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April 25, 2025
from “Photography”
by Siegfried Kracauer
in Classic Essays on Photography
edited by Alan Trachtenberg
“In personal prose words feed on life beyond the page in a way that seems magical.”
—THE
I became interested in the connection between photography and the personal essay while working with Kathryn Winograd on her remarkable collection of essays and photographs entitled This Visible Speaking for The Humble Essayist Press which we featured last year. In her bibliography she listed a collection of Classic Essays on Photography edited by Alan Trachtenberg that caught my eye. When I read it, I found that many of the claims about the power of the photo to convey a reality beyond the art shed light on the subtle but very real intimacy found in personal prose: the sense that the words feed on life beyond the page in a way that seems magical.
Several weeks ago we featured a paragraph by Walter Benjamin about the “tiny spark of accident” and “the here and now” that animates a photo. This week we continue our discussion with a paragraph from “Photography” by Siegfried Kracauer on the sense of “endlessness” in a photograph.
The Paragraph of the Week
Photography tends to suggest endlessness. This follows from its emphasis on fortuitous complexes which represent fragments rather than wholes. A photograph, whether portrait or action picture, is in character only if it precludes the notion of completeness. Its frame marks a provisional limit; its content refers to other contents outside that frame; and its structure denotes something that cannot be encompassed—physical existence. Nineteenth-century writers called this something nature, or life; and they were convinced that photography would have to impress upon us its infinity. Leaves, which they counted among the favorite motifs of the camera, cannot be "staged" but occur in endless quantities. In this respect, there is an analogy between the photographic approach and scientific investigation: both probe into an inexhaustible universe whose entirety forever eludes them.
—Siegfried Kracauer
Commentary
A photo is a fragment drawing on “endlessness,” and in this way it is like personal nonfiction. The photograph has a frame that “precludes the notion of completeness.” The frame draws the line, but any detail within the frame “refers to contents outside the frame” suggesting that it is part what “cannot be encompassed.” In a personal essay this idea of the story drawing on an implied larger world is similarly palpable. People not in the essay about the crying baby hear the baby too, and the moon in an essay about night swimming shines on dry land as well. In a photograph details overlap like leaves suggesting an infinite depth that “cannot be ‘staged,’ but occur in endless qualities.” In a similar way the writer of personal prose does not create details to construct a complete and imagined whole but selects them from the larger whole suggesting an infinity left unsaid. In this way personal essayists assay their world like scientists probing “into an inexhaustible universe whose entirety forever eludes them.”
—THE
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