Detail, Photographic and Cinematographic Images. On the Significance of the History of Media for Walter Benjamin‘s Culture Theory

Abstract

The essays Little History of Photography and The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproductibility are the focus of this study that intends to discuss Walter Benjamin’s theory of media in the terms of an interacction between techne and asitehesis: the rise of the theory of photography from the detail, the introduction of the optical unconscious, the temporalization of thedetail in the concept of shock during the transition from photography to film and , finally, the transformation of these reflections on a theory of media into an epistemological and historical-cultural device.