The ‘Chok’ of Image ‘Constellations in Themselves’: Reframing Walter Benjamin’s ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931)

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This article revisits some of the principal documents and guiding assumptions that have shaped the debate about the significance of Walter Benjamin’s landmark essay ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931) as well as Benjamin’s conception of photography and media discourse at large. Based on a handwritten draft fragment, translated for the first time into English, Benjamin’s earliest documented manuscript passages for ‘Little History of Photography’ are discussed here in detail to argue for an altered significance of the ‘directives’ inherent in ‘photography’s authenticity’. The article reconfigures the relevance of Benjamin’s ‘critically trained gaze’ and the illuminating ‘chok’ discovered by smaller and faster cameras in ‘postures, gestures, and gazes’. It takes a fresh look at Benjamin’s contested contributions to photography theory in his early ‘Little History of Photography’ and in his late 1940 theses ‘On the Concept of History’. The article re-examines the significance of the disruptive ‘static moment of events’ which, for Benjamin, captures revolutionary visual ’seeds of the new’. Reframing such seminal concepts as ‘chok’, ‘aura’ and ‘optical unconscious’, the article salvages critical impulses from Benjamin’s writings to address in productive fashion the multiple crises and challenges of visual culture in the twenty-first century.