Wolkenwandelbarkeit: Benjamin, Stieglitz, and the Medium of Photography

Wolkenwandelbarkeit: Benjamin, Stieglitz, and the Medium of PhotographyIn his essay from 1933, "Erfahrung und Armut," Walter Benjamin evokes the fractured character of modernity, as well as the difficulty in communicating historicalexperience.Ina particularly vividimageofsoldiers returningfromthetrenchesof the First World War, he brings together these two themes through the figure of clouds: "Eine Generation, die noch mit der Pferdebahn zur Schule gefahren war, standunter freiem Himmel in einerLandschaft, indernichts unverandertgeblieben war als die Wolken" (2.1: 214). This remarkable scene-which is also evoked in his essay, "Der Erzahler"-stages a dramatic contrast between the dynamic pace of the technological age, culminating in mass warfare, and the seemingly unchanging natural landscape. Yet whereas this passage appears to mobilize the cloud as a figure of consistency and static sameness, the nature of the cloud-caught between transparency and opacity, form and formlessness-renders this very consistency questionable. After all, throughout his critical and literary works, Benjamin explores the cloud asaradicallydynamicobject caughtin aprocessofperpetualtransfiguration.In this article, I examine precisely this more dynamic, dispersive, ungrounded character of the cloud as a figure that is not opposed to technology, but which rather plays a central role in two fundamental reassessments of what we understand under the rubric of the photographic image and the structure of its medium: Alfred Stieglitz's photographs and Benjamin's writings on photography, both of which offer us new and unexpected ways of thinking about photography in terms of a cloud-like structure of non-self-identity. By placing these two contemporaries in dialogue through the cloud as it figures in their reflections on photography and visualperception, we gain insight into thestructure ofself-alterityand self-differentiation, which conditions not only every photographic image, but the photographic medium as such. The cloud reveals this structure with particular luminosity because of its unique character as a figure of disfiguration, caught in a perpetual drift away from itself, always splitting and dispersing in several possible directions at once. In order to grasp the implications of Stieglitz's and Benjamin's ways of thinking about the cloud-like structure of the image, we begin with a brief overview of the history of cloud photography, outlining the prevailing views that inform the development of this genre up to the early twentieth century.A Short History of Cloud PhotographyFor technological, epistemological, and aesthetic reasons, cloud images hold a special place within the transnational history of photography.1 From the earliest days of camera technology, photographers sought to capture the sky. This desire, however, was long frustrated by technical limitations. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, it was impossible to capture both earth and sky together in one image.2 While early photographic chemicals were relatively insensitive to everything below the horizon (necessitating long exposure times), the same chemicals were highly sensitive to the blueness of the sky above. Therefore, if a photographer were to capture the properly lit sky, the earth beneath it would appear as an underexposed, opaque surface. Conversely, if the earth were adequately captured, the sky woulddevelopoverexposed.Thisdilemma essentiallyforcedearlyphotographersto choose between creating a landscape or a skyscape, but never a union of the two in one picture.3In the mid-1850s, the Parisian photographer Gustave Le Gray developed the standard method for overcoming this impasse, a method that is often cited as the oldest example of photomontage. Rather than trying to capture land and sky (or, more typically in his particular case, clouds and ocean) in one photographic shot, Le Gray spliced together the negatives of two separately taken photographs to render the illusion of a single image in the resulting print. …