著者

城丸 美香

出版者

美学会

雑誌

美学 (ISSN:05200962)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.54, no.4, pp.28-41, 2004

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According to Walter Benjamin, the photography is the first revolutionary reproduction technology, and the invention of it has brought a certain critical situation, "a poverty of experience" or "a decline of experience". It has progressed with the change in the communicative form from the story to the information. The photography reproduces traumatic shocks, and it has two opposite functions, repetition and reproduction. On the one hand, repeating shocks is a fragmentation of time and space. On the other, reproducing shocks is a reconstruction of a new spatial-temporal order by re-arranging those fragments. And this re-arrangement (=construction) is done by means of words (characters). The construction is that people read a (non-sensitive) similarity between words and fragments of various things which are released from all relations, and by doing so, set them in a new context where things can expose their new meanings. This new context is the place where things can gain the actuality. The function of photography is to form the space where all possible words can exist toward an image, and Benjamin found out the possibility of new collective experience in this space.