Walter Benjamin's early attempt to understand a still young technology, remarkably prescient and topical even today. "The illiterate of the future [?] will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph." Benjamin's essay, published in two parts in the periodical Literarische Welt in 1931, was one of the earliest essays on this technology and precedes his better-known essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"(1935).

An extraordinary document in the history of photographic criticism.

Perhaps more than any other text, A Little History of Photography by the German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin has shaped the way in which we understand early photography and the photographic act. One of the first theoretical studies of visual culture, this essay laid the foundation for modern cultural criticism. Instead of regarding the artwork as a unique object, Benjamin emphasized the political and artistic potential of a new technology based on endless reproduction. A Little History of Photography was originally published in the German literary journal Die Literarische Welt in 1931 as three short essays reviewing several books dedicated to early photography. In this text, Benjamin introduced concepts that remain central to critical theory of the medium: the aura, optical unconscious, reproducibility, among other topics. It constitutes a remarkably prescient description of the limits and potentials of photography which remains thought-provoking today.