Making Visible, Making Strange: Photography and Representation in Kracauer, Brecht and Benjamin

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KRACAUER ON PHOTOGRAPHY

One of the most striking aspects of Thomas Levin's recent translation of Kracauer's Weimar essays is its inclusion of photographic material from the 1920s and early 1930s which typifies the 'new photography' associated with the Neue Sachlkhkeit movement.1 Kracauer's 1927 essay on photography, published in the Frankfurter Zeitung some four months after 'Das Ornament der Masse',2 is accompanied in Levin's edition by a technologically and aesthetically self-reflexive Sasha Stone photograph, which depicts photographers ostensibly photographing the photographer/viewer.3 Given Kracauer's considerable interest in the mass and popular visual culture of the Weimar …