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PHOTOGRAPHY
every detail of the sitters and their clothing were imbued with an unmistakable "permanence." But Benjamin makes clear in the "Little Historf' that this permanence, as well as other class attributes such as the ability to generate an "animated conviviality,)) were also objective attributes of the class, and not merely photographic artifacts. "These pictures were made in rooms where every client was confronted, in the person of the photographer, with a technician of the latest school; whereas the photographer was confronted, in the person of every client, with a member of a rising class equipped with an aura that had seeped into the very folds of the man's frock coat or floppy cravat.)1 The aura, in other words, is at one and the same time the" breathy halo~' so evident in many daguerreotypes and early salt prints and an objective attribute of a class that developed at a particular historical moment. As Benjamin puts it, "in this early period subject and technique were as exactly congruent as they became incongruent in the period of decline that immediately followed." That "period of decline" was the period of modernist photography; the incongruence contrasts the ongoing decline of human history into barbarism with the increasing ability of modernist photographers to use photographic technique for social and political ends. If the first part of the essay is given over to an examination of photography as the representative form of the bourgeoisie in the mid-nineteenth century, the latter half attempts to provide examples of photographic practices that are turned back against the hegemonic class. Two modern photographers are here made to occupy exemplary positions: Eugene Atget emerges as the liberator of the world of things from thrall in which they are held by aura, and August Sander wrenches the representation of the human countenance free from the musty conventions of bourgeois portraiture. Atget's 4,000 images of Paris and its surroundings capture not its beauty or picturesqueness, but its empty spaces and discarded objects. His dispassionate survey of a terrain substitutes for the "exotic, romantically sonorous" texture of early photography a "salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings. " Benjamin's Atget steps forth from his images as a kind of photographic Brecht, able to shake the observer free from the participatory reverie suggested by earlier photographs, and to create, by defamiliarizing the most familiar things, a neutral space for the development of critical capacities. August Sander's photographic practice in some ways parallels that of Atget. He had produced, by the early 1930s, thousands of images of Germans from every social group and employment type. The great taxonomy