti-
nuity but is only witness to the chronological order within which
each document fits. Kracauer’s critique is directed precisely at the
cumulative and neutralising historical process embodied by the then
dominant current of historiography that he associates in the twenties
with, above all, Dilthey’s conception of the Geisteswissenschaften.
Kracauer contrasts his negative vision of a history torn between
catastrophe and utopia with series of events in their purely tem-
poral succession, with this sum of “photographs of the time” of
which the biographical enterprises around Goethe are emblematic.5
The utopia of freed consciousness to which the essayist refers he
sees embodied in Kafka, but he also sees it finding a setting in the
oneiric game of fragmentation and re-composition particular to the
cinematic medium.
It is significant that Kracauer does not make artistic photography
the centre of his analysis but, instead, the trivial shot printed in the
newspaper. He thereby underlines the fundamental characteristic of
this medium as a form of hybrid reproduction. The portrait of the

10
 Kracauer as Thinker of the Photographic Medium

Ill. 3. André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, Portrait No. 3

taken from Mlle Hortense Schneider en huit poses
[Miss Hortense Schneider in Eight Poses], 1860.

star cannot be understood in an individual way without consider-

ing the intermedial chain of duplication of which it is only one ele-
ment, a chain that associates cinematographic filming, set photos,
photo-reportage and reprographic printing. Kracauer approaches
photography primarily as a vector of mass culture, to the very degree
that it forms one of that culture’s main bases and disseminates its
leitmotivs.

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 Philippe Despoix

Ill. 4. Von Hindenburg, cover of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, No. 40, 1927.
Ill. 5. Die neue Silhouette. Die Berliner Golfspielerin Frl. Tag beim Driveschlag
[The New Silhouette. The Berlin lady golfer Miss Tag hitting a drive],
cover of the Münchner Illustrierte Presse, No. 30, 1927.

The cinema star reproduced in the newspaper could just as well

be a variety-show dancing girl, the equivalent of one of the anony-
mous Tiller girls. This famous troupe that raised its leg like a single
collective body acted as a focal point in the major essay “The Mass
Ornament” that had been published shortly before by Kracauer and
in which he analysed the new modern mass rituals that were then
breaking out: review parades, sports events, gymnastic displays,
etc.6 A brief look at the illustrated press of this period, beginning
with Berliner Illustri[e]rte Zeitung which was a leading title, shows
that all his chosen topics are regularly invoked there: the starlet
posing on the beach, a speedboat race on the Lido, reports on the
Tiller girls, portraits of successful actresses, photos of sportspeople
in action or of exotic beauties, but also advertising and political stag-
ings, such as of Marshall Hindenburg (Ills. 4–5 and 6–7).7 Kracauer’s

12
 Kracauer as Thinker of the Photographic Medium

Ill. 6. Zeiss-Ikon advertisement, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, No. 14, 1927, p. 541.
Ill. 7. Agfa advertisement, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, No. 29, 1927, p. 116.

critical essay, which he publishes in a daily newspaper that does

not carry illustrations, presents itself as a fictional assemblage of
these photographic commonplaces propagated by the new popular
press.
The essay is conceived and written in the period when his friend
Walter Benjamin is also taking a close interest in the illustrated
magazines. Benjamin comes to the defence, not without irony, of the
Berliner Illustri[e]rte Zeitung in his sketch “Nothing against the Illus-
trated Press”. Benjamin insists, against literary critics who are too
timid, on this press’ importance in view of the undifferentiated mass
of readers it reaches and of the documentary character of its ico-
nography that sometimes even has avant-garde features.8 Benjamin
will, moreover, directly quote Kracauer’s essay in his own “Little
History of Photography” of 1931, picking up his friend’s conjunction

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 Philippe Despoix

between the record of a sportsperson, the time lag of a photographic

pose and reproduction in the illustrated magazines.9 The similarity
of their preoccupations with the new forms of entertainment cannot
be underlined enough here.
Without yet knowing it, Kracauer’s concerns are close to those
of Aby Warburg who was at the same time turning his attention
to photography in the illustrated press. The analysis of its specific
iconographical formulae is, for Warburg, an explicit part of the “mis-
sion” for his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek. During his work on
the atlas Mnemosyne (1927–29), Warburg will not hesitate to juxta-
pose photographs of sports, recreational or political events cut out of
the newspapers with sculptural forms and settings from Antiquity.10
These examples, that could be multiplied, outline at the end of the
1920s the context of a multiple interrogation – of which Kracauer
was one of the main protagonists – on the effects of the generalisa-
tion of photographic reproduction on cultural memory.

On Yesterday’s Border

The critique of the quasi-cultic function of photography in the illus-

trated magazines soon gives way, however, to an analysis of the
affinities specific to the medium. Three exhibitions held in Berlin at
the beginning of the 1930s give Kracauer, who has in the meantime
become a very well respected film critic, the chance to clarify the
approaches and qualities specific to the new technique. “On Yester-
day’s Border” is based on his visit to the Berlin permanent exhibi-
tion Film- und Photoschau that opened in the summer of 1932 and
was envisaged as a provisional prefiguration of a future museum of
photography and cinema.11
From the magical drums and the flip books, which are moments
of transition between the still image and the animated one, to the
bioscope of the Skladanowsky brothers, German competitors of the
Lumières, all the archaic techniques of the illusion of movement
which were a big attraction of the popular fairs, capture the attention

14
 Kracauer as Thinker of the Photographic Medium

Ill. 8. Bioscope of Max and Emil Skladanowsky, 1895.

Ill. 9. Film roll taken from the first film by the Skladanowsky brothers, 1895.

of the critic (Ills. 8–9). Kracauer puts them in historical perspective

to conceive as a continuous series photography, chronophotogra-
phy, the very earliest cinema, silent movies and even recent sound
films. He notes, nevertheless, how the first silent fictions, which
as early as the 1910s transposed popular tunes and themes from
pot-boilers and which made modern stars of actresses like Henny
Porten, only have an unintended comic effect in hindsight.12
But it is the section dedicated to the first photographic experi-
mentations of Niépce which allows Kracauer to take up again his
reflection on the temporal dimension that is peculiar to this tech-
nology. Thus, a mere window captured on bituminous paper from
the beginnings of heliography – the paper’s conservation does not
even seem assured – is revealed to be not only a paradigm of this

15
 Philippe Despoix

Ill. 10. Albert Vennemann, Blick auf die Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße Richtung

Lustgarten [View on Kaiser-Wilhelm Street in the direction of the Lustgarten],
ca. 1925.

archaic phase but of photography as a whole. While unable to make

people believe in the eternity of the film star reproduced in the
newspapers, the photographic medium seems able to safeguard the
transient character of objects destined to disappear. This distinction
indicates how much photography materialises, in Kracauer’s eyes,
a modern aesthetic of the ruin.
“Photographed Berlin”, a miniature in the form of an exhibition
review, echoes this. The exhibition, from the end of 1932, on the
landscape of Berlin, allows Kracauer to clarify how much “that which
is known and has already vanished” is the area where photography
asserts its singularity. The shots of Albert Vennemann – who had
published in the review Querschnitt among other places and whose
work made up the exhibition – refer for Kracauer as much to the
ephemeral nature of the urban landscape as they do to the process
of his own memory, as city-dweller, becoming history (Ill. 10). The
photography seems to fall within a natural history – a symbol for

16
 Kracauer as Thinker of the Photographic Medium

which could be the Tiergarten park, marked as it is by the heteroge-

neous temporalities of nature and civilisation. As a memory image,
photography can only stay on “yesterday’s threshold” beyond which
it loses its evidence and becomes a historical document.
The series of articles of this period concludes with “Note on Por-
trait Photography”, published in February 1933, a few weeks before
Kracauer hurriedly left Berlin where the Nazis had taken power. The
portrait appears to him to be the area par excellence in which the
new technology must affirm its difference from traditional media
which, like painting, had given the genre a special status. The cor-
responding exhibition, probably of modest dimensions, is hardly
mentioned, serving as a pretext for a more developed reflection on
the photographic values specific to the human face. Only a short
time before, August Sander had, with his Antlitz der Zeit (1929),
transformed the portrait into an exploration of social physiognomy,
and Walter Benjamin had just praised it in his “Little History of
Photography”.13 Similarly, Helmar Lerski, to whose experimenta-
tions Kracauer will later return, had demonstrated this orientation
with his Köpfe des Alltags (1931), a series of anonymous heads taken
in their daily environment and defined only by their profession.14 In
the same vein is a kind of portrait with minimal stylisation which is
an example for Kracauer of the specific relations characterising what
he will soon theorise as “the photographic approach”.

Towards a Photographic Approach

Kracauer’s exile in France, in the thirties, will not give him the
opportunity to publish on photography. The latter occupies, nev-
ertheless, a pivotal role in what is known as the “Marseille manu-
script” of 1940, the first draft of what will become his final theory
of film. He refers early in the manuscript to the paradox that pho-
tographic technology is born from the interest in movement, and
he notes the central importance in the transition towards film of
chronophotography – meaning Muybridge or Marey – registering a

17
 Philippe Despoix

horse’s gallop.15 What is for Kracauer characteristic of the medium

from its beginnings is its “indifference towards subject matter”,
its non-anthropocentric character that we find at the heart of his
“­theory of the instant photograph”:

beginning from immediate perception, two paths lead in opposite direc-

tions [he writes]: the first leads to the image (…), the second to the
INSTANT PHOTO. The latter is the opposite of an image (…) and all the
more characteristic in that it captures just any moment (…) that it freezes
complexes that are not intentional compositions.16

It is this “tendency towards the instant photo” – this exact radical

formulation will not be used again – that forms, in this Marseille
manuscript, the moment of articulation between photography and
film.
So at the moment when Kracauer is elaborating the very basis of
his cinematographic theory, photography becomes once more for
him an unavoidable pathway. The writing of Theory of Film, put
off numerous times, will stretch over twenty years and the work
will only be published in the United States in 1960. But it is not by
chance that the first preliminary publication from this magnum opus
is devoted to photography. This is the article “The Photographic
Approach”, published in 1951 in the lavishly illustrated The Maga-
zine of Art, and the last text presented here with the original photo-
graphs chosen by the author.
Written in English, which is now his adopted language, this sin-
gular essay is an initial, partial version of the introductory chapter
to Theory of Film. It is imbued with Kracauer’s new American con-
text, in particular with his exchanges with Beaumont Newhall, the
curator of numerous exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and
one of the first historians of photography. Kracauer borrows a good
deal of material from him, taking it from, among other places, his
fundamental study “Photography and the Development of Kinetic
Visualization”.17 But the essay is also witness to a decisive “redis-
covery” of Proust and of the central place that photography occupies

18
 Kracauer as Thinker of the Photographic Medium

in Remembrance of Things Past. It is a theme that may well have

been the subject of discussions in Paris, and even in Marseille, with
Benjamin who had translated two of the volumes.18 It is from this
point on that Proust takes on the role of theoretical interlocutor
occupied implicitly by Bergson in the first essay of 1927. In the
staging of the Proustian novel, the instant photograph – that of the
grandmother in the narrator’s mind – appears as an instrument of
complete estrangement of the subject, as a screen hindering the
revelations of involuntary memory. By borrowing Proust’s terms but
inflecting the values given to them, Kracauer is able to affirm, in an
insight complementary to Proust’s, that photography is the medium
of access to the visible, and to material existence. Photography, by
virtue of its involving a fundamental alienation of human vision, is
for Kracauer an implement of concrete knowledge.
The main concepts that will structure not only the first chapter
on photography but, with some variations, all of Theory of Film, are
already set out in this new essay. Phenomena particularly suited to
being rendered by the medium have for Kracauer to do with a reality
without artifice, that is unstaged. They derive from the fortuitous,
from the indeterminate, from endlessness. Kracauer constructs a
basic tension between, on the one hand, the approach he describes
as photographic, which is comparable to an imaginative reader try-
ing to discover the hidden layers of a text and, on the other hand,
the approach of the traditional artist who, passionately wanting to
express his vision, tries to realise it using photography.19
Kracauer makes visible this polarity, which inhabits the medium
from its beginnings, by his choice of photographic documents,
by, for example, counterposing Talbot’s The Open Door from the
very beginnings of photography with Adam-Salomon’s self-portrait
inspired by the pictorial tradition.20 It is not an accident that the
names of the authors – some of them eminent – of the photographs
informing the page layouts are often not even quoted. He is not pri-
marily interested in the photographers as artists for their style, but,
rather, in the defining tension revealed in their shots between an
expressive tendency and a realist one. It is, moreover, remarkable

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 Philippe Despoix

that the series of photographs that he proposes as counterpoint to

his argument, set out all of the realms of nature to the point where
differences between them begin to blur. There are shots where
minerals, even the urban landscape, become abstract (Weston and
Moholy-Nagy), there is a landscape of stones “humanised” by a
rail-track that splits the horizon (Russell), and a view of children
playing in the remains of ruined buildings (Cartier-Bresson). The
division between the animal and the botanical begins to blur (Eliot
Porter), and there is the closeness between the botanical and the
mineral in the interlacing of roots captured by Atget.21 This sober
series appears to be a summary of the qualities that are specific to
the medium in its affinity with the visible world. A work by Atget
concludes the series, and a photograph by him will also be used to
open the iconography of Theory of Film, of one of those deserted
Parisian streets already admired by Benjamin (Ill. 11).22 This kind of
photograph embodies the estrangement of the human gaze in which
Kracauer sees the origin of the aesthetic and cognitive dimensions
that are constitutive of the medium. This point, that is fundamental,
will lead him to claim that we are dealing with a technology at one
remove from the traditional artistic domain, a technology that even
displaces the very idea of art – “art with a difference”.23

History, Photography, Autobiography

The texts of Kracauer’s American period are then simultaneously

continuous with, and a reversal of, the texts of the Weimar period.
The endless repetition of the star’s portrait in the newspapers brought
with it the danger of people being blinded to disenchanted reality
and of them conjuring away death, now that transcendence no lon-
ger ministered for death. The defence of a photographic approach as
a means of estrangement grounds from the beginning of the 1940s
a salutary exploration of the real world. Carlo Ginzburg has empha-
sised in a penetrating commentary to what extent “photography
which was for Kracauer in 1927 ‘the sign of the fear of death’ became

20
 Kracauer as Thinker of the Photographic Medium

Ill. 11. Eugène Atget, Rue Saint-Rustique, 1922.

21
 Philippe Despoix

through Proust the tool that enables one to transcend this fear, to
look death in the face.”24
The failure to recognise the loved one on a photograph, which
pointed for the French writer to an anticipated death or to a real
mourning suddenly “opens the spectator’s estranged gaze to the
illumination of knowledge.”25 Whereas at the end of the twenties
the ghost-like character of photography called, in Kracauer’s eyes,
for redemption by the utopian power of the cinematographer, the
two technologies are now thought of in a material continuity that is
positively viewed. By subtracting man for one instant from his lan-
guage, the photographic medium makes him face his own finitude,
that is to say, his own historicity. This touches on one of the epis-
temological foundations of Kracauer’s final work History. The Last
Things before the Last (published posthumously in 1969) which was
undertaken as a complementary project to Theory of Film and which
systematically weaves together photographic media and the theory
of historiography. At the same time, the difference of his approach
to the reproductive technologies when compared with that of the
Frankfurt School, particularly with his friend Adorno, becomes even
clearer. Adorno, indeed, will reproach Kracauer for this affirmation
of positivity. Far from restricting himself to a critique of ideology,
the theory of the later Kracauer has more important analogies with
the specifically temporal dimension that Barthes, deconstructing his
own semiology a generation later, would discover by way of Proust
in photography.26

This collection of essays ends with a strange document. It is a series

of photos of a hypothetical “Curriculum Vitae in pictures” that was
planned, it seems, by Kracauer. But it is difficult to establish if it was
ever carried out. Is this an irony of history? The envelope carrying
this title is empty now, although a considerable number of disparate
photographs are stored in the archives.27 The name of the proj-
ect bears unambiguous witness to the continual, indeed concrete,
nature of the importance of photography for Kracauer.

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 Kracauer as Thinker of the Photographic Medium

His reflections on the hitherto uncharted relation to time and

memory inaugurated through the medium came side by side in the
1920s with a virulent critique of the biographical genre as a new
literary fashion that revealed a double crisis: of the novel and of
historiography. In his American period, an analysis of photography
opens, as we have seen, his major work on the cinematic medium,
and photography continues to provide the analogical crux that is
epistemologically central to his last unfinished work on history, its
presuppositions and its modes of writing.28
Does the project of a curriculum in pictures constitute the outline
of a photographic autobiography? If so, it would be at the meeting-
point of two lines of thought particular to Kracauer, that of autobiog-
raphy as a legitimate form of “biography of a society” and that of the
structural affinity between photography as a medium and historical
material.29 The project is all the more surprising when one remem-
bers his strong plea for “exterritoriality” – the city of New York was
the symbol of this for him – or his fierce desire to extricate himself
from any public “chronological labelling”.30 This refusal of any point
of anchorage, the affirmation of a certain spatio-temporal state of
floating that also characterises the historian’s position, would seem
to be stymied by the assemblage of a set of photographs capturing
with precision his changing physiognomy at certain times and at
certain places. Unless it was envisaged as a posthumous album, as
a physical trace, fragmentary and incomplete, of that which remains
after death, or envisaged even, more radically, as a series of places
that were the frame of his existence.
We will probably never know if this project was conceived as a
complement to those “memoirs in the grand style” that Kracauer
mentioned – not without a tone of scepticism – in his correspondence
at the beginning of the 1950s.31 Nor will we ever probably know if
this uncertain curriculum in pictures came later to take the place
of memoirs following his reflections on the historiographical value
of the photographic medium, nor whether it is his wife ­Elisabeth
Kracauer – author of most of the photographs of him ­subsequent

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 Philippe Despoix

to their marriage – who took it upon herself to carry on with the

project after his death.
These archive photographs reveal to us neither the personality of
Kracauer nor his biography. But through the chance of their hav-
ing been conserved and by virtue of their imperfect state, they bear
witness to disparate episodes of a journey through the twentieth
century, episodes that are revealed in the density of the succes-
sive photographic technologies and practices, from the studio pose
to the snapshot, from the fragile glass plate to the Polaroid. They
seem to have been left to us like raw material that its own theory
would alone be capable of deciphering. Maria Zinfert proposes an
imagined and provisional reconstruction of the project at the end
of this volume.

24
Essays on Photography
 Photography

In the time of Schlauraffen I went forth and saw Rome

and the Lateran hanging by a small silken thread, and a
man without feet who outran a swift horse, and a keen
sharp sword that cut through a bridge.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales1

This is how the film star looks. She is 24 years old. She is on the
cover of an illustrated magazine standing in front of the Excelsior
Hotel on the Lido. We are in September. If one looked through a
magnifying glass, one could recognise the grid, the millions of tiny
dots that form the star, the waves and the hotel. But the subject of
the picture is not the network of points; it is the living star there
on the Lido. The time: the present. The accompanying text calls
her demonic; our demonic star. Despite this, she is not devoid of
a certain expression. The tomboy hairstyle, her bewitching way of
holding her head and the twelve eye-lashes on the right and on the
left – all the details painstakingly itemised by the camera – are at
their appointed place in space, making a flawless appearance. Every-
one is delighted to recognise her, for everyone has already seen the
original on the screen. The photograph is such a good likeness that

27
 Siegfried Kracauer

she cannot be confused with anyone else, even if she is maybe only
the twelfth part of a dozen Tiller Girls.2 Dreamlike, there she stands
in front of the Excelsior Hotel, which basks in her fame, a creature
of flesh and blood, our demonic star, 24 years of age, on the Lido.
We are in September.
Did the grandmother look like this? The photograph, which is
over 60 years old and already a photograph in the modern sense,
shows her as a young girl of 24. As photographs capture likenesses,
this one too must have been how she looked. It has been produced
with care in the studio of a court-licensed photographer. But if the
oral tradition were missing, it would not be possible to reconstruct
the grandmother from the picture. The grandchildren know that, in
her later years, she lived in a narrow little room that had a view of
the old, historical, city centre; they know that, for the sake of the
children, she made soldiers dance on a glass plate. They know a
wicked story from her life and know two remarks credited to her,
which change a little from one generation to the next. For the pho-
tograph to be of the same grandmother of whom one has held on to
this little, a little that will also perhaps be forgotten, credence must
be given to the parents who claim that they knew it directly of the
mother. Witnesses’ testimony is uncertain. In the end, it is not the
grandmother who is represented in the picture but her girlfriend
whom she resembled. Contemporaries do not exist anymore. But
where is the likeness? The original rotted away a long time ago.
The image, now darkened, has so little in common with the remem-
bered features that the grandchildren force themselves to believe
with astonishment that this is an encounter with a female ancestor
who has been handed down to them in this fragmentary way. So,
good, it is the grandmother, however, in reality, it is any girl of
1864 chosen at random. The girl smiles on, always with the same
persisting smile, which stands still, without reference anymore to
the life from which it has been taken. The likeness is no longer of
any use. Tailors’ dummies in hairdressers’ shops smile in just such
a stiff, unending way. The dummy is not contemporary; it could be
in a museum in a glass cabinet with others of its kind, a cabinet that

28
 Photography

might well be labelled ‘Dress, 1864’. The dummies are there because
of the historical costume, and the grandmother in the photograph
is also an archaeological dummy serving to present the dress of the
period. So that was how one dressed in those days: with a chignon,
in a narrow corset, in crinoline and a little Zuave jacket. Before
the grandchildren’s eyes, the grandmother is dissolving into old-
fashioned details of fashion. The grandchildren laugh at the attire
which, with the disappearance of its wearer, commands on its own
the scene of the action, an external decoration that has become
something autonomous. The grandchildren have no respect, and
nowadays young girls dress differently. They laugh and they get the
creeps at the same time. For via the ornamental side of the dress,
through that from which the grandmother has disappeared, they
think that they catch sight of a moment of past time, that time that
passes without return. It is true, time is not photographed along with
the smile or the chignon, however the photograph, so it seems to
them, is a presentation of time. If only photography would bestow
permanence on them, they would not endure at all beyond mere
time — rather time would make pictures out of them.

“From the Early Period of Goethe’s and Karl August’s Friendship” –

“Carl August and the Election of the Coadjutant for Erfurt 1787” –
“The Visit of a Bohemian to Jena and Weimar (1818)” – “Memoirs
from a Weimar Secondary School (1825 to 1830)” – “A Contem-
porary Account of the Goethe Celebrations of 7 November 1825 in
Weimar” – “A Rediscovered Bust of Wieland by Ludwig Klauer” –
“Plan for a National Goethe Memorial in Weimar” – The herbarium
in which these and other studies have grown is the Goethe Society’s
Jahrbücher, a series which can continue in principle without end. To
make laughable Goethe philology, which deposits its compounds in
the volumes, would be all the more pointless given how it is wishing
goodbye to this life that it has taken up, whereas the false glamour

29
 Siegfried Kracauer

of the numerous monumental works on the figure of Goethe, on his

being and personality, has hardly been laid bare. The principle of
Goethe philology is that of the historicist thinking that has become
dominant at approximately the same time as modern photographic
technology. Its representatives3 assume, overall, that one can explain
any phenomenon purely by tracing its origins. They believe in any
case that historical reality is grasped when they have completely
re-constituted the succession of events in their temporal sequence.
Photography provides a space-continuum; historicism would like to
fulfil the time continuum. The entire mirroring of the intra-temporal
course of a period contains, according to historicism (Historismus),
the meaning of everything that has happened in that time. If, in the
representation of Goethe, were missing the intermediate links that
are the election of the co-adjutant for Erfurt or the memoirs of the
Weimar secondary school pupil, the representation of him would
be lacking in reality. For historicism, it is a matter of the photogra-
phy of time. What could correspond to its photography of time is
a huge film which would depict the processes linked together in it
from all sides.

Memory incorporates neither the total spatial nature of a state of

affairs nor its total temporal course. Its recordings are, compared to
photography, full of gaps. That the grandmother was once caught
up in a wicked story which is always being retold, for there is an
unwillingness to speak about it, this fact will not mean much from
the standpoint of the photographer. He knows the first little wrinkles
on her face, he has noted every datum. Memory does not pay heed
to dates, it skips over the years or it increases the span of time. The
selection of features that are brought together by memory must seem
arbitrary to the photographer. The selection must be made in this and
not that way because memory’s dispositions and purposes demand
the repression, falsification and accentuation of certain parts of the

30
 Photography

subject; a spurious infinity of reasons decides on what remains to be

filtered. Whatever scenes a person happens to remember, they mean
something that relates to the person without necessarily having to
know what they mean. The scenes are preserved due to what they
mean for that person. So they are organised according to a principle
which differs in its essence from photography. While photography
grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum, memory
images preserve the given in so far as it means something. Since
what is meant is disclosed just as little in the purely spatial context
as it is in the purely temporal one, memory images are out of kilter
with photographic reproduction. If they seem to be a fragment from
the point of view of photography – a fragment because photography
does not incorporate the meanings to which they relate, and directed
towards which they cease to be a fragment – so, in reverse, from
the viewpoint of memory images, photography seems a jumble of
things made up in part of detritus.
The meaning of memory images is tied to their truth content. As
long as they are tied to the uncontrolled life of the drives, there
lives within them a demonic ambiguity. They are as opaque as
frosted glass through which a shimmer of light barely penetrates.
Their transparency grows to the extent that knowledge clears away
the vegetation of the soul and sets limits on natural compulsions.
Truth can only be found by a freed consciousness, which is able
to have the measure of the demonism of the drives. The features
remembered by this consciousness are related to what is cognised
as true, which is revealed in the features or may be excluded by
them. The image in which these features are to be found, stands out
from all other memory images, for it does not preserve as they do an
abundance of opaque memories but preserves contents recognised
as true. All memory images need to be reduced to this one image,
that can be called for good reason the last one, for only in it does
what is unforgettable linger. The last image of a person is its genuine
“history”. From it, all marks and particularities fall away that do not
relate in a meaningful sense to the truth as cognised by a freed con-
sciousness. How it is represented by a human being depends neither

31
 Siegfried Kracauer

purely on its natural constitution nor on the apparent coherence of

its individuality; only bits of these contents go into the history of the
human being. The history is like a monogram that condenses a name
to a drawn line, which has meaning as an ornament. The monogram
of Eckart is fidelity.4 Great historical figures live on in their legends
which, however naïve, seek to preserve their genuine history. In
proper fairytales, fantasy has recorded typical monograms in an
allusive way. Beneath a human being’s photograph, its history is
buried like under a blanket of snow.

Eckermann, describing a Rubens landscape shown him by Goethe,

remarks to his surprise that the light in it seems to come from two
opposite sides “which is quite contrary to nature”. Goethe answers
him, “It is by this that Rubens proves himself great, and shows
to the world that he, with a free spirit, stands above nature, and
treats her comfortably to his higher purposes. The double light is
certainly a violent expedient, and you certainly say that it is contrary
to nature. But if it is contrary to nature, I still say it is higher than
nature; I say it is the bold stroke of the master, by which he, in a
genial manner, proclaims to the world that art is not entirely sub-
ject to natural necessities, but has laws of its own.”5 – A portraitist
who subjected himself thoroughly to “natural necessities” would
make at best photographs. In a certain epoch that had begun with
the Renaissance and is now perhaps coming to a close, the “work
of art” certainly stays close to nature, the particularities of which
are being revealed more and more in this epoch; but the “work of
art” is directed, going through this very nature, towards “higher
purposes”. It is cognition in the material of colours and of contours,
and the greater the work, the more it approaches the transparency of
the last memory image, in which the features of the “history” come
together. A man whose portrait was being painted by Trübner6 asked
the artist not to forget the folds and wrinkles on his face. Trübner

32
 Photography

pointed to outside the window: “A photographa’ lives over there.

If folds and wrinkles is what you want, then you’ll have to get ’im
to come, he’ll make everything perfect for you. I pain’ history.”
For the history to be represented, the mere surface connections
that photography offers must be destroyed. For in the work of art,
the meaning of the subject becomes a spatial appearance, while in
photography it is the spatial appearance of a subject that is its mean-
ing. The two appearances, the “natural” one and the one cognised
as true, are not commensurate. In giving up the former for the sake
of the latter, the work of art negates at the same time the likeness
for which photography aims. Photographic likeness concerns the
subject’s appearance which does not betray how the subject would
be revealed in cognition; the work of art, in contrast, only conveys
what is transparent in the subject. In this it is like a magic mirror
which does not reflect back to a human being inquiring of how it
looks but how the person wishes to be or is deep down. The work
of art also deteriorates over time; however, from its decomposed
elements, there emerges what was meant, while photography stows
the elements away.
Until well into the second half of the last century, the ­photographic
procedure was frequently practiced by former painters. There cor-
responded to the not yet thoroughly depersonalised technology of
that period of transition, a spatial environment in which traces of
meaning were capable of holding on. With the increasing detach-
ment of the technology and the simultaneous withdrawal of mean-
ing from its subjects, artistic photography loses its rights. It flour-
ishes not in making works of art but in their imitation. Portraits of
children are Zumbusches,7 and Monet was the godfather of land-
scape impressions. Compositions that do not go beyond the deft
following of familiar styles fall short precisely in the representation
of the rest of nature, of which the developed technology was to a cer-
tain extent capable. Modern painters have assembled their pictures
from photographic fragments, to underscore the juxtapositions of
reified appearances, which juxtapositions get assimilated in spatial
relations. This artistic intention is contradicted by that of artistic

33
 Siegfried Kracauer

­ hotography. This latter does not work from the areas that are in
p
keeping with the photographic technology but rather its intention
is to dress the technical reality in a stylish way. The artistic pho-
tographer is an artist dilettante who copies an artistic style after the
removal of its content, instead of simply capturing the absence of
content. Similarly, rhythmical gymnastics also wants to involve the
soul, of which it knows nothing, and this gymnastics concurs with
artistic photography in also striving to take possession of the higher
life in order to elevate an activity, that is at its most elevated when
it finds a subject suitable to its technical capacities. Photographer-
artists work with the mentality of those social powers that are inter-
ested in the appearance of the intellectual, because they are fearful
of what the intellect is. The latter might blow up the foundations
the appearances of which work as a distortion. It would be worth
the effort to uncover the close relations between the existing social
order and artistic photography.

Photography does not preserve the transparent features of an object

or person but records it from whatever position as a spatial con-
tinuum. The ultimate memory image outlasts time because it is
unforgettable; the photograph, which does not mean or conceive
the memory image, must be assigned essentially to the instant of its
emergence. “The essence of film is, to a certain extent, the essence
of time”,* E.A. Dupont8 remarks in his book on the average film,
the theme of which is the ordinary surroundings that can be photo-
graphed (quoted from Rudolf Harms’ Philosophy of Film). If, how-
ever, photography is a function of passing time, then its factual

* Ewald André Dupont, Wie ein Film geschrieben wird und wie man ihn verwertet,
Berlin, Kühn, 1919, p. 15, quoted in Rudolf Harms, Philosophie des Films, Leipzig,
Meiner, 1926, p. 142.

34
 Photography

meaning will change depending on whether it belongs to the realm

of the present or to some period of the past.
Today’s photography which depicts appearances familiar to the
contemporary consciousness, provides limited access to the life of its
original subject. It records each time a superficial state that, in this
period of its supremacy, is as understood a means of expression as is
language. A contemporary believes that in the photograph he catches
sight of the film star herself, not just her tomboy haircut or the way
she holds her head. Admittedly, he would not be able to judge her
from the photograph alone. But luckily the star dwells among the
living, and the cover of the illustrated magazine is fulfilling the task
of recalling her bodily reality. This means that today’s photography
is acting as an intermediary; it is an optical sign for the star and it
counts as cognition of her. Whether her decisive characteristic is her
demonic quality may, in the end, be doubted. For the demonic here
is less something imparted by the photograph than it is the impres-
sion of the cinema-goers who experience the original on the screen.
They accept it as the representation of the demonic; fine. It is not
because of its likeness to the star but despite of it, that the photograph
denounces the demonic. The latter belongs for the time being to the
still unstable memory image of the star, to which the photographic
likeness does not relate. The memory image created out of our expe-
rience of the celebrated star, breaks through the wall of likeness into
the photograph and thus lends some transparency to it.
When the photograph ages, the direct relation to the original is
no longer possible. The body of a dead person seems smaller than
its living form. An old photograph also appears to be smaller than
a present-day one. Life has retreated from it, that life of which the
spatial appearance covered the bare spatial configuration. Memory
images behave in the opposite way to photographs, the former
enlarging themselves to be the monogram of the remembered life.
The photograph is the residue that has fallen from the monogram,
and its value as a sign diminishes from year to year. The truth
content of the original remains within its history; the photograph
includes the deposit that history has eliminated.

35
 Siegfried Kracauer

When the grandmother is no longer encountered in the photo-

graph, the picture taken from the family album must collapse into its
details. While the gaze can wander from the star’s tomboy haircut to
her demonic nature, from the nothing that is grandmother, the gaze
is referred back to the chignon, to the details of fashion holding one’s
attention. Photography’s dependence on time corresponds exactly to
the time dependence of fashion. As fashion has no meaning other
than its being the contemporary human husk, modern fashion is
translucent and the old one abandoned. The dress worn with the
narrow corset juts from the photograph into our time like a patrician
mansion from earlier times that is exposed to destruction because
the centre has been moved to another part of the town. Members
of the lower classes usually settle into such buildings. To acquire
the beauty of the ruin, very old attire needs to lose all touch with
the present. Recently worn attire has a comic effect. The grandchil-
dren make fun of the grandmother’s 1864 crinoline, prompting the
thought in them that modern girls’ legs might be hidden under it.
The look of the recent past, with its claim to be alive, is more lifeless
than a look of long ago, the meaning of which has changed. What
is comic about the crinoline is explained by the impotence of its
presumption. In the photograph, the grandmother’s attire is recog-
nised as an abandoned remnant that would like to claim continued
existence. The attire is reduced to the sum of its parts, like a corpse,
and it imposes itself as if there were still life in it. A landscape in old
photographs, and every other subject in them, are also period attire.
For it is not the features intended by the freed consciousness that
are preserved in such an image. It represents relations from which
that consciousness has withdrawn, and includes contents that have
shrivelled without wanting to admit it. The more consciousness
removes itself from natural bonds, the smaller nature grows. On
old engravings aiming at photographic fidelity, the hills of the Rhine
appear as ­mountains. Because of the technical development, they
have been since ­relegated to tiny slopes, and the delusions of gran-
deur of those grizzled views is a little ridiculous.

36
 Photography

The ghost is funny and dreadful at the same time. It is not just
laughter that answers the outdated photograph. It represents the
mere past, but the remains were once the present. The grandmother
was a person and to this person there belonged the chignons and
a corset and the High Renaissance chair with its twirled stiles. Bal-
last that did not depress but was taken along without thinking.
The picture haunts the present now, like the lady of the castle. It is
only in places where a bad deed has been committed, that appari-
tions move about. The photograph becomes a ghost because the
costume-dummy was once alive. It is proven through the picture
that the strange accoutrements were incorporated into life as self-
evident accessories. These things, whose lack of transparency is
experienced in the old photograph, were once inextricably mixed
with the transparent features. The wicked link that persists in the
photograph awakens a shudder. Such a shudder is produced in a
drastic way in the film scenes of the pre-war period that were pre-
sented in the Parisian avant-garde cinema Studio des Ursulines9; the
scenes show how features, stored in memory images, are caught
up in a long disappeared reality. The replaying of old hit-songs or
the reading of once written letters also conjures up afresh, like the
photographic portrait, the unity that had fallen apart. This ghostly
reality is unredeemed. It consists of parts in space, the connection
between which is so little necessary that one could conceive of the
parts being also ordered differently. It had once clung to us like our
skin, and this is how our property still clings to us nowadays. We
are held in nothing, and photography gathers fragments around
a nothing. When the grandmother stood before the lens, she was
for a second present in a space continuum that offered itself to the
lens. But what was made eternal was just this aspect, instead of the
grandmother. The viewer of old photographs feels a shiver. For they
make present not the knowledge of the original sitter but the spatial
configuration of a moment; it is not the human being that emerges
from the photograph but rather the sum of everything that can be
subtracted from that being. The photograph destroys the human
being, by picturing it, and were the being and photograph to become

37
 Siegfried Kracauer

one, the being would not exist. Recently, an illustrated magazine,

under the title ‘The countenance of the famous. Thus they once
were and thus are they now!’, juxtaposed childhood shots of well-
known personalities with shots of them in their maturity. Marx as a
boy and Marx as a Centrist leader,10 Hindenburg as lieutenant and
our ­Hindenburg.11 The photographs stand beside one another like
statistical reports and it is no more possible to foresee the later image
in the earlier one than it is to reconstruct the latter from the former.
The statement that the registers of optical inventory belong together
is to be taken on trust. The features of human beings are contained
in their “history” alone.

The newspapers illustrate their texts more and more, and what
would a magazine be without image material? The irrefutable proof
of the very marked validity of photography of the present day is
provided above all by the increase in the number of illustrated maga-
zines. In them are gathered together all phenomena, from the film
star onwards, that are within reach of the camera and the public.
Babies interest the mothers, while the young men are captivated by
groups of beautiful girls’ legs. Attractive girls love to look at sports
and theatre stars who stand on the gangway of the ocean liner when
they are travelling to distant lands. In those distant lands, conflicts
of interests are fought out. However, interest is not directed at them,
but on the cities, the natural disasters, the leading intellectuals and
politicians. The congress of the League of Nations is meeting in
Geneva. It serves to show Messrs. Stresemann and Briand12 in con-
versation in front of the hotel entrance. The new fashions must also
be spread, otherwise the attractive girls do not know in the summer
who they are. The fashion beauties appear with young men at soci-
ety events, in distant lands there are earthquakes, Mr. Stresemann is
sitting on a terrace lined with palm trees, and for the mothers there
are our little ones.

38
 Photography

The intention of the illustrated newspapers is the complete repro-

duction of the world that is accessible to the camera; they record the
spatial imprint of people, circumstances and events from all possible
perspectives. Their method corresponds to that of the weekly film
newsreel;13 it is a sum of photographs, whereas for real film, a photo-
graph only serves as a means. There has never been a time that has
known so much about itself, if knowing about oneself means having
a picture of things that is similar to them in a photographic way.
As topical photographs, most pictures in the illustrated newspapers
refer to subjects which exist in reality. The images are therefore at
bottom signs, which help recall the original that should be recogn-
ised. The demonic film star. In reality, however, a reference to the
originals is not intended at all by the weekly ration of photographs.
If the weekly supply were to serve as a support for memory, then
memory would have to determine its selection. Yet the flood of pho-
tos sweeps away memory’s dams. The onslaught of the collections
of images is so powerful that it threatens to destroy the awareness
of important features that perhaps exists. Works of art suffer this
fate through their reproduction. The saying is true for the dupli-
cated original: in for a penny, in for a pound. The original, instead
of appearing from behind the reproductions, tends to disappear in
their multiplicity and to live on as art photography. In the illustrated
publications, the public sees the world, the perception of which is
hindered by these very publications. The spatial continuum from the
camera perspective overtakes the spatial appearance of the cognised
subject, and the likeness with the latter blurs the contours of the
subject’s “history”. There has never been a time that has known
so little about itself. In the hands of ruling society, the institution
of the illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful weapons
in the struggle against knowledge. A bright arrangement of images
is not the smallest factor in the successful waging of this struggle.
The juxtaposition of images systematically excludes the perspective
that is being opened to consciousness. The ­“picture-idea” expels the
idea, and the blizzard of photographs betrays their indifference to
what things mean. It does not have to be like this. But the American

39
 Siegfried Kracauer

illustrated magazines, which those of other countries try to emulate,

equate in any case the world with the model of photographs. This
equation is not made without grounds. For the world has given
itself a “photograph-able face”; it can be photographed because it
strives to dissolve itself within the spatial continuum that yields to
snapshots. It sometimes depends on the split second that is enough
to put lighting on a subject, as to whether a sportsman becomes so
famous that photographers then illuminate him on assignment from
the illustrated magazines. The figures of the pretty girls and of the
young men are to be captured also by the camera. That the camera
gobbles the world is a sign of the fear of death. Image photographs
would like to banish with their proliferation the remembrance of
death that comes with every memory. In the illustrated magazines,
the world has become a photograph-able present and the photo-
graphed present is made totally eternal. This present seems to have
been snatched from death but in reality it is delivered up to it.

The series of visual representations, whose last historical step is pho-

tography, begins with the symbol. It goes back to the “natural com-
munity” in which man’s consciousness is still immersed in nature.
“The history of words always begins with the sensuous, natural sig-
nification, and only in the course of development arrives at abstract,
figurative meanings; and in religion, in the development of the
human individual and of mankind, the same progress from the mate-
rial to the psychic and spiritual can be noted. Likewise the symbols
in which the earliest mankind set forth its institutions of nature and
the environing world began with purely physical and material mean-
ings. Symbolism, like language, is taught by nature.”* The quotation

* Johann Jacob Bachofen, Oknos der Seilflechter, ein Grabbild (Munich, C. H. Beck,
1923) p. 22, trans. “Ocnus the rope Plaiter”, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right;

40
 Photography

comes from Bachofen’s14 essay on rope-weaving Oknos, in which it

is shown that the spinning and weaving represented in the image
originally were a reference to the activity of the formative power of
nature. To the degree that consciousness becomes aware of itself
and that the initial “identity of nature and man” (Marx, The German
Ideology)15 dwindles the image takes on an ever more abstract, imma-
terial meaning. But whether or not this meaning advances to the
designation of, as Bachofen puts it, “the mental and spiritual”,* the
meaning is so immersed in the image that it cannot be separated from
it. For long stretches of subsequent history, pictorial representations
remain symbols. As long as man needs symbols, he finds himself in
a practical dependence on the realities of nature which determines
the visible and bodily dimensions of consciousness. It is only with
the increasing mastery of nature that the image loses its symbolic
power. Consciousness, separating itself from, and opposing itself to,
nature, is no longer a chrysalis encased in its mythological sheath:
it thinks in concepts which, however, may be used with thoroughly
mythological intent. The image is still not without power in certain
epochs; symbolic representation becomes allegory. “The latter means
simply a general concept or an idea that is different to itself, while
the symbol is the sensory, embodied idea itself”.** This is how the
old Creuzer16 defines the difference between the two types of image.
At the stage of symbol, what is thought is contained in the image;
at the stage of allegory, the thought preserves and uses the image
as if consciousness hesitated to throw off its shell. This schematic
account is crude. It is sufficient if it demonstrates the change of rep-
resentations that is the sign of the departure of consciousness from
its immersion in nature. The more decisively consciousness frees
itself from nature in the course of the historical process, the more

selected writings of J.J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Mannheim, Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press 1967), p. 54–55.
* Ibid. p.54.
** Georg Friedrich Creuzer Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der
Griechen, (Leipzig & Darmstadt: K.W. Leske), 1810, vol. 1, p. 83.

41
 Siegfried Kracauer

purely do its natural foundations present themselves to conscious-

ness. For meaning no longer appears to consciousness in images but
instead the process of meaning is directed at, and penetrates, nature.
European painting of recent centuries has to an ever greater extent
represented nature stripped of its symbolic and allegorical meanings.
As a result, the human features depicted in this new painting are
certainly not without meaning. In the time of the old daguerreotypes,
consciousness was still so bound up with nature that the faces make
realities present that cannot be disconnected from the natural life.
Since nature changes in exact accord with the prevalent state of con-
sciousness, the natural foundations that are devoid of meaning come
to the fore with modern photography. Photography is subordinate,
no less than are other earlier types of representation, to a particular
stage of development of practical and material life. This stage has
generated out of itself the capitalist process of production. The same
bare nature, which makes its appearance in photography, lives in the
reality of the society created by the capitalist process. This allows one
to imagine a society that has completely given in to mute nature, a
society that means nothing, however abstract its silence may be. Its
outlines emerge in the illustrated newspapers. Were this society to
last, the consequence of the emancipation of consciousness would
be the destruction of consciousness; nature, not being grasped by
consciousness, would take the place left by the latter at the table. If
this society is not lasting, an incomparable opportunity is given to
the freed consciousness. Less mixed than ever with stocks of nature,
consciousness can prove its might over them. The turn to photogra-
phy is history betting against the house.

Although the grandmother has disappeared, the crinoline has

remained. The totality of photography is to be thought of as nature’s
general inventory where nature cannot be reduced any further. It
is to be thought of as the comprehensive catalogue of all appear-

42
 Photography

ances that arise in space, in so far as these are not constructed from
the monogram of objects or persons, but show themselves from
a natural perspective that the monogram does not render. To the
spatial inventory, there corresponds the temporal one of historicism.
Instead of preserving the “history” that consciousness reads from
the temporal sequence of events, historicism makes a register of the
temporal sequence of events, whose connections are not contained
in the transparency of history. The bald declarations of space- and
time-inventories belong to a social order that regulates itself by eco-
nomic laws of nature.
Consciousness immersed in nature is not able to see its own foun-
dation. It is the task of photography to show what has until now not
been seen: the natural foundation. For the first time in history, pho-
tography exposes the whole natural husk, for the first time, through
photography, the world of the dead presents itself in its indepen-
dence of man. Photography shows towns from an aerial perspective,
it brings down the gargoyles and figures from the Gothic cathedrals.
All spatial configurations are incorporated in the main archive in
unusual intersections that distance them from human proximity.
When the grandmother’s attire has lost its relation to today, it will
no longer be funny but remarkable, like an underwater polyp. The
demonic will one day vanish from the film star, and but the tomboy
hairstyle will remain, as do the chignons. In this way, the inventory
crumbles, for nothing holds it together. The photographic archive
collects in copies the last elements of nature that have been alienated
from what was meant.
This storing up of nature furthers the dispute between conscious-
ness and nature. Just as consciousness finds itself facing the fully
uncovered mechanics of industrialised society, so too, thanks to
photographic technology, it faces the reflection of the reality which
has slipped away from it. To have provoked in every area the deci-
sive dispute: this is exactly the bet against the house of the histori-
cal process. The pictures of the stock of nature dissolved into its
elements are handed to consciousness to do with what it wishes.
Their basic order is gone, and they no longer cling to the spatial

43
 Siegfried Kracauer

c­ oherence that linked them with an original, from which the mem-
ory image had been derived. But if the natural remains do not aim
at the memory image, then their visually conveyed order is neces-
sarily provisional. It would then be incumbent on consciousness to
demonstrate that all given configurations are provisional, if not to
awaken a presentiment of the correct order of the stock of nature. In
Franz Kafka’s works, the freed consciousness rids itself of this duty;
it shatters natural reality to pieces and shifts the fragments around.
The disorder of the remains mirrored in photography can be most
clearly set out by the cancellation of all the usual relations between
the elements of nature. To not leave these relations be is one of the
possibilities of film. This possibility is realised by film whenever it
associates parts and clips together in strange configurations. While
the helter-skelter of the illustrated magazines is pure confusion, this
game with nature cut into pieces is reminiscent of dream in which
the fragments of everyday life get jumbled up. The game indicates
that the valid organisation of things is not known in the light of
which the remains of the grandmother and of the film star will one
day have to find their place within the general inventory that has
absorbed them.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 28th October 1927

44
 On Yesterday’s Border
On the Berlin Film and Photo Exhibition

A permanent film and photo exhibition1 has been opened in a com-

plex of shops in Joachimsthaler Street. It brings together material
that has never been shown before in such a comprehensive way.
Documents, pictures and test samples are brought together here,
reaching from the very beginnings of photography and film to the
immediate present. They provide an almost seamless overview of
a development in which we have so fully participated that we have
up to now been unable to tell it apart from ourselves. Only with
this collection does the unconscious life that we have been carrying
in ourselves become open and stand there facing us as something
strange. And in scrutinising the collection, we recognise, not with-
out a shudder, how the present in parts sinks back into the past and
how the past constantly haunts the present.

The exhibition rooms are reminiscent of market stalls. All the walls
are plastered from top to bottom with photos, and in the gaps
between them gaudy street posters stand out now and again. Fur-
ther factors contribute to awakening the impression of fairground
magic. Business goes on late into the night; in one of the rooms that
is fitted out as one of the old suburban cinemas, forgotten and new
films are shown; the shop window decoration is like a barrel organ
melody made visible; the entry price has been kept so low that the

47
 Siegfried Kracauer

open shop door does not have the effect of being an insurmount-
able barrier. In short, the street draws itself right into the show
and its most hidden corners are still made for passers-by. Whether
the improvisation that rules here is down to the intentions of the
organizer or is simply thanks to the lack of means, it is in any case
in perfect keeping with the subject that is to be presented. These
pictures would suffocate in the bright, grand rooms of a museum
not only because of their origin and their meaning but they would
also be out of place in such surroundings because they have not yet
become fully historical. Their place is on yesterday’s border where
things can only be improvised. For in the dim light, contours are
blurred for now and the murmur of lived experience echoes across
into the newly deserted fields.

The photograph of a “Window” by Niépce   2 comes from the very

beginnings. He was active between 1816 and 1830 and was a fore-
runner of Daguerre. The photograph was produced on specially pre-
pared paper soaked in bitumen, and will not survive much longer.
The picture is already showing cracks and tears, the form already
threatens to dissolve again into the monotony of the background
from which its creator had conjured it. For him it must have been a
cause of incomparable joy to be able to capture all passing things.
The subject is still clearly visible, with its mullion and transom and
stone balustrade – a paltry window in any Parisian house. But it is
precisely the triviality of the subject that makes visible the meaning
of the first photographs. They were doubtless driven by the mission
to sanctify the time-bound quality of a world that was dying. The
emotion that overpowers the contemporary viewer looking at the
yellowed sheet is to be understood from the fact that, in contrast
to most modern photos, the desire is to save the transient and not
to make it eternal to excess. The way that the photograph brings
wonderfully to a standstill a fleeting phenomenon for the sake of the
latter’s possible meaning, calls to mind the original vocation of pho-

48
 On Yesterday’s Border

tographic technology, where its users were for a long time content to
pointlessly arrest the disappearance of inessential phenomena.

The beginnings of film: a magic cylinder is rotated3 and ordinary

scenes are generated out of small picture-books by rapidly flicking
through them as if each were a pack of cards. “You Cannot Have Any
Idea”, is the title of one of these little books and the claim is aimed at
awakening the curiosity of fairground visitors. The Biofix machines4
of that period are still in use in Luna Park, making exaggerated prom-
ises to spendthrift lechers. An atmosphere of fairground show booths
generally wafts around the beginnings of all of film production. It
is the atmosphere in which the experiments of Max Skladanowsky
thrive.5 Just as the rough-and-ready range of instruments used by
this inventor already contains within it many possibilities that came
to be worked out later, so too, the place at which this virgin area
is broken into, is decisive for the future. The circumstances within
which a new development emerges, always have an unforeseeable
influence on its course. The first ever feature film, that was made by
Skladanowsky, is called Die Rache der Frau Schulze 6 and is a sort of
street ballad whose images are accompanied by verses like these:

In the evening, when the clock strikes ten,

Mrs. Schultze wants to sleep in her den,
Her dear neighbour – is composing,
Tinkling the piano and tromboning.

It is telling that a woman circus rider plays the role of the avenger.
All films of that time are illustrations of balladeers’ songs or they
present as real sensationalist-type themes. The same forces that the
engineers obey in developing the apparatus also bring themes to the
films which live their life below official literature. They venture into
the world of fairground spectacles, of primitively made – and primi-
tively revelled in – adventure stories, of the ten penny dreadfuls

49
 Siegfried Kracauer

found in the half-public areas in stationers’ shops and in backyards.

But if this world is the first to be claimed for film, this means nothing
other than that film fits in there. And indeed, film later enjoys its
greatest triumphs as a creature of the street, as a conveyor of those
indestructible, great themes that are presented more clearly in the
show tent than they are in so-called literature and that give happi-
ness to those unsullied by education and to the wise. The Chaplin
routines that carry the indelible mark of film’s origins on their brow,
are also the highpoint of film.

Rache der Gefallenen. Sittengemälde in vier Akten7 a tired film car-

ries this title, with the young Hans Albers featuring as the demonic
seducer.8 His locks still wave in their full splendour, and his vanity
still has the innocence of the heroes in novels read by servant girls.
He now wants to be the folk figure that he perhaps really was in his
early days, but he does not carry it off any more. The kitsch that
he once played was of a popular nature that had meaning, while
the nature that he now mimes in the interest of his popularity, is
kitsch. A still photograph from the film is revealing. The (appar-
ently already fallen) heroine is standing with a pistol in her hand in
a richly appointed family drawing-room opposite an easel painting
of the seducer in a tailcoat, and she harbours feelings that the text
expresses as follows: “I once loved this man. Oh, how I hate him
now! I must kill him, if it only be in a painting.” Instead of us notic-
ing the agitation of the heroine that these words betray she, on the
contrary, gives the impression of someone who is completely unin-
volved. With the calm bearing of an elevated middle-class statue,
she fills the middle of the room, and the calm which prevents her
bosom from heaving fully corresponds to the indifference with
which she holds the revolver. The murder instrument might as well
be an empty match box that in the next moment is put down, so
slight are its relations to the fallen woman and to the tails. But why
these tragic words? The still on display shows that at the time it was

50
 On Yesterday’s Border

made, the space that has since been won by film had not yet been
opened up. The drawing-room is an adapted theatre set, the actors
are theatre actors who are not supposed to speak, the furniture
comes from the props room, and the camera is afraid to budge. As
long as this proto-stage lasts, the people and things belong neither
to the theatre, in which they can make themselves understood, nor
yet to the world that can be mirrored on the screen. They are ghosts
moving about in the mists of dawn, whose speech is not ours. Their
gestures seem to write off their words as lies, their motionlessness
is turmoil, and their pistols shoot into the void. When the camera
wakes from its paralysis, they will give way.

Many films of past periods are only funny now. This is not where
they want to be funny, but comes precisely at the culminating points
of their seriousness. In the middle of a cemetery set, for example,
which clearly forms the moving conclusion to a dramatic piece of
action, linger a well-dressed man – who would do honour to any
Courths-Mahler9 novel – and the kneeling Henny Porten.10 The com-
mentary to the text in images runs:

“The most beautiful spot that on earth I have

Is the grassy bank by my parents’ grave.”11

There is not the slightest doubt that the mourning figure and the
man standing somewhat to one side are badly shaken. Despite this,
the image provokes laughter, and there are other, less crass scenes
from outmoded society films that have also been consigned irretriev-
ably to the comic register. This comes from a particular change that
has happened with these images. Where they revealed to their first
viewers essentially the content that was intended by them, they
reveal to contemporary viewers the strange, just decayed milieu in
which this content announced itself so naïvely, as if it were really
rooted in that milieu. We see not only the man’s emotion but also his

51
 Siegfried Kracauer

antiquated jacket and we are obliged to notice that Henny Porten’s

mourning is taking place under the old-fashioned shape of her hat.
The emphasis of the images has shifted, and the fashionable, exter-
nal elements that had gone unnoticed originally have come to the
fore like a secret alphabet. Instead of being moved by the pathos that
exuded from the heroes in the period when they were contempo-
rary, what alone strikes us about them now is the derisory contrast
between their emotional claims and their obsolete appearance. Since
film presents life as it appears more fully than any other art form, per-
haps one of its tasks is to make us always aware of the questionable
intertwining of fleeting time with feelings and passions which claim
to last. The amusement aroused by film strips that have very recently
become outdated has a sombre foundation indeed, for the sight of
clothes and gestures with which we had very recently expressed
ourselves, reminds us of the decline of any present whatsoever. And
doubtless many sports events, tragedies etc. that we come across on
the screen today, will soon have as comic an impact as the pair at
the parents’ grave. Only a reality that has become fully historically
conscious could be free of this comic effect, a reality that no longer
stretches over into our own, and contents that are so very evident
and overpowering that they even conquer their transient appear-
ance. But where could they be found in the contemporary world?

The exhibition moves imperceptibly from the past to the pres-

ent. A few stages in the development can, however, be made out.
The letter of Max Mack to Albert Bassermann is exhibited in which
the latter, who had until then resisted being filmed, is successfully
implored to take a role in the film His Own Murderer.12 On show are
images of the first set built in a studio. There are samples of films
that introduced a new series or that at the technical level introduced
a new stimulus. But despite these small signals, one does not find
a threshold behind which would lie the past for once and for all,
rather than glide, as it does, without intermediate steps into the

52
 On Yesterday’s Border

present. The uncanny feeling that comes from not really knowing
when modern dress supersedes the old, is further heightened by
the awareness that through the technical progress the emptiness of
films themselves grows. At the end of the exhibition, a new sound
film camera has been assembled; its relation to Skladanowsky’s
ungainly bioscope being akin to that of an elegant modern car to an
early Ford. The films, however, that emerge from this sleek, wonder-
fully engineered apparatus, do not fulfil the expectations that could
be attached to this bringing to perfection of the original model. On
the contrary, the more the films become industrial products, the
more hollow they sound, and the increase in the technical know-
how invested in them seems to actually entail a lessening of their
substance. They turn correct intentions on their head, they increase
sensationalism and by so doing lower its level, they pass on rotten
ideologies to the public and they obstruct their contents with the
sets. It did not have to have been like this but this is how it has
come to be. Moving through the exhibitions is exactly like sliding
into an abyss. But one hope remains: the masterful apparatus that
produces these trivial products. It cannot have been created in vain
but must one day fulfil a function that really suits it.

It is worth adding that the enormous amount of material that will be

made accessible to the public, step by step, was provided by count-
less people involved in making films. Directors opened their private
archives, and extras supplied valuable old photos. The company
organising the exhibition is contributing set percentages of the exhi-
bition’s gross revenues to the social insurance funds of some film
associations. The company also wants to found subsidiary exhibi-
tions in other big cities of the country. Lectures of the most varied
kinds and special events from specialised areas are planned in the
main space itself.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 12th July 1932

53
 Photographed Berlin

In the glass-covered atrium of the Arts and Crafts Museum “1,000

Views of Berlin” is on show: photographs by A. Vennemann.1 They
.

have been stuck on simple white cardboard and illustrate all pos-
sible details of Berlin life that are oriented towards public space.
The views come across as a bit stiff, as if everything were standing
still, but this is to be explained, no doubt, by the change in our way
of seeing that cinema has brought about. Film has made us used to
no longer considering a thing from a fixed viewpoint but, rather, to
glide around it, choosing our perspectives as we want. What film is
able to do – to record things in motion – is denied to photography.
Hence, where photography wants to make a claim for its indepen-
dence, it appears to be a form that is beginning to become histori-
cal. It is detaching itself slowly from the present and has already
acquired an old-fashioned nature. It is similar to the railway in this;
the railway is to the airplane what photography is to the film reel.
The railway and the photograph are contemporaneous with each
other, are similar for having both perfected their forms, and they
have long since become forerunners in the creation of new forms.
We have separated ourselves nowadays from the rails in the same
way that we have from the once mandatory stillness of the camera.
So if photography also belongs utterly to the present, already those
shadows fall on it that surround all completed achievements.

55
 Siegfried Kracauer

Subjects known from everyday life are virtually the only ones that
are reproduced here. Old Berlin houses, castles and palaces, streets
and more streets, children playing, restaurants, people from all sorts
of professions, passers-by, people on weekend outings, public parks
and pretty spots in the surroundings, railway stations, industrial
plants and modern office buildings – the inventory could scarcely
be more complete. These many pictures speak above all to our
memory. They conjure up impressions we have had, to which we
have paid no heed. They summon up old familiar things that have
been with us all this time. The illuminated advertisements are our
evening company, and the young, playing street-boy has likewise
appeared to us a few times, scratching out the gaps between the
cobblestones. All the photographs recall from memory only those
optical elements that live within our existence. But nothing is more
apt than that photographs would make present precisely the very
world that we possess. This world, not the new, yet to be conquered,
world, is the rightful subject of photography. It is a matter of fact
that a photographic image cannot give a complete idea of anything
whatsoever if the person viewing the image has not already seen
the thing. What was originally photographed can never be deduced
from the photograph, and the countless photographic reproductions
of works of art do not disseminate knowledge of the works as sup-
posed but only go to prove that art reproduced has lost its marking
impact. A weak picture postcard that one brings back from a journey
better fulfils the function of a photograph than does an elaborate,
showy photograph of unvisited destinations. It would be useful to
study more closely at some point to what extent the gluts of shots
in the glossy magazines stifle the public’s receptive capacity for the
visible world. Photography does not convey the meanings that must
be experienced for a thing to become ours – it only gives a mirror
reflection of the thing torn out of all relations to experience. It is
not the external appearance of the thing but rather an abstraction
without coherence that passes from the thing into the photographic
image taken of it. So instead of presenting a subject, photography
relies on the concept we already have of the thing, so as to be able to

56
 Photographed Berlin

present it. Photography’s main field is what is known and familiar,

but goes unnoticed. Photography indeed serves in the exhibition as
a guide through memory. As it helps us to an astonishing plenitude
of re-encounters, it finally shares with us the power to access things
and figures with which we have unconsciously lived.

Some images from the Tiergarten are particularly successful. They

bring out the pond-like, forgotten element of the Tiergarten by
stretching to no further than the base of the shrubs and by suppress-
ing the sky completely. Thus free nature is held at bay, outside, and
the interior character of the artificial park is accentuated. Detached
from the present, the garden seems to be already enmeshed in the
past. The park could be a symbol of photography itself, and perhaps
the latter follows the park so effortlessly because photography also
whiles away its time on yesterday’s threshold.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 15th December 1932

57
 A Note on Portrait Photography

An exhibition in Berlin of good photo-portraits offers the opportu-

nity for a fundamental reflection on the outlook for photographic
portraiture.1 Why are very many portraits, particularly so-called
artistic ones, so odd? I am thinking of the portraits that one often
sees hanging behind glass, framed, at the entrances to photography
studios. Some famous man’s head emerges out of a mystical dark-
ness, or a popular actress is made to gesticulate demonically. If one
of the normal viewpoints is not revealing enough, according to the
conceptions of the concerned parties, the result is that some unusual
things are made eternal. The face appears in bold perspectives that
are supposed to express something significant, parts of the chin or of
the brow are given a prominence that they do not, we can assume,
possess in everyday life, and reflections from spectacles become
the main optical element. What we are dealing with in all these
cases is always the same shortcoming. It is that this photography,
instead of visualising the physiognomy that is to be portrayed, uses
the physiognomy as a means towards ends that lie beyond the sub-
ject. What photographic possibilities does the head contain? This is
the question that is asked and answered in such portraits. In other
words, they strive from the beginning not so much to reproduce
their subject as to demonstrate all the effects that can be teased out
of it. The decisive effects are, of course, those corresponding to craft
touches: light and shadow effects of a particular kind. Woe betides
the sitter who is able to stimulate the production of such effects.

59
 Siegfried Kracauer

With no attention paid to what is perhaps the person’s conveyed

substance, the person gets over-illuminated or obscured in shadow,
and all that remains is a Composition in Black and White. The pho-
tography fairly often does not limit itself to ornamental touches but
strives – this is even worse – to realize an artistic “conception”. The
ambition of some portrait photographers is, in fact, to go beyond
technical issues, to also deliver works of art and, to an extent, to
give the physiognomy soul. Instead, then, of developing a concep-
tion from their subject that is factually subordinate to that subject,
these photographers inflict a conception on it as if adding sauce to it.
Whether it goes with the head or not, the head must be doused with
it. This would be a good point for a sociological digression on the
mentality invested in countless portrait-photographs. This mentality
displays certain typical features that do not so much belong to those
having their portraits taken as to the photographer portraitists. And
indeed photo-portraiture’s unspoken intermediate position between
reproductive technology and productive art makes it fertile territory
for the adoption of fashionable qualities. He who does not belong to
the creative avant-garde must use the new things that are in the air,
assuming, that is, that he wants to make art, whatever it might take.
So certain psychological stances assert themselves, certain poses
recur in portraits of completely different subjects. They are pressed
on the customer who certainly has reason often to be pleased by
such embellishments.
The portraits featuring in the exhibition mentioned above are dif-
ferent to the ones just described, by having no “conception”. What
an advantage! Whereas according to the usual pseudo-artistic pro-
cedure, physiognomy becomes a play of light or disappears entirely
beneath opinions or representations that are entirely independent of
it, here the physiognomy is the true end in itself. The photographer
has clearly taken pains to study the particularities of the physiog-
nomy and then to give it pictorial validation. He makes himself
subordinate to the subject that he tries to convey in the most char-
acteristic way possible. Clear proof of this is the omission of any
decorative element which otherwise plays, as a rule, a central role.

60
 A Note on Portrait Photography

Content and gesture cohere with each other as if naturally in these

pictures. Instead of the face being forced into a strange perspective,
the perspective emerges in each case from the nature of the face.
Instead of a subjective wish for a certain style making itself sole mas-
ter, it is the essence of the person being portrayed that determines
the style. The profiles do not stem from a whim and the frontal
views are requirements of the material. In keeping with this, the
use of lighting and shadow do not follow self-centred special aims
but fulfil the function of commenting on the text of the face. That
is at least how it is done in principle. Photographs of this kind are
without question the only ones that should be called portraits. Given
that they reach into the person being portrayed, they hit a boundary,
admittedly, which only the painter is able to overcome. The painter
can, thanks to his active intervention, really objectify the prototype
that he has before his eyes; the camera, in contrast, being only a
passive, recording instrument, would have to lose itself in the end in
the prototype. But as this theoretical consequence is ruled out, good
portrait photography, which takes its subject matter seriously, itself
comes dangerously close to painting, to which the bad photography
wants to align itself too rapidly. Integral to the photographer’s tact is
the reduction to the minimum of any unavoidable stylisations with
painting-like effects.

Frankfurter Zeitung, 1st February 1933

61
 The Photographic Approach

Instantaneous photography grew out of a desire older than ­pho­-

tography itself – the wish to picture things in motion. This was a
­challenge to photographers and inventors. As early as the late 1850’s,
stereoscopic photographs appeared which evoked the illusion of cap-
turing crowds and action. With these stereographs, instantaneous
photography virtually entered the scene.
In nineteenth-century France, the arrival of photography coincided
with the rise of positivist philosophy and the concurrent emphasis
on science. Hence the marked concern, in the childhood days of
photography, with truth to reality in a scientific sense – a concern
which not only benefited the realistic trend in art and literature but
facilitated the acceptance of the camera as both a recording and
exploring instrument.
As a recording device, the camera was bound to fascinate minds
in quest of scientific objectivity. Many held that photographs faith-
fully copy nature; and, eager for similar achievements, realistic and
impressionist painters assumed the guise of self-effacing copyists.
But it need scarcely be stressed that in actuality photographs do not
copy nature but metamorphose it, by transferring three-dimensional
objects to the plane and arbitrarily severing their ties with their
surroundings – not to mention the fact that they usually substitute
black, gray and white for the given color schemes.
In its exploration of the visible world, the camera produces images
that differ from painting in two respects. Photographic records evoke

63
 Siegfried Kracauer

not only esthetic contemplation but also an observant attitude, chal-

lenging us to discern minutiae that we tend to overlook in everyday
life.
In addition, photographs permit the spectator to apprehend visual
shapes in a fraction of the time he would require for a similarly
acute apprehension of the actual objects. There are three reasons
for this: photographs, by isolating what they present, facilitate visual
perception; they transform depth to one plane; and they usually also
reduce the angle of vision, thus enabling the eye to comprehend with
relative ease whatever is represented.
To the nineteenth century, the unsuspected revelations of pho-
tographs were something to marvel at.* Talbot, one of the found-
ing fathers of photography, remarked as early as 1844 that, more
often than not, “the operator himself discovers on examination, per-
haps long afterwards, that he had depicted many things he had no
notion of at the time”.1 With the rise of instantaneous photography
it became obvious that the camera is not only extremely inquisitive,
but actually transcends human vision. Snapshots (in the technical
sense of the word, rather than in the popular meaning of ama-
teur photography) may isolate transitory gestures and configura-
tions which our eye cannot possibly register. In the preface to his
book, Instantaneous Photography (1895),2 the English photochemist
Abney dwelt on the “grotesqueness” of the numerous snapshots
which make you believe “that figures are posed in attitudes in which
they are never seen”.3
But there is a difference between acknowledging the characteris-
tics of a medium and actually taking advantage of them. Nineteenth-
century photographers tended to submit to the visual habits and
esthetic preferences of society at large. They shrank from exploring
the world photographically lest the grotesqueness of their images

* The historical references throughout have largely been drawn from Beaumont
Newhall’s article, “Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization” (Jour-
nal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, London, 1944, vol. VII, p. 40–45) and
his History of Photography (New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1949).

64
 The Photographic Approach

Antony Samuel Adam-Salomon, Self-Portrait, c. 1860.

might be incompatible with the prevailing artistic traditions. And

were they not artists, after all? Instead of defying pre-photographic
fashions of seeing, therefore, these artist-photographers deliberately
fell back into accepted art styles and time-honored stereotypes. Con-
spicuous was the case of Adam-Salomon: a sculptor become photog-
rapher, he excelled in portraits which, because of their “Rembrandt
lighting”4 and velvet drapery, persuaded the poet Lamartine to recant
his initial opinion that photographs were nothing but a “plagiarism
of nature.”5 Lamartine now felt sure that they were art. It was the
eternal conspiracy of conventional beauty against unwonted truth.
That the conventional sold better was all the more in its favor.
The desire for genuinely photographic ventures could not be stilled,
however, by any amount of conservatism. Once instantaneous pho-
tography was firmly established, an increasing number of devotees
of art-photography renounced their prejudices and scruples. This is

65
 Siegfried Kracauer

illustrated by the dramatic conversion of P. H. Emerson, who, hav-

ing for a long time emulated painting, in 1891 openly condemned
as a fallacy his confusion of photography with art in the traditional
sense. In spite of all temptations to the contrary, the urge to capital-
ize on the camera’s ability to record and explore was irrepressible.
What did the photographic approach, sensitive to the potentiali-
ties and limitations of the medium, imply for the photographer, his
products and the effects of the latter upon the spectator? Proust
has drawn an image of the photographer which still vibrates with
the nineteenth-century controversy about photography versus art.
It is in that passage of The Guermantes’ Way where the narrator
enters the drawing room of his grandmother without having been
announced, and finds her seated there reading:

I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was
not aware of my presence… Of myself … there was present only the
witness, the observer with a hat and traveling coat, the stranger who
does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take
a photograph of places which one will never see again. The process that
mechanically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grand-
mother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear
to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant
love for them, which before allowing the images that their faces present
to reach us catches them in its vortex, flings them back upon the idea that
we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it.
How, since into the forehead, the cheeks of my grandmother I had been
accustomed to read all the most delicate, the most permanent qualities
of her mind; how, since every casual glance is an act of necromancy,
each face that we love a mirror of the past, how could I have failed to
overlook what in her had become dulled and changed, seeing that in the
most trivial spectacles of our daily life our eye, charged with thought,
neglects, as would a classical tragedy, every image that does not assist
the action of the play and retains only those that may help to make its
purpose intelligible. But if, in place of our eye, it should he a purely
material object, a photographic plate, that has watched the action, then

66
 The Photographic Approach

what we shall see, in the courtyard of the Institute, for example, will be,
instead of the dignified emergence of an Academician who is going to
hail a cab, his staggering gait, his precautions to avoid tumbling upon
his back, the parabola of his fall, as though he were drunk, or the ground
frozen over… . And, as a sick man who for long has not looked at his
own reflection … recoils on catching sight in the glass, in the midst of
an arid waste of cheek, of the sloping red structure of a nose as huge as
one of the pyramids … I, for whom my grandmother was still myself, I
who had never seen her save in my own soul, always at the same place
in the past, through the transparent sheets of contiguous, overlapping
memories, suddenly in our drawing room which formed part of a new
world, that of time, saw, sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced,
heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the lines of a book
with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman whom I did
not know.*

Proust starts from the premise that love blinds us to the changes in
appearance which the beloved undergoes in the course of time. It is
logical, therefore, that he should emphasize emotional detachment
as the photographer’s foremost virtue. He drives home this point
by identifying the photographer with the witness, the observer, the
stranger – three types characterized by their common unfamiliar-
ity with the places at which they happen to be. They may perceive
anything, because nothing they see is pregnant with memories that
would captivate them and thus limit their vision. The ideal photog-
rapher, then, is the opposite of the unseeing lover; his eye, instead
of being “charged with thought”, resembles the indiscriminating
mirror or camera lens.
The one-sidedness of Proust’s point of view is evident. But the
whole context indicates that he was primarily concerned with depict-
ing a state of mind in which we are so completely overwhelmed by
involuntary memories that we can no longer register our present

* Marcel Proust, The Guermantes’ Way, Part I, New York. Modern Library, 1925,
p. 186–188.

67
 Siegfried Kracauer

surroundings to the full. And his desire to contrast, for the purpose
of increased clarity, this particular state of mind with the photo-
graphic attitude, may have induced him to adopt the credo of the
naive realists – that what the photographer does is to hold a mirror
up to nature.
Actually there is no mirror at all. Any photograph is the out-
come of selective activities which go far beyond those involved in
the unconscious structuring of the visual raw material. The pho-
tographer selects deliberately both his subject and the manner of
presenting it. He may prefer inanimate objects to portraits, out-
door scenes to interiors; and he is relatively free to vary and com-
bine the different factors upon which the final appearance of his
product depends. Lighting, camera angle, lens, filter, emulsion and
frame – all these are determined by his estimates, his esthetic judg-
ment. Discussing the pictures Charles Marville took of doomed old
Paris streets and houses under Napoleon III, Beaumont Newhall
traces their “melancholy beauty” to Marville’s personality, which
no doubt was responsible for the knowing choice of stance, time
and detail. “Documentary photography is a personal matter”,6 he
concludes. Contrary to Proust’s assertion, the photographer’s eye is
also “charged with thought”.
And yet Proust is basically right in relating the photographic
approach to the psychological state of alienation. For even though
the photographer rarely shows the emotional detachment Proust
ascribes to him, neither does he externalize his personality, but
draws on it mainly for the purpose of making his account of the vis-
ible world all the more inclusive. His selectivity is empathic rather
than spontaneous; he resembles not so much the expressive artist
who wants to project his visions, as the imaginative reader who tries
to discover the hidden significance of a given text.
There are, however, cases which at first glance do not fit into
this scheme. During the last decades, many a noted photogra-
pher specialized in subjects that reflected the pictorial archetypes
he found within himself. For instance, the late Moholy-Nagy and
Edward Weston concentrated on abstract patterns, featuring form

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 The Photographic Approach

rather than incident. The photographers in this vein seem to have

overwhelmed their material instead of yielding to the impact of
existence. Accordingly, their prints are often reminiscent of con-
temporary paintings or drawings. In this respect they somehow
resemble those nineteenth-century artist-photographers who fell
into line with the Pre-Raphaelites and other schools of art of their
day. And like their predecessors, these modern photographers may
be not only influenced by current art but so deeply imbued with its
underlying concepts that they cannot help reading them into every
context. Or do they rather discover them in the text? The Zeitgeist
conditions perception, making the different media of communica-
tion approach each other.
Many photographs of this sort are ambiguous. They aim, on the
one hand, at effects which might as well be obtained by the painter’s
brush – in fact, some of them look exactly like reproductions of
works of art; on the other hand, they seem primarily concerned with
certain aspects of unadulterated nature. Fascinating border cases,
these photographs result from two conflicting tendencies – the
desire to project inner images and the desire to record outer shapes.
Obviously they are genuine photographs to the extent to which they
follow the latter inclination. Their specifically photographic value
lies in their realistic quality. It is noteworthy that Edward Weston,
who wavered between those two tendencies, increasingly rejected
the idea of photography as a means of self-projection. “The camera
must be used for recording life”, he remarked in his Daybook, “for
rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself …
I shall let no chance pass to record interesting abstractions, but I feel
definite in my belief that the approach to photography is through
realism”.7 His statement would seem all the more conclusive since
he himself had emphasized abstraction.
The photographic approach – that is, the effort to utilize the inher-
ent abilities of the camera – is responsible for the particular nature
of photographs. In the days of Zola and the Impressionists, the prop-
erties of photographs were commonly held to be the hallmarks of
art in general; but no sooner did painting and literature break away

69
 Siegfried Kracauer

Edward Weston, Rock Erosion, 1935.

from realism than these properties assumed an exclusive character.

Since they depend upon techniques peculiar to the medium, they
have remained stable throughout its evolution. These properties
may be defined as follows:
First, photography has an outspoken affinity for unstaged real-
ity. Pictures which impress us as intrinsically photographic seem
intended to capture nature in the raw, nature unmanipulated and
as it exists independently of us. Sir John Robison, a contemporary
of Daguerre, praised the first photographs for rendering “a withered
leaf lying on a projecting cornice, or an accumulation of dust in a
hollow moulding … when they exist in the original.”8 And Talbot,
in an attempt to condition public taste to the new photographic
themes, invoked the precedent of many a painting immortalizing
such ephemeral subjects as a “casual glance of sunshine, … a time-
withered oak, or a moss-covered stone”.9 It is true that in the field of
portraiture. photographers frequently interfere with the given condi-
tions to bring out what they consider the typical feature of a human

70
 The Photographic Approach

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, From Berlin Wireless

Tower, 1928.

face. But the boundaries between staged and unstaged reality are
fluid in this field; and a portraitist who provides an adequate set-
ting or asks his model to lower the head a bit, may well be helping
nature to manifest itself forcibly. What counts is his desire to do
precisely this – to catch nature in the act of living without imping-
ing on its integrity. If the “expressive artist” in him gets the better
of the “imaginative reader”, he will inevitably transgress the limit
that separates a photograph from a painting.
Second, through this concern with unstaged reality, ­photography –
especially instantaneous photography – tends to stress the fortu-
itous. Random events are the very meat of snapshots; hence the
attractiveness of street crowds. By 1859, New York stereographs
took a fancy to the kaleidoscopic mingling of vehicles and pedes-
trians, and somewhat later Victorian snapshots reveled in the same
inchoate patterns. Dreams nurtured by the big cities thus material-

71
 Siegfried Kracauer

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Children Playing in the Ruins, Spain, 1933.

ized as pictorial records of chance meetings, strange overlappings

and fabulous coincidences. Even the most typical instantaneous
portrait retains an accidental character. It is plucked in passing and
still quivers with crude existence.
Third, photographs tend to suggest infinity. This follows from their
emphasis on fortuitous combinations which represent fragments
rather than wholes. A photograph, whether portrait or action pic-
ture, is true to character only if it precludes the notion of complete-
ness. Its frame marks a provisional limit; its content refers to other
contents outside that frame, and its structure denotes something that
cannot be encompassed – physical existence. Nineteenth-century
writers called this something nature, or life; and they were convinced
that photography would have to impress upon us its endlessness.
Leaves, which they considered the favorite motive of the camera,
are not only not susceptible to being staged, but they also occur in
infinite quantities. There is an analogy between the photographic

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 The Photographic Approach

A. J. Russell, Granite Canyon in Foreground, 1867.

approach and scientific investigation in this respect: both probe into

an i­nexhaustible universe, whose whole forever eludes them.
Finally, photographs tend to be indeterminate in a sense of which
Proust was keenly aware. In the passage quoted above, he contends
that the photograph of an Academician about to hail a cab but ham-
pered in his movements, staggering in his gait, will not convey the
idea of his dignity so much as it will highlight his awkward efforts
to avoid slipping. Obviously Proust has snapshots in mind. The
snapshot of the Academician does not necessarily imply that its
original must be thought of as being undignified; it simply fails to
tell us anything specific about his general behavior or his typical atti-
tudes. It so radically isolates his momentary pose that the function of
this within the total structure of his personality remains anybody’s
guess. The pose relates to a context which itself is not given. The
photograph thus differs from the work of art in transmitting material

73
 Siegfried Kracauer

without defining it. No doubt Proust exaggerates the indeterminacy

of photographs just as grossly as he does their depersonalizing qual-
ity. In effect, the photographer endows his pictures with structure
and meaning to the extent to which he makes significant choices. His
pictures record nature and at the same time reflect his attempts to
decipher it. Yet, as in depicting the photographer’s alienation, Proust
is again essentially right, for however selective true photographs are,
they cannot deny the tendency towards the unorganized and diffuse
which marks them as records. If this tendency were defeated by the
artist-photographer’s nostalgia for meaningful design, they would
cease to be photographs.
Since the days of Daguerre, people have felt that photographs are
products of an approach which should not be confused with that of
the artist but should be founded upon the camera’s unique ability
to record nature. This explains the most common reaction to photo-
graphs: they are valued as documents of unquestionable authentic-
ity. It was their documentary quality which struck the nineteenth-
century imagination. Baudelaire, who scorned both art’s decline into
photography and photography’s pretense to art, at least admitted
that photographs had the merit of rendering, and thus preserving, all
those transient things which were entitled to a place in the “archives
of our memory”.10 Their early popularity as souvenirs cannot be
overestimated. There is practically no family which does not boast
an album crowded with generations of dear ones before varying
backgrounds. With the passing of time, these souvenirs undergo a
significant change in meaning. As the recollections they embody fade
away, they assume increasingly documentary functions; their value
as photographic records definitely overshadows their original appeal
as memory aids. Leafing through the family album, the grandmother
will re-experience her honeymoon, while the children will curiously
study bizarre gondolas, obsolete fashions and old young faces they
never saw.
And most certainly they will rejoice in discoveries, pointing to odd
bagatelles which the grandmother failed to notice in her day. This
too is a typical reaction to photographs. People instinctively look

74
 The Photographic Approach

Eliot F. Porter, Road Runner, 1941.

at them in the hope of detecting something new or unexpected – a

confidence which pays tribute to the camera’s exploring faculty. The
American writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes was among
the first to capitalize on this faculty in the interests of science. In
the early 1880s he found that the movements of people walking, as
disclosed by instantaneous photography, differed greatly from what
artists had imagined them to be like, and on the grounds of his obser-
vations criticized an artificial leg then popular with amputated Civil
War soldiers. Other scientists followed suit, using the camera as a
means of detection. In selecting illustrations for The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals,11 Darwin preferred photographs
to works of art, and snapshots to time exposures. Photography was
thus recognized as a tool of science.

75
 Siegfried Kracauer

And, of course, it was always recognized as a source of beauty.

Yet beauty may be experienced in different ways. Under the impact
of deep-rooted esthetic conventions many people, who undoubtedly
acknowledged the documentary quality of photographs, nevertheless
expected them to afford the kind of satisfaction ordinarily derived
from paintings or poems – a blending of photography with the estab-
lished arts. Because of the affinity between photography and the other
arts, there is in fact an unending procession of artist-photographers.
But this confusion was never shared by the more sensitive – those
really susceptible to the photographic approach. All of these rejected
the esthetic ideal as the main issue of photography. In their opinion,
the medium does not primarily aspire to artistic effects; rather, it
challenges us to extend our vision, and this precisely is its beauty.
According to Talbot, one of the charms of photographs consists in
the discoveries to which they invariably lend themselves. “In a per-
fect photograph”, said Holmes, “there will be many beauties lurking,
unobserved, as there are flowers that blush unseen in forests and
meadows”.12 Like Talbot, he considered the esthetic value of photo-
graphs a function of their explorative powers; photographs, his state-
ment implies, are beautiful to the extent to which they reveal things
that we normally overlook. Similarly, Louis Delluc, one of the greatest
figures of the French cinema after World War I, took delight – esthetic
delight – in the surprising revelations of Kodak pictures.
This is what enchants me: you will admit that it is unusual sud-
denly to notice, on a film or a plate, that some passerby, picked up
inadvertently by the camera lens, has a singular expression; that
Mme. X … preserves the unconscious secret of classic postures in
scattered fragments; and that the trees, the water, the fabrics, the
beasts achieve the familiar rhythm which we know is peculiar to
them, only by means of decomposed movements whose disclosure
proves upsetting to us.*

* Louis Delluc, Photogénie, Paris, M. De Brunoff, 1920, p. 5. [Reprint in ­Simpson,

P., Utterson, A. & Shepherdson, K. J. (eds.) Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media
and Cultural Studies (London, Routledge, 2004) pp. 49–51.]

76
 The Photographic Approach

Eugene Atget, Tree Roots, c. 1915.

What enchanted Delluc in a photograph was the presence of the

unforeseeable – that which is in flagrant contradiction to artistic
premeditation.
These statements indicate the close relationship that exists between
our esthetic experience of photographs and our interest in them as
observers, if not scientists. Photographs evoke a response in which
our sense of beauty and our desire for knowledge interpenetrate;
and often they seem esthetically attractive because they satisfy that
desire.13

Magazine of Art, March 1951

77
 Maria Zinfert

Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

There is an envelope in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach

bearing the inscription “Curriculum Vitae / in pictures (Friedel)”.
It is part of the Siegfried Kracauer estate. The writing is in the hand
of his wife Elisabeth,1 known as ‘Lili’; among those close to him,
Kracauer was called “Friedel”.2 The envelope does not, however,
offer a faithful biography in images of the latter – for it is empty.
The inscription invites one certainly to try a reconstruction which
can, however, hardly be undertaken seriously. The only reference to
a “curriculum vitae in pictures” is this empty envelope. Whether it
ever contained photographs is difficult to establish,3 and it is there-
fore not excluded that it is only evidence of a project that was not
carried out or that was begun but remained unfinished. Whatever it
be, one thing is certain: the expression ‘curriculum vitae in pictures’
is a reference to a “Bildertext”, a “text in images”.4
The archive photos chosen here, and presented in ­chronological
order, can be read as a fragmentary and provisional curriculum
vitae.5 But this cannot be made up only of images. The textual com-
mentaries provide the biographical information that corresponds to
the images, although the subject of the commentaries is the images
per se. What these reveal about themselves is what reproductions
of photographic print-runs reveal. The iconographical material pre-
sented here offers a glimpse of the photographic contents of the
Kracauer estate. Being archival material, these photos are, by virtue
of their status and function, something other than what they were

79
 Maria Zinfert

Ill. 1. Frankfurt am Main, 1897, Atelier Collischonn; paper print on cardboard,

6.5 x 10.5 cm.

for Kracauer himself. They are no longer situated on yesterday’s bor-

der. They have become historical. Archival research interrogates the
photographs in as much as they are seen as concrete traces in their
various dimensions. What follows can only give a glimpse of these.

Frankfurt am Main 1889–1918

Only about ten photos from Kracauer’s childhood and youth survive
in the archive. They were taken in Frankfurt studios, and mounted
on cardboard. Only one of them shows Kracauer with someone
else: he has been photographed in Herman Collischonn’s studio
against a bright background wearing a dark suit and a sailor’s
collar, beside his mother Rosette Kracauer6 (Ill. 1). There are no
amateur snapshots from this period of youth. The studio photos
hardly provide any personal information. To someone looking at
them today, the external appearance of the people photographed
dissolves into “old-fashioned details of fashion”.7 The background is

80
 Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Ill. 2. Frankfurt am Main, 1904,

Atelier Erna; paper print on cardboard,
11.5 x 5.5 cm.

pure ­theatre ­backdrop. The objects placed in the image are common-
place ­accessories. The pedestal table on which the young Kracauer
seems to lean in the Atelier Erna studio (Ill. 2), is similar to those
countless, identical tables used over the course of the decades in
all the portrait studios. This pedestal table, an inheritance from the
first era of photography when significant exposure times justified
its presence, still had its place at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury – but only as a decorative element in a conventional composi-
tion. Photographs of this period aimed for the most part to produce

81
 Maria Zinfert

Ill. 3. Italy [?], ca. 1912, unknown

photographer; paper print of the reproduction
of an identity photo, 26 x 20 cm.

worthy souvenirs of key ­biographical events. The portrait of the

adolescent was perhaps taken on the occasion of Kracauer’s enter-
ing the Klinger Oberrealschule in 1904, just as the photo where he
is with his mother could have marked the latter’s thirtieth birthday
in the spring of 1897.

The studio photo must have been taken during Kracauer’s student
period, between 1907 and 1912;8 the reproduction here does not
represent an original print but a secondary one, made much later in
New York (Ill. 3). The cachets that can be seen in the corners indi-
cate that the positive print used for the enlargement had served as
an identity photo. It is to be found on a pass for museums, galleries,
archaeological sites and national monuments that had been issued
to him on a journey to Italy in 1912. Some of the twelve large-format
reproductions of the New York laboratory Modernage deposited in

82
 Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Ill. 4. Mainz, 1917, unknown photographer; paper print on cardboard,

8.7 x 13.6 cm.

the archive carry on their back an indication of quality added by

Lili Kracauer. She selected two of the prints and explained that they
were only to be used if the better prints were exhausted. Their use
might have been connected with the project of a “curriculum vitae
in pictures”. But this is, for the moment, only a hypothesis.
The photograph in which Kracauer can be recognised in the
middle of the back row dates from autumn 1917 (Ill. 4).9 But is it
him? Is it not rather “this imagined young man, behind whom he
concealed himself”?10 This is Ginster, the eponymous hero of his
autobiographical novel, who suddenly emerges like in an optical
trick. Look at the photograph differently, and it is Kracauer who
appears, “a skinny, intimidated young man who finds the military
life a strain”,11 in a bold mix of reality and fiction. The group photo,
carefully composed, places the lieutenant or the sub-lieutenant12
at the centre of the image, holding a cigar in his right hand; the
soldiers around him are manipulating various objects; Kracauer is
holding a cigarette in one hand, another soldier has a book, the one
at the end on the left has a broomstick, while the one on the right
holds a long object that it is difficult to identify, and the others are

83
 Maria Zinfert

Ill. 5. Frankfurt am Main [?], 1920s, unknown photographer; original paper print,
8.5 x 12.5 cm.

seemingly about to slice bread or polish boots. Who, seeing this,

would think of “trench war in its final, most awful phase”, of “the
monotony of this hell, [of the] permanent vicinity of death”?13 If the
image is related to the reality of the Great War, it is to the extent
of serving a strategy of distortion and dissimulation described by
Kracauer in Ginster.

Frankfurt am Main 1918–1930 and Berlin 1930–1933

The photographs of Kracauer taken in the 1920s that are in the

archive have, it is clear, not entirely broken with the photographic
studios. But those reproduced here dating from this period could
have been taken by friends or by acquaintances.
The photographic portrait made in the street isolates Kracauer
from the outdoor scene that serves as setting: residential buildings

84
 Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Ill. 6. Dolomites (Italy), 1924, unknown photographer; original paper print

with pencil marks, 9 x 13.5 cm.

can be seen in the blurred background, a tramway, passers-by, it

is a sunny day (Ill. 5). But the scene thus composed is wickedly
eclipsed by the brilliant white pin-on collar that Kracauer wears.
One could write its biography by taking inspiration from his article
in the Frankfurter Zeitung on the monocle which “possessed a man
that stuck to it” which even “when the monocle sparkled in the sun,
remained immobile on him”.14
The view showing Kracauer in a sports jacket, leg warmers and
walking shoes dates from the summer of 1924, and was taken
during a trip to the Dolomites with his friend Theodor Wiesengrund
(Adorno) (Ill. 6). Three people are to be seen: Kracauer on the
left, Wiesengrund on the right15 and between them a woman. On
the print, two vertical lines detach the part in the middle thereby
separating Kracauer from the two people beside him. These marks
were made for the purposes of an enlargement of the marked-out
section, which is also present in the archive, showing Kracauer on

85
 Maria Zinfert

Ill. 7. Frankfurt am Main, second half of the 1920s, unknown photographer;

paper print from the archive (DLA) of a broken plate, 17 x 12 cm.

86
 Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

his own, relocated to the right edge, with a flat-gabled building

behind him and mountains looming out of the horizon.
A well-known photograph shows Kracauer in a room that it is
difficult to identify as a private or institutional space, such as the edi-
torial offices of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Everything that surrounds
Kracauer in this print, made in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv from
a broken photographic plate, appears to be there by chance (Ill. 7).
The sides of a tall cupboard projecting its shadow on the wall above
which there is a fanlight, Kracauer in front, sitting on a table-top,
with an oddly folded sheet of white paper at his side. The original
print in the archive, made from the negative glass plate that was still
intact, only shows the central section, a head-and-shoulders portrait
of Kracauer – all the details on the margins have been ­eliminated
that could have harmed the representation being aimed for: an
image suitable for publication.16 This effacing of the situation in
which the shot was taken has the effect of making the photographic
medium invisible. As for the print made from the cracked plate, not
only does it restore the improvised setting in which the shot was
taken, it allows one to also see the damaged plate of glass from
which the print was made, thus making “the viewer’s glance switch
endlessly between the representation and the network of cracks
interrupting it”.17

87
 Maria Zinfert

Ill. 8. Paris [?], 1930, photog. Elisabeth Kracauer;

original paper print, 14 x 9 cm.

France 1933–1938

The portrait, suggesting a shot taken in a studio, was taken in Paris

by his wife Lili Kracauer in 1937 (Ill. 8).18 It is the fourth of five
similar portraits that are to be seen on the extant original photo-
graphic film and corresponding contact prints. The objects that are
reflected in the table-top are not there by chance. The book, the
pipe, the ashtray, the box of matches, have been intentionally placed
and play their role as the accessories in a succinct setting, showing
Kracauer the author.

88
 Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Ill. 9. France, ca. 1934, unknown photographer; original paper print, 5 x 8 cm.

Photos in which Lili and Siegfried Kracauer figure together are

rare. Going back to their first years together, there are only a few
snapshots that can be dated to 1934/35 and were taken on the
occasion of a picnic with friends. In the one reproduced here, Lili
Kracauer is in profile, sitting next to her husband (Ill. 9). They had
met in Frankfurt am Main before the end of 1925 when she was a
librarian at the Institut für Sozialforschung. After their marriage in
March 1930, she left her job and became Kracauer’s collaborator.19
Immediately after the burning of the Reichstag, in February 1933,
the two of them fled Berlin where they had lived since 1930 and
came to Paris.

89
 Maria Zinfert

Ill. 10. Combloux (Haute-Savoie), 1934, photog. Elisabeth Kracauer;

original paper print, 9 x 14 cm.

From the end of July to the beginning of September 1934, they stayed
at Combloux in the Haute Savoie. There are a few photographs dat-
ing from this period, that were taken on the occasion of walks in the
region. One of them shows Kracauer crossing a meadow, his coat
on his right arm, a book in his left hand. In another shot shortly
before, the same book serves him as a support. In it, Kracauer is in
the process of writing, eyes lowered, sitting on a rock illuminated
by the sun (Ill. 10). Under the branches of a tree framing, on the top
left, there opens a view of the valley.

90
 Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Ill. 11. Combloux (Haute-Savoie), 1934, photog. Siegfried Kracauer;

paper print from the archive (DLA), 12 x 17 cm.

An almost identical photo shows Lili at the same spot. Kracauer

took it (Ill. 11). If one compares the two images, one could say
that the one with Lili has, as it were, slipped from the frame. The
equilibrium of the composition where Kracauer appears concen-
trated on his task, has been lost in the slightly altered position of
the camera. The tree that works as a frame in the first image is in
the other one nothing but a disorder of branches, without a fixed
point; one’s gaze peters out in the distance on the mountains on the
right. The comparison is not really fair. Lili and Siegfried Kracauer
did not stop photographing each other over the course of time. The
archive also contains original prints of photos that Kracauer took
of his wife, but not of the one reproduced here. This copy is a print
made in the archive.

91
 Maria Zinfert

Ill. 12. Card issued as a journalist of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1937,
unknown photographer; original document, 10 x 13 cm.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung press card, issued in 1937 for access to
French cinemas, does not belong to the specifically photographic
part of the Kracauer estate (Ill. 12). It is unlikely that the identity
photo used for it is one of the portraits made by Lili Kracauer.

92
 Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Ill. 13. Frankfurt am Main, ca. 1938, unknown photographer; original paper print,
8.5 x 11.5 cm.

A photo by an unknown photographer, which is to be likewise found

in the archive, shows Rosette Kracauer and her sister Hedwig,20
at the end of the 1930s, in their apartment in Frankfurt am Main
(Ill. 13). Despite all his efforts, Kracauer had not succeeded in ensur-
ing the flight from Germany of his mother and his aunt. Both were
deported in 1942 to Theresienstadt and shortly after to Poland. They
did not survive.

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 Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Paris, Marseille, New York 1939–1945

There are no photographs of the period which goes from the end of
the 1930s to 1945. It is the period of the flight from Europe, held up
in fact by all sorts of obstacles,21 and of a difficult start in New York
after the arrival of Lili and Siegfried Kracauer in April 1941.

95
 Maria Zinfert

Ill. 14. Stamford (NY), 1950, photog.

Elisabeth Kracauer; original paper print,
12 x 8 cm.

New York 1945–1966

The last photographs of this provisional curriculum vitae were taken,

like most of the portraits conserved in the archive, on trips and out-
doors. The shot, taken in the summer of 1950 at Stamford (N.Y.),
shows Kracauer sitting at a small table on a wooden ­verandah
(Ill. 14). He is photographed from a slightly high angle, in such a way
that his silhouette is completely captured while his face can hardly be
seen. He seems absorbed in his work, pencil in hand, and is looking
at a pile of papers placed in front of him. The composition, as well
as the elements of the image, suggest strongly that Lili Kracauer was
inspired by the well-known motif of the studiolo in the representa-
tion of authors. It is certain this motif frequently found in painting,

96
 Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Ill. 15. Lake Minnewaska (NY), first half

of the 1950s; photog. Elisabeth Kracauer;
original paper print, 8 x 5 cm.

and taken up by photography, was familiar to her.22 An echoing of

this motif, however, is rare in other photos taken by her of Kracauer
at work. It is difficult to draw a clear line between her photographic
practice and the critique of the medium being made by Kracauer.
For him, integral “to the photographer’s tact” was “the reduction
to the minimum of any unavoidable stylisations with painting-like
effects”.23
The photo taken in the first half of the 1950s at Lake Minnewaska
(N.Y.)24 is not affected by a tradition of this kind, and can be consid-
ered a typical holiday photo (Ill. 15). Pipe in hand, Kracauer poses
in an almost nonchalant attitude on a balcony, opposite the camera,
with his face in three-quarter profile, looking into the distance.

97
 Maria Zinfert

Ill. 16. New York, second half of the 1950s, unknown photographer; Polaroid,
6 x 8 cm.

There do not exist in the archive any prints of photos actually taken
in New York, apart from a few identity photos. Almost the only
exception is this snapshot, a small format Polaroid, which shows
the Kracauers with Maya Deren. On the back of the photograph,
someone has noted the name of Deren (Ill. 16a). Lili Kracauer,
who can be seen in the background, seems to be greeting some-
one who is hidden by Maya Deren, who is approaching Kracauer
(Ill. 16). The moment that is captured is so alive that one has the
impression of having not a photo under one’s eyes but rather one
of those “snapshots (‘picture frames’) of which [a film] consists”
which are completely absorbed by “the ‘shot’ — the smallest unit of
a film”.25 The impression is reinforced by the element of blurring in
the movement and by the characteristic smears of a ­Polaroid, which
allow the materiality specific to the medium to come into view. The
­Polaroid is comparable to the print from the broken glass plate to

98
 Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Ill. 16a. Back of the Polaroid with handwritten notes and the stamp of the archive
(DLA Marbach).

the extent that here also one’s gaze switches back and forth between
the representation and the marks of its suspension. The material
reality of the image also allows the photo to be approximately dated.
Polaroids with a 64x83mm format were only commercialised from
1954 on. Taking account also of biographical information about
Maya Deren,26 the snapshot must date from the second half of the
1950s.

99
 Maria Zinfert

Ill. 17. Klosters (Switzerland), 1960, photog. Elisabeth Kracauer [?]; taken from a
contact sheet in the archive (DLA) of the original Kodak film roll.

100
 Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Ill. 17a. Klosters (Switzerland), 1960,

photo No. 29 of the same contact sheet,
4 x 3.5 cm.

It was at Klosters, near Davos in Switzerland, that this series of photos

was taken (Ill. 17).27 If all the portraits of Kracauer in the archive were
to be lined up alongside each other, one would notice that the same
elements appear repeatedly. The poses adopted through the years,
and the decades, of collaboration with his wife vary very little.
One can see a typical portrait of Kracauer in the unsuccessful shot
No. 29 (Ill. 17a) of this roll of film exposed and developed at Klosters.
It stands out in the contact sheet from the photos surrounding it. All
have by way of background the same structure of dark, needlework-
like lines and of clearer surface areas: it is the amorphous pattern
of the wallpaper in front of which Kracauer appears only partially
captured by the camera. Assuming that this was an attempt to make
a conventional photographic portrait, clearly these shots are by and
large unsuccessful. They are blurred, suffer most of the time from
a bad exposure and are poorly framed. But as documents that bear
witness to the photographic practice of Lili and Siegfried Kracauer,
the contact sheet, and particularly photo No. 29, are of ­considerable

101
 Maria Zinfert

interest. In contrast to the other eleven portrait busts of the series, one
is a three-quarter length portrait in a pose that Kracauer ­commonly
took when he was being photographed. Although his body is straight
opposite the camera, his folded arms and hands on his knee produce
an image of someone who is self-contained and is waiting.

When he was being photographed, Kracauer seems to avoid any

assertive or definite attitude. He rarely looks at the camera; most of
the time, his gaze is directed at an unspecified object, outside the
frame of the image. This is also the case in the portrait shot in 1964
in Rome: Siegfried Kracauer in the ruins of the Forum Romanum
(Ill. 18).

Postscript

History. The Last Things before the Last was unfinished when
­Kracauer died in a New York hospital in November 1966.28 Mention
is found in his correspondence of a work that was never under-
taken: “These last weeks, Lili and I have organised all kinds of old
documents which lay unsorted in two cases from Paris. We were
genuinely overcome: the past revisited, le temps retrouvé … But the
main point is that this rooting around in the past, with all the letters
among the papers, aroused in me an irresistible desire to write my
memoirs – I mean, write them really in the grand style. But that will
be a luxury that I will probably never be able to afford.”29

102
 Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Ill. 18. Rome, 1964, photog. Elisabeth Kracauer; original paper print, 17,5 x 11 cm.

103
 Notes

Kracauer as Thinker
of the Photographic Medium

1 See among other works Siegfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten. Aus dem
neuesten Deutschland, Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Druckerei, 1930,
pp. 20–21, trans. The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Ger-
many, trans. Quintin Hoare (London, UK; New York, NY: Verso, 1998),
p. 32; Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1960 (reprint Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press,
1999), p. 3–23; History. The Last Things Before the Last, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1969 (reprint Princeton : Markus Wiener, 1995), p. 3–4.
2 See the facsimile of the front page of the Frankfurter Zeitung where the
article appears ‘under the line’, in the bottom third dedicated to cultural
comment, p. 26 of this volume; re-edited in Kracauer, Das Ornament der
Masse: Essays, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963, pp. 21–39, trans. “Pho-
tography”, in The Mass Ornament, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mas-
sachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press 1995), pp. 47–63.
3 The photographs of the Tiller girls or of the famous actresses of 1927
reproduced in the Berliner Illustri[e]rte Zeitung, as well as the photograph
of the opera singer Hortense Schneider in crinoline of the 1860s are not
those, probably fictional, to which Kracauer refers in his essay. The material
chosen here provides, however, the precise iconographical context within
which he worked.

105
 Notes

4 On the implicit reference here to Bergson see Inka Mülder-Bach, "The Exile
of Modernity. Kracauer's Figurations of the Stranger", in Culture in the Ante-
room: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer, ed. Gerd Gemünden and Johannes
von Moltke (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 2012) p. 283.
5 Kracauer is in this period close to a negative and catastrophic vision of
history similar to that which Benjamin will develop in his Paris decade,
or later Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).
He will distance himself from it later as his American works, dedicated to
cinema and historiography, show. See Philippe Despoix, Ethiken der Entzau-
berung. Zum Verhältnis von ästhetischer, ethischer und politischer Sphäre
am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts, Bodenheim: Philo Verlagsgesellschaft,
1998, in particular p. 202–203.
6 See the eponymous essay "The Mass Ornament", in The Mass Ornament,
pp. 75–87.
7 The cover of the Berliner Illustri[e]rte Zeitung. No. 40, 2nd October 1927
(Ill. 4) represents Marshall von Hindenburg whose birthday was being cel-
ebrated at the time. On the last page of this issue there are, among other
shots, photos of actresses on the beach, one of them on the Lido at Venice.
Kracauer publishes his own article in the Frankfurter Zeitung on 28th Octo-
ber, against the backdrop, then, of current events.
8 See Walter Benjamin, "Nichts gegen die ‘Illustrierte’", Gesammelte Schrif-
ten, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, vol. IV, sub-volumes 1–2, 1982, p. 449;
the text was sent at the end of 1925 to Die Literarische Welt but was not
published.
9 Benjamin, "Kleine Geschichte der Photographie" (1931), trans.: “Little
History of Photography” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2,
1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings et al.,
(Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999),
p. 514. Compare with “Photography”, p. 40 of this volume.
10 See "Warburgs Ansprache in Hamburg, KBW, Drei-Hüter-Feier", in Wan-
derstrassen der Kultur. Die Aby Warburg – Fritz Saxl Korrespondenz 1920 bis
1929, ed. Dorothea McEwan, Hamburg: Dölling und Gallitz 2004, p. 205–206;
see also Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
2003, plates C, 77 and 79. For the later contact of Kracauer with the Warburg

106
 Notes

Institute, see Siegfried Kracauer, Erwin Panofsky. Briefwechsel 1941–1966, ed.

Volker Breidecker, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996, in particular p. 107–108.
11 This exhibition relied on private collections and archives and is not to be
confused with the famous international exhibition "FIFO" ("Film und Foto"
Ausstellung) which was organized by the Deutscher Werkbund in Stuttgart
in 1929 and which travelled under a similar title, in Germany and beyond.
12 Henny Porten (1890–1960) is considered, with Asta Nielsen, to be one of
the leading German stars of silent cinema; her career in it began in 1911.
13 See August Sander, Antlitz der Zeit; sechzig Aufnahmen deutscher Men-
schen des 20. Jahrhunderts, mit einer Einleitung von Alfred Döblin, Munich:
Kurt Wolff/Transmare Verlag, 1929; trans.: Face of our Time: Sixty Portraits
of Twentieth-Century Germans, Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1994.
14 See Helmar Lerski, Köpfe des Alltags; Unbekannte Menschen, Berlin: Ver-
lag H. Reckendorf, 1931; and, among other places, Kracauer, Theory of Film,
pp. 161–162.
15 “‘Marseiller Entwurf’ zu einer Theorie des Films”, in S. Kracauer, Werke.
Theorie des Films, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
vol. 3, 2006, p. 533–534.
16 Ibid., p. 563.
17 Beaumont Newhall "Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visu-
alization", in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, London,
vol. 7, 1944, pp. 40–45; and The History of Photography. From 1839 to the
Present Day, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1949.
18 Benjamin had translated, with Franz Hessel, Marcel Proust, A l’ombre
des jeunes filles en fleurs (Im Schatten der jungen Mädchen, Berlin, Die
Schmiede, 1927) and Le côté de Guermantes (Die Herzogin von Guermantes,
Munich, R. Piper, 1930) where is to be found the quotation given by Kracauer
on the photographic shock of the narrator facing his grandmother. See also
on this hypothesis: Carlo Ginzburg, “Minutiae, Close-up, ­Microanalysis”, in
Critical Inquiry, vol. 34, No. 1 (Autumn 2007), p. 179. In the copy of Proust,
Remembrance of Things Past (two-vol. edition, New York: Random House,
c. 1934) in the personal library of Kracauer (kept in ­Special Collections at
the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach), there are seven pages of handwrit-
ten notes on the novel, of which one page is dedicated to the passages on
photography.

107
 Notes

19 Kracauer will describe in Theory of Film, p. 16, how “The photographer

summons up his being, not to discharge it in autonomous creations but to
dissolve it into the substances of the objects that close in on him”.
20 See the first two reproductions in The Magazine of Art: Fox Talbot, The
Open Door (facsimile of The Pencil of Nature, 1844) and Antony Samuel
Adam-Salomon, Self-Portrait (c. 1860), p. 62 and p. 65 of this volume.
21 Kracauer is referring to the following photographs: Edward Weston, Rock
Erosion (1935); Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Vom Berliner Funkturm (1928); Henri
Cartier-Bresson, Enfants dans les ruines (1933); A. J. Russell, ­Granite ­Canyon
in Foreground (1867); Eliot F. Porter, Road Runner (1941) and Eugène Atget,
Racines (c. 1915) also reproduced in Magazine of Art, pp. 70–77 of this
­volume.
22 See Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 17 and Ill. 11 (Eugène Atget, Rue Saint-
Rustique, 1922).
23 Ibid., pp. 300–301.
24 Carlo Ginzburg, "Minutiae, Close-up, Microanalysis”, p. 178.
25 Ibid., p.179.
26 See in particular on this point Heide Schlüpmann, “Stellung zur Mas-
senkultur”, in Schlüpmann, Ein Detektiv des Kinos. Studien zu Siegfried Kra-
cauers Filmtheorie, Basel; Frankfurt am Main; Stroemfeld: 1998, pp. 55–65;
and Myriam Hansen, “Kracauer’s Photography Essay. Dot Matrix – General
(An-)Archive – Film” in Culture in the Anteroom. The Legacies of Siegfried
Kracauer, eds. Gerd Gemünden, Johannes von Moltke, Ann Arbor: The Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 2012, pp. 93–110.
27 The Kracauer estate was bequeathed by his widow Lili Kracauer to Bran-
deis University. One year after her death, in 1972, the estate was bought by
the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar. It is difficult to recon-
struct at what moment the photos probably assembled in the envelope may
have been scattered. The photographic material in the estate has now been
made the subject of a book, Maria Zinfert (ed.), Kracauer. Photographic
Archive, Zürich: diaphanes, 2014.
28 See on this subject among others Nia Perivolaropoulou, “Zeit der Ge­-
schichte und Zeit des Films bei Siegfried Kracauer”, in Film als Loch in
der Wand. Kino und Geschichte bei Siegfried Kracauer, eds. Drehli Robnik,
Amália Kerekes, Katalin Teller, Vienna; Berlin: Verlag Turia + Kant, 2013,

108
 Notes

pp. 146–159 ; see also Philippe Despoix, “Geschichstschreibung im Zeitalter

fotografischer und filmischer Reproduzierbarkeit”, in the above volume,
pp. 103–115.
29 See "The Biography as an Art Form of the New Bourgeoisie", in The
Mass Ornament, pp. 101–105; and Kracauer, Jacques Offenbach and the
Paris of His Time, foreword by Gertrud Koch, trans. Gwenda David and Eric
Mosbacher, New York: Zone Books, distributed by MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 2002, p. 23; see also Kracauer, History. The Last Things before the
Last, New York, Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 3–4.
30 See the letters to Adorno of 25th Oct. and 8th Nov. 1963, in Theodor W.
Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer, Briefwechsel 1923–1966, ed. Wolfgang Schopf,
in Theodor W. Adorno, Briefe und Briefwechsel, vol. 7), Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2008, pp. 611–612 and p. 621.
31 Letter to Adorno of 1st Oct. 1950, ibid., p. 449; see also Maria Zinfert’s com-
mentary in “Curriculum Vitae in Pictures” at the end of this volume, p. 101.

Photography

1 A classic children’s fairy tale, “Das Märchen vom Schlaraffenland” by

the brothers Grimm was included in their Kinder- und Hausmärchen from
the second edition of 1819 ; compare the translation with (§158) “The Story
of Schlauraffen Land [The Tale About the Land of Cockaigne]”, in Grimm’s
Fairy Tales (New York: Pantheon Books 1944), pp. 660–661.
2 A troupe of dancing girls created in 1890 by John Tiller in Manchester
that had significant international success from the 1920s. Kracauer also
evoked them in his essay “Das Ornament der Masse” that appeared in June
1927, which was taken as the title for the essay collection published subse-
quently by Suhrkamp in 1963; trans.: “The Mass Ornament”, in The Mass
Ornament, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Massachussetts, London, Eng-
land: Harvard University Press 1995), pp. 75–87.
3 In the original text Kracauer adds here between hyphens: "Dilthey among
others", a reference that will be dropped when the essay is re-published in
the volume Das Ornament der Masse in 1963. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911)

109
 Notes

was a German historian, psychologist and philosopher, biographer of the

young Hegel and commentator of Goethe who played an important role in
the development of a “historicising” conception of the human sciences as
well as of hermeneutics. Kracauer will return to this author in his posthu-
mous fragment History. The Last Things Before the Last, New York, Oxford
University Press, 1969.
4 Allusion to a legendary medieval figure, brought back into currency by
Ludwig Tieck and Goethe.
5 The underlining is Kracauer’s; cf. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "J. P.
Eckermanns Gespräche mit Goethe. 18. April 1827", in Sämtliche Werke
(Münchner Ausgabe), ed. Heinz Schlaffer, vol. 19, Munich, Vienna, Carl
Hanser Verlag, 1986, pp. 559–560; trans. Conversations of Goethe with Ecker-
mann and Soret, trans. John Oxenford (London: George Bell & Sons, revised
edition 1901), p. 248.
6 Wilhelm Trübner (1851–1917): professor at the Academy of Karlsruhe, a
portrait painter and a painter of naturalist and realist landscapes who later
drew close to Impressionism; he belonged to the circle of Munich artists
around Wilhelm Leibl.
7 Ludwig von Zumbusch (1861–1927): a painter who came from a family
of famous sculptors, author of children’s portraits, pastels and landscapes.
He was part of the Munich Secession.
8 Ewald André Dupont (1891–1956): one of the pioneers of German cin-
ema, an important director of the Weimar period who had success with
feature films such as Variété (1925), Moulin Rouge (1928), Piccadilly (1929)
or Salto Mortale (1931). Kracauer wrote, from 1923 on, several reviews of
these films.
9 Dedicated to avant-garde films, the Studio des Ursulines had opened in
1926 at 10 rue des Ursulines in Paris.
10 Kracauer is referring to Wilhelm Marx (1863–1946), a German politician
who was a member of the Zentrum party, and was Chancellor between 1926
and 1928.
11 Marshall Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) was President of the Repub-
lic in 1927. A portrait of him, drawn after a photograph, made, among other
places, the cover of the Berliner Illustri[e]rte Zeitung, of 2 October 1927,
three weeks before the publication of Kracauer’s essay.

110
 Notes

12 Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) was the German Minister of Foreign

Affairs at the time and Aristide Briand (1862–1932) had the same post in
France. In 1926, they had both won the Nobel Peace Prize.
13 Kracauer will propose an analysis of the news in “ Die Filmwochenschau”
(Die Neue Rundschau, Oct. 1932) in Werke. Kleine Schriften zum Film, ed.
Inka Mülder-Bach, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, vol. 6.2 (1928–1931),
2004, pp. 553–555.
14 Johann Jacob Bachofen (1815–1897): Swiss historian of law and a clas-
sicist and philologist famous for his theory of matriarchy. Oknos der Seil-
flechter : Ein Grabbild. Erlösungsgedanken antiker Gräbersymbolik originally
appeared in 1859; partial trans. “Ocnus the Rope Plaiter”, in Myth, Religion,
and Mother Right; Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press 1967), p. 51–65.
15 Karl Marx, “Die deutsche Ideologie. I. Thesen über Feuerbach”, in Karl
Marx und Friedrich Engels, Werke, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, vol. 3, 1978, p. 31
(trans. in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1845–47,
vol. 5: Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology and Related Manuscripts,
p. 44).
16 Georg Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1856): German archaeologist and philolo-
gist. He is the founder of the scientific study of myths and develops a theory
of the symbol set out in the volumes of Symbolik und Mythologie der alten
Völker (1810–1812). Kracauer is alluding here to the title of his memoirs:
Aus dem Leben eines alten Professors [Life of an Old Professor] from 1848.

On Yesterday’s Border

1 The Berlin exhibition “Film- und Photoschau” had been opened on the
2nd July 1932 in Joachimsthaler Straße under the motto “German mind –
German work”. It was based on an important collection of the set designer
Eduard Andres dedicated to the history of cinema, for which Harry Piel,
Max Mack and Fritz Lang, among others, had made available their private
archives. Despite the closeness in the title, this permanent exhibition was not
connected to the famous international exhibition “FIFO” (“Film und Foto”)

111
 Notes

in Stuttgart in 1929, which travelled in the following years in Germany as

well as abroad.
2 Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833): one of the discoverers of pho-
tography. He had tried between 1816 and 1820 to fix objects captured by a
camera obscura on bitumous paper sensitive to light, a procedure that he will
extend to the reproduction of etchings on metal and will call “héliographie”.
He worked from 1826 onwards in collaboration with Louis Jacques Mandé
Daguerre (1787–1851) who, exploiting the sensitivity of silver iodide in order
to shorten exposure times, will subsequently develop the “daguerreotype”,
thereby inaugurating the official birth of photography in 1839. The descrip-
tion given by Kracauer of this “photographed” image does not appear to
correspond to any of Niépce’s surviving works. The “bituminous paper”
does, however, indeed point to the beginnings of heliography. Perhaps this
Window was one of the matching images of Point of View taken from the
Window of Gras (1826–27), which appears to use bitumen on tin and was
only found in 1952.
3 A machine that came from the first cinematographic experimentations,
like the phenakistiscope invented by the Belgian Joseph Plateau (1832), the
zoetrope of the English mathematician William George Horner (1834) or the
praxinoscope of the Frenchman Émile Reynaud (1877).
4 On the eve of the First World War, the Biofix laborotory proposed, fol-
lowed by others, the production of an original flip book made by photo-
graphing the person or people who wished to have it.
5 Max Skladanowsky (1863–1939): pioneer of early cinema who developed,
with his brother Emil, the “bioscope”. In November 1895, they projected
in the Wintergarten in Berlin the first cinematographic takes by using this
machine (that is to say, less than two months before the Lumière brothers
in Paris); they thereby inaugurated the first projections of moving images to
a paying public in Germany.
6 Eine Fliegenjagd oder Die Rache der Frau Schultze (A Fly Chase or the
Revenge of Mrs. Schulze, 1905) of Max Skladanowsky is no longer consid-
ered to be the first fiction film in the history of cinema.
7 Die Rache der Gefallenen (The Revenge of the Fallen Woman, Deutsche
Film-Industrie, Robert Glombeck, 1917).

112
 Notes

8 Hans Albers (1891–1960): successful German singer and actor who

worked in the cinema from 1915. He appeared in, among other films, Der
blaue Engel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930).
9 Hedwig Courths-Mahler (1867–1950): German author of numerous pop-
ular novels the recurrent theme of which is social ascent through love.
10 Henny Porten (1890–1960): famous film actress, was, with Asta Nielsen,
one of the first German stars of silent film in which she first appeared in
1911. Kracauer evokes her numerous times in his film reviews from 1923
on.
11 This is a couplet from a very popular tune of the time Die Rasenbank
am Elterngrab (“The Grassy Bank by my Parents’ Grave”); its theme went
through multiple versions and it was also the subject of postcards.
12 There seems to be a confusion here between Sein eigener Mörder (His own
Murderer, 1914), not directed by Max Mack, and Der Andere (The Other, Max
Mack, 1913). By taking the leading role in the film, Albert Bassermann (1867–
1952) had been one of the first to break the boycott of the cinema by theatre
actors in Germany. This feature film, the scenario of which was inspired by
Paul Lindau’s play Der Andere: Schauspiel in vier Aufzügen (1896) and by
the theories of Hippolyte Taine developed in his De l’intelligence (1870), is
considered to be one of the very first German “art” films.

Photographed Berlin

1 Albert Vennemann worked as a photographer in Berlin in the 1920s and

at the beginning of the 1930s. He published his photographs in magazines,
among others in Der Querschnitt, and his works were presented several
times in Berlin, such as in the group exhibition “Fotomontage” (1931) or in
the exhibition “1000 Berliner Ansichten” about which Kracauer writes here.
The Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum (Arts and Crafts Museum) was housed in
the famous building designed by Heino Schmieden and Martin Gropius. It
contained important special collections of silverware, glasses, ceramics and
textiles, as well as an exhibition of the history of furniture from the Middle
Ages to the contemporary period.

113
 Notes

A Note on Portrait Photography

1 Apart from the mention of time and place above the article in the Frank-
furter Zeitung “Berlin, end of January”, Kracauer does not identify in any
way the exhibition that serves as a pretext for his reflections. The only
exhibition of this kind inventoried in Berlin for this period is an exhibition
of Hugo Erfurt dedicated to portraits of artists which was entitled “Kün-
stlerbildnisse”. Erfurt gave a talk in 1933 in Berlin on the theme “Die Ent-
wicklung der Bildnis-Photographie” (see Christine Kühn: Neues Sehen in
Berlin. Fotografie der Zwanziger Jahre. Berlin: Ausstellungskatalog Kunst-
bibliothek, Berlin Museum für Fotografie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2005,
p. 255). In this period, photographers like August Sander (Antlitz der Zeit,
1929, trans. Face of our Time: Sixty Portraits of Twentieth-Century Germans,
Munich : Schirmer/Mosel, 1994), whom Kracauer’s friend Walter Benjamin
had praised in “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” (1931, trans. “Little
History of Photography”, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2,
1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings et al.,
Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999,
pp. 507–530), or Helmar Lerski (Köpfe des Alltags, 1931) to whom Kracauer
will himself return in Theory of Film (1960), had already come to prominence
with a modernist, photographic conception of the portrait.

The Photographic Approach

1 Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, London, Longman, Brown,

Green and Longmans, 1844, p. 40, quoted by Beaumont Newhall, The His-
tory of Photography. From 1839 to the Present Day, New York, The Museum
of Modern Art, 1949, p. 182. (Newhall’s History of Photography had four
editions, in 1937, 1938, 1949 and 1964, and they differ significantly from
each other. Kracauer quotes from the third edition of 1949.
2 The quotation seems to come not from the preface but from the first
chapter.

114
 Notes

3 Sir William de Wiveleslie Abney, Instantaneous Photography, New York,

Scovill and Adams, 1895, p. 2.
4 Newhall, The History of Photography, p. 76.
5 Alphonse de Lamartine, "xxxvième entretien. La littérature des sens. La
peinture. Léopold Robert. 1re partie", in Cours familier de littérature. Un entre-
tien par mois, Paris, t. 6, 1858, p. 410, quoted in English in Newhall, ibid.
6 Newhall, The History of Photography, p. 91.
7 Edward Weston, Daybooks, Rochester, George Eastman House, vol. 1,
1961, p. 55, quoted in Newhall, The History of Photography, p. 157–158.
8 Sir John Robison, « Notes on Daguerre’s Photography », in The Edinburgh
New Philosophical Journal, vol. 27, 1839, p. 155–156, quoted in Newhall
“Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization”, in Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 7, 1944, p. 40.
9 Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature, p. 25–26, quoted in Newhall, The His-
tory of Photography, p. 40.
10 Charles Baudelaire, “Salon de 1859”, in Critique d’art. Suivi de Critique
musicale, Paris, Gallimard, coll. Folio essais, 1992, p. 278, comp. trans.:
“Salon of 1859”, in Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans.
P.E. Charvet (Cambridge, Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
p. 297.
11 See Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Ani-
mals, London, J. Murray, 1872.
12 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph”, Atlantic
Magazine, June 1859, quoted in Newhall, “Photography and the Develop-
ment of Kinetic Visualization”, p. 41.
13 The editor of the Magazine of Art indicated further on in the notes on con-
tributors to the issue: “The article by SIEGFRIED KRACAUER is condensed
from the introductory chapter of a book on film esthetics being prepared
with the aid of a grant from the Bollingen Foundation and to be published
by Oxford University Press. Dr. Kracauer is the author of From Caligari to
Hitler (Princeton University, 1947).” The book was published nine years
later under the title Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality, New
York, Oxford University Press, 1960.

115
 Notes

Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

1 Anna Elisabeth Kracauer (née Ehrenreich), born 6 May 1893 in Stras-

bourg, belonged to a Catholic family. All the biographical details come from
documents preserved in the Kracauer estate at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv
Marbach am Neckar (KE DLA).
2 “The official ‘Siegfried’ is to be ruled out straightaway, and the intimate
‘Friedel’ dates from a long time ago — […] Those who still use it loom out
of the past more or less into the present. […] Please call me Krac”; a letter of
Siegfried Kracauer to Ernst Bloch, early January 1928, quoted in Thomas Y.
Levin, Siegfried Kracauer. Eine Bibliographie seiner Schriften, Marbach am
Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, collection Verzeichnisse, Berichte,
Informationen, 1989, p. 18.
3 According to the present state of research, the envelope was apparently
empty when it was deposited in the DLA.
4 The expression borrowed from Kracauer refers here to a text in photo-
graphs, corresponding to film where it is a text in animated photographic
images; see also e.g. : “Instead of the words serving to illustrate the text in
images, they lower the images to the level of illustrating the dialogues … ”,
S. Kracauer, “Dialog im Film”, in Werke. Kleine Schriften zum Film, ed. Inka
Mülder-Bach, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, vol. 6.3 (1932–1961), 2004,
pp. 217. The images of a curriculum vitae in pictures would not be depen-
dent, then, on a discursive text (in words) but would form, rather, the first
material of a visual text (in images). See also S. Kracauer, “An der Grenze
des Gestern”, in Werke. Kleine Schriften zum Film, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach,
Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, vol. 6.3 (1932–1961), 2004, pp. 76–82, here
“On Yesterday’s Border”, p. 47–53.
5 The provisional selection made here represents only a small part of the
approximately 300 photographs of Kracauer and other people that are con-
served in the archive. For an overall view, see Maria Zinfert, Kracauer.
Photographic Archive, Zürich, diaphanes, 2014.
6 Rosette Kracauer was born 2 April at Frankfurt am Main; she was the
daughter of Falk Aron, known as Ferdinand Oppenheim(er), and of his wife
Friederike. In the 1880s she married Adolf Kracauer, born 16 March 1849 at
Sagan; an only child, Siegfried Kracauer, was born on 8 February 1889.

116
 Notes

7 S. Kracauer, “Die Photographie”” in Werke. Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensio­

nen, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach, Berlin, Suhrkamp, vol. 5.2 (1924–1927), 2011,
p. 683 (trans.: “Photography”, p. 27–45 of this volume).
8 In April 1907, Kracauer began architectural studies in Darmstadt, switched
for the autumn to Berlin, went for the summer semester to Munich where
he passed his diploma exam in 1911; he finished in July 1914, defending his
thesis at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin.
9 Kracauer was called up to the infantry at Mayence in mid-September
1917, but was put on reserve as early as November.
10 This is a paraphrase of a formula from Kracauer’s autobiographical novel
on the period of the First World War, “not him — more some imagined
young man, behind whom he hid himself.” S. Kracauer, Ginster, in Werke.
Romane und Erzählungen, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach, Frankfurt am Main,
Suhrkamp, vol. 7, 2004, p. 32.
11 Siegfried Kracauer, describing a secondary character, who strikes him
above all as “the revolting and robust hero” in the film West Point (1927)
by Edward Sedgwick; see also S. Kracauer, “Gutes Lustspielprogramm”, in
Werke. Kleine Schriften zum Film, vol. 6.2, p. 209.
12 This is another formula from Ginster, borrowed here for lack of the
­requisite knowledge of military grades.
13 A description of Kracauer’s, writing about the film Westfront 1918 (1930)
by G.W. Pabst; S. Kracauer, “Westfront 1918”, in Werke. Kleine Schriften
zum Film, vol. 6.2, p. 360.
14 S. Kracauer, "Das Monokel. Versuch einer Biographie", in Werke. Essays,
Feuilletons, Rezensionen, vol. 5.2, p. 496, published initially under the
pseudonym Raca, in the Frankfurter Zeitung, No. 892 of 30th November
1926 (evening edition, comment section).
15 An almost identical photo can be found in the Adorno estate. In it, the
two friends are in the same spot, but Theodor Wiesengrund (Adorno) has
been moved to where the woman stood, and she has disappeared from the
image. Reproduced in: Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer, Briefwechsel
1923–1966, ed. Wolfgang Schopf, iconographical document 2, p. 726, Frank-
furt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2008. The photo comes with a caption that consists
of a quotation that is taken from a letter of Adorno’s of the 28th October
1964: “an attempt ought to finally be made here to create a monument to the

117
 Notes

­figure that together we compose.” Adorno, however, is making an allusion

not retrospectively to this old photograph but to his article, then very recent,
on Kracauer, “Der wunderliche Realist” (trans.: Theodor Adorno, “The Curi-
ous Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer”, in Notes to Literature. vol. 2 (New York;
Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 58–75.) Kracauer would
not, for his part, have been in as much agreement with the idea of such a
monument as the sight of the two hikers side by side might suggest.
16 Kracauer, who became a member of the editorial staff of the Frankfurter
Zeitung in 1921, gave the photo, among others, in 1930 to the Reichshand-
buch der Deutschen Gesellschaft for publication purposes; see also the pho-
to’s reproduction on the front of Siegfried Kracauer 1889–1966, ed. Ingrid
Belke and Irina Renz.
17 Peter Geimer, Bilder aus Versehen. Eine Geschichte fotografischer Erschei-
nungen, Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts, coll. Fundus Bücher, 2010, p. 9. Geimer
is referring to a well-known photo by André Kertesz, Broken Plate (1929),
which he places as an emblem at the beginning of his work that is dedicated
to “the interaction between the effect and its negation, the image and the
perturbation of the image”, p. 11.
18 Lili Kracauer is the author of all of the portraits made after their marriage
to be found in the Kracauer estate. She used a Leica: there are a number of
instruction manuals in Kracauer’s library for the Model Leica III, which was
commercialised from 1932, and there are also works on photography with
a Leica.
19 This can be gleaned from the following declaration that Lili Kracauer
wrote in November 1963 for a Berlin authority: “On the 5th March 1930, I
got married to Dr. Siegfried Kracauer. In his wide-ranging activities as an
editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, as a social scientist [sic!] and as an author,
Dr. Kracauer was dependent on collaborators. Thanks to my professional
training over many years and in different areas, I was in a position to take
over all the work that my husband needed done. My work for him consisted
in the search for materials, in the production of excerpts, proof-reading,
managing an extensive correspondence, etc.” Lili Kracauer, Typed Manu-
script, Declaration to a Germany authority, 8th November 1963, (original in
German) KE DLA.

118
 Notes

20 The two sisters Rosette (1867–1942) and Hedwig (1862–1942) were mar-
ried to the brothers Adolf (1849–1918) and Isidor (1852–1923) Kracauer.
21 In June 1940, Lili and Siegfried Kracauer were able, after having over-
come repeated obstacles, to get from Paris to Marseille. In August, Walter
Benjamin also arrived in Marseille, where he met the Kracauers almost
every day. After the Spanish government suddenly decided, in September,
to prohibit the passage of stateless persons, the way was closed to the last
open port, Lisbon. The border had to be crossed using false papers or else
by taking difficult paths through the Pyrenees. It is there that Benjamin com-
mitted suicide on the 24th September 1940. In February 1941, the Kracauers
finally managed to leave Marseille for Lisbon, embarking in April, at the last
minute on a ship which carried them safely to New York.
22 Lili Kracauer had studied music and art history at the University of
Leipzig at the beginning of the 1920s. On the historical development of the
author’s portrait, see Michael Diers, “Der Autor ist im Bilde. Idee, Form und
Geschichte des Dichter- und Gelehrtenporträts”, in Jahrbuch der Deutschen
Schillergesellschaft, ed. Wilfried Barner, Christine Lubkoll, Ernst Osterkamp,
Ulrich Raulff, Göttingen: Wallstein, vol. 51, 2007, p. 551–586. Diers sees
in the portrait of Kracauer, with which he ends his article, significant cor-
respondences with a woodcut of Petrarch of 1532 which influenced the
representation of authors, but he attributes this to pure chance.
23 S. Kracauer, “Anmerkung über Porträt-Photographie”, in Werke. Essays,
Feuilletons, Rezensionen, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach, Berlin, Suhrkamp, vol. 5.4
(1932–1965), 2011, p. 361 (trans.: “A Note on Portrait Photography”,
pp. 59–61 of this ­volume).
24 The Kracauers passed the summers of 1952, 1953 and 1955 on Lake Min-
newaska in New York State.
25 See S. Kracauer, “Tentative Outline of a Book on Film Aesthetics” (1949),
in Siegfried Kracauer — Erwin Panofsky Briefwechsel 1941–1966, ed. Volker
Breidecker, Berlin, Akademie Verlag, coll. Schriften des Warburg-Archivs
im Kunstgeschichtlichen Seminar der Universität Hamburg, 1996, p. 84:
“Film is not photography: the ‘shot’ — the smallest unit of a film — com-
pletely absorbs the snapshots (‘picture frames’) of which it consists.”
26 Maya Deren, born Eleonora Derenkowsky in 1917 in Kiev, died in Octo-
ber 1961 in New York. In 1948, in a review of a number of films, Kracauer

119
 Notes

commented on three of her films, describing them as the best known of an

avant-garde movement then forming in New York, S. Kracauer, “Filming the
Subconscious”, in Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings, ed. Johannes von
Moltke and Kristy Rawson, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2012, pp. 57–62. (trans.: “Die filmische Gestaltung des Unter-
bewußten”, in Werke. Kleine Schriften zum Film, vol. 6.3, pp. 387–388.
Deren’s films are frequently mentioned in Theory of Film (1960).
27 After the plan of a first trip to Europe in 1955 did not materialise, the
Bollingen Foundation, for which Kracauer worked as an expert, financed a
stay of three months in Europe in 1956. There was a second trip to Europe
in 1958. From 1960 on, Lili and Siegfried Kracauer spent the summer months
in Europe every year, primarily in France and Italy, Germany and Swit-
zerland. On this series of failed photos see Maria Zinfert (2013), “On the
Photographic Practice of Lili and Siegfried Kracauer: Portrait Photographs
from the Estate in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (Marbach am Neckar)”, in
The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 88:4, pp. 435–443.
28 S. Kracauer, History. The Last Things Before the Last, New York, Oxford
University Press, 1969 (reprint Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1995).
29 See Theodor W. Adorno / Siegfried Kracauer, Briefwechsel 1923–1966,
pp. 449; “the past revisited” is in English and “time regained” in French
in the original letter to Adorno of the 1st October 1950, in which Kracauer
announces to his friend, among other things, the publication of his essay
“The Photographic Approach” in Magazine of Art, vol. 44, No. 3, March
1951, p. 107–113 (p. 63–67 of this volume).

120
 Sources of the Texts

“Die Photographie”
(Frankfurter Zeitung, 28th October 1927), in Siegfried Kracauer, Werke.
Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach in collaboration with
Sabine Biebl, Andrea Erwig, Vera Bachmann and Stephanie Manske, Berlin:
Suhrkamp, vol. 5.2 (1924–1927), 2011, pp. 682–698.

“An der Grenze des Gestern. Zur Berliner Film- und Photo-Schau“
(Frankfurter Zeitung, 12th July 1932), in Siegfried Kracauer, Werke. Kleine
Schriften zum Film, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach in collaboration with Mirjam
Wenzel and Sabine Biebl, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, vol. 6.3 (1932–
1961), 2004, pp. 76–82.

“Photographiertes Berlin”
(Frankfurter Zeitung, 15th December 1932), in Siegfried Kracauer, Werke.
Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen, vol. 5.4 (1932–1965), 2011, pp. 310–312.

“Anmerkung über Porträt-Photographie”

(Frankfurter Zeitung, 1st February 1933), in Siegfried Kracauer, Werke.
Essays, Feuilletons, Rezensionen, vol. 5.4 (1932–1965), 2011, pp. 359–361.

“The Photographic Approach”

(Magazine of Art, vol. 44, No. 3, 1951, pp. 107–113), reprinted in Siegfried
Kracauer’s American Writings. Essays on Film and Popular Culture, ed.
Johannes von Moltke, Kristy Rawson, Postface by Martin Jay, Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2012, pp. 204–213.

121
 Sources of the Texts

Philippe Despoix, “Kracauer Penseur du médium photographique”,

in Siegfried Kracauer, Sur le seuil du temps, Essais sur la photographie,
Texts chosen and presented by Philippe Despoix, Montréal: Les Presses
de l’Université de Montréal, Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de
l’homme, 2013, pp. 7–24.

Maria Zinfert, “Curriculum Vitae in Pictures”,

in Siegfried Kracauer, Sur le seuil du temps, Essais sur la photographie, ibid.,
pp. 83–107.

122
 List of Illustrations and Photographic Credits

Kracauer as Thinker of the Photographic Medium

Ill. 1. Drei Jahre Tillergirls in Berlin [Three Years of Tiller Girls in Berlin],
Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, No. 43, 1927, p. 1 739; repro. Deutsches Litera-
turarchiv Marbach (DLA).
Ill. 2. Keine Puppengesichter mehr! Individuelle Film-Schönheit [No More
Dolls’ Faces! Individual Beauty at the Cinema], Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung,
No. 45, 1927, p. 1827; repro. DLA.
Ill. 3. André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, Portrait No. 3 taken from Mlle
Hortense Schneider en huit poses [Miss Hortense Schneider in Eight Poses],
1860; albumen print, 10 x 6 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Photog. Hervé
Lewandowski, RMN-Grand-Palais / Art Resource, NY.
Ill. 4. Von Hindenburg, cover of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, No. 40,
1927; repro. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
Ill. 5. Die neue Silhouette. Die Berliner Golfspielerin Frl. Tag beim Drive-
schlag [The New Silhouette. The Berlin lady golfer Miss Tag hitting a drive],
cover of the Münchner Illustrierte Presse, No. 30, 1927; repro. Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek.
Ill. 6. Zeiss-Ikon advertisement, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, No. 14, 1927,
p. 541; repro. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.
Ill. 7. Agfa advertisement, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, No. 29, 1927, p. 116;
repro. DLA Marbach.
Ill. 8. Bioscope of the Skladanowsky brothers, 1895; Filmmuseum Pots-
dam, photograph Klaus Bergmann.

123
 List of Illustrations and Photographic Credits

Ill. 9. Film roll taken from the first film by the brothers Max and Emil
­Skladanowsky, 1895; Bundesarchiv Bild 183-C31914.
Ill. 10. Albert Vennemann, Blick auf die Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße Richtung
Lustgarten [View on Kaiser-Wilhelm Street in the direction of the Lust­
garten], ca. 1925, original paper print, 9.5 x 14.2 cm; Stadtmuseum Berlin.
Ill. 11. Eugène Atget, Rue Saint-Rustique, 1922; Digital Image, The Museum
of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence.

Photography

Front page of the Frankfurter Zeitung, 28th October 1927; repro. Staats­
bibliothek zu Berlin.

On Yesterday’s Border

Front page of the Frankfurter Zeitung, 12th July 1932 (detail); repro. Staats-
bibliothek zu Berlin.

Photographed Berlin

Front page of the Frankfurter Zeitung, 15th December 1932 (detail); repro.
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

Note on Portrait Photography

Front page of the Frankfurter Zeitung, 1st February 1933 (detail); repro.
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.

124
 List of Illustrations and Photographic Credits

The Photographic Approach

P. 62 Fox Talbot, The Open Door, taken from The Pencil of Nature, 1844
(courtesy of Beaumont Newhall); facsimile page of Magazine of Art, vol. 44,
No. 3, 1951, p. 107.
P. 65 Antony Samuel Adam-Salomon, Self-Portrait, ca. 1860 (Eastman
Historical Photographic Collection); Magazine of Art, p. 108.
P. 70 Edward Weston, Rock Erosion, 1935 (collection Museum of Modern
Art); Magazine of Art, p. 109.
P. 71 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, From Berlin Wireless Tower, 1928 (collection
Museum of Modern Art, courtesy of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy); Magazine of Art,
p. 109.
P. 72 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Children Playing in the Ruins, Spain, 1933
(collection Museum of Modern Art, courtesy of Magnum Photos, Inc.);
­Magazine of Art, p. 110.
P. 73 A. J. Russell, Granite Canyon in Foreground, 1867 (collection
Museum of Modern Art); Magazine of Art, p. 111.
P. 75 Eliot F. Porter, Road Runner, 1941 (collection Museum of Modern
Art, courtesy of the photographer); Magazine of Art, p. 112.
P 77. Eugene Atget, Tree Roots, ca. 1915 (collection Museum of Modern
Art, courtesy of Berenice Abbott); Magazine of Art, p. 113.

Curriculum Vitae in Pictures

Ill. 1. Frankfurt am Main, 1897, Atelier Collischonn; paper print on card-

board, 6.5 x 10.5 cm; Kracauer estate (KE), Deutsches Literaturarchiv Mar-
bach (DLA).
Ill. 2. Frankfurt am Main, 1904, Atelier Erna; paper print on card­
board,11.5 x 5.5 cm; KE DLA.
Ill. 3. Italy [?], ca. 1912, unknown photog.; paper print of the reproduc-
tion of an identity photo, 26 x 20 cm; KE DLA.
Ill. 4. Mainz, 1917, unknown photog.; paper print on cardboard,
8.7 x 13.6 cm; KE DLA.

125
 List of Illustrations and Photographic Credits

Ill. 5. Frankfurt am Main [?], the 1920s, unknown photog.; original paper
print, 8.5 x 12.5 cm; KE DLA.
Ill. 6. Dolomites (Italy), 1924, unknown photog.; original paper print with
pencil marks, 9 x 13.5 cm; KE DLA.
Ill. 7. Frankfurt am Main, second half of the 1920s, unknown photog.;
paper print from the archive (DLA) of a broken glass negative, 17 x 12 cm;
KE DLA.
Ill. 8. Paris [?], 1930, photog. Elisabeth Kracauer; original paper print,
14 x 9 cm; KE DLA.
Ill. 9. France, ca. 1934, unknown photog.; original paper print, 5 x 8 cm;
KE DLA.
Ill. 10. Combloux (Haute-Savoie), 1934, photog. Elisabeth Kracauer; origi-
nal paper print, 9 x 14 cm; KE DLA.
Ill. 11. Combloux (Haute-Savoie), 1934, photog. Siegfried Kracauer; paper
print from the archive (DLA), 12 x 17 cm; KE DLA.
Ill. 12. Card issued to Kracauer as a journalist of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung
1937, unknown photog.; original document, 10 x 13 cm; KE DLA.
Ill. 13. Frankfurt am Main, ca. 1938, unknown photog.; original paper
print, 8.5 x 11.5 cm; KE DLA.
Ill. 14. Stamford (New York), 1950, photog. Elisabeth Kracauer; original
paper print, 12 x 8 cm; KE DLA.
Ill. 15. Lake Minnewaska (New York), first half of the 1950s, photog.
­Elisabeth Kracauer; original paper print, 8 x 5 cm; KE DLA.
Ill. 16. New York, second half of the 1950s, unknown photog.; Polaroid,
6 x 8 cm; KE DLA.
Ill. 16a. Back of the Polaroid with handwritten notes and the stamp of the
archive; KE DLA.
Ill. 17. Klosters (Switzerland), 1960, photog. Elisabeth Kracauer [?]; taken
from a contact sheet in the archive (DLA) of the original Kodak film roll;
KE DLA.
Ill. 17a. Klosters (Switzerland), 1960, photo No. 29 of the same contact
sheet, 4 x 3.5 cm; KE DLA.
Ill. 18. Rome, 1964, photog. Elisabeth Kracauer; original paper print,
17.5 x 11 cm; KE DLA.

126
 

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all those who have contributed to this pub-
lication, first of all, the Presses de l’Université de Montréal and the
éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme in Paris for giving us
permission to use the concept of a collection of essays of Kracauer
on photography which first appeared in a French edition entitled Le
Seuil du temps (2013). We would also like to thank Conor Joyce who
translated the texts always in a spirit of friendly collaboration.

We are also grateful to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach am

Neckar and to its very cooperative staff, above all in the photo-
graphic archives.

The support of Pascal-Anne Lavallée and of Jean-Philippe Michaud –

for additional research, the preparation of materials and bibliograph-
ical harmonisation – was decisive, as was the support of the Cana-
dian Centre for German and European Studies (Montreal) which
generously subsidised the research necessary for the book.

We also thank Nia Perivolaropoulou for her remarks and sugges-

tions, absolutely invaluable as always, during the preparation of
this collection.

127
 © diaphanes
Zurich-Berlin 2014
ISBN 978-3-03734-691-4

www.diaphanes.com

Typedesign: 2edit, Zurich

Cover image: Siegfried Kracauer, Stamford (N.Y.) 1950,
photog. by Elisabeth Kracauer, detail of original contact print,
Kracauer Estate, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach
Printed in Germany