Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the author of
Sharon Sliwinski is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and author of
Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the author of
Sharon Sliwinski is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and author of
“A Hiding Place in Waking Dreams”: David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, and Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography”
-
Published:May 2017
Shawn Michelle Smith, 2017. "“A Hiding Place in Waking Dreams”: David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, and Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography”", Photography and the Optical Unconscious, Shawn Michelle Smith, Sharon Sliwinski
Download citation file:
This chapter provides a close reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Little History of Photography” (1931). It studies the photographs and photographers Benjamin drew on as he developed his thoughts about the optical unconscious, especially the calotypes made by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson in the 1840s. The chapter traces Benjamin’s path through the history of photography and considers the studies that shaped his understanding, especially Heinrich Schwarz’s David Octavius Hill, Master of Photography. It contemplates the disruptive temporality of photography, which looks to both the past and the future, in relation to Hill’s monumental painting The Disruption, for which many of the calotype portraits were originally made. Finally, it explores the metaphorical links between the materiality of the calotype and the optical unconscious through a reading of Sigmund Freud’s “Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” (1925).
Advertisement
