ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author illustrates how Benjamin's and Adorno's engagement with photography and criticism develops over the course of their extensive dialogue about the medium and its function within discourses of (literary) criticism and (political) critique. The ramifications of this exchange within their writings are multifaceted, subtle, and complex, and continue to have an impact on Adorno's work long after Benjamin's death in 1940. The author explores Benjamin's and Adorno's uses of photography as a paradigm of literary representation in their discussion of the works of Franz Kafka. They develop the notion of the writer Kafka as a 'photographer', and of the camera as a perspectival device which allows the translation of experience into the written text. For Benjamin, the interrelations between Kafka and photography also acquires a personal, identificatory dimension which becomes clear in his childhood memoirs. Photography encapsulates a critical stance characterized by a mixture of distance and proximity, objectivity and distortion, intellectual detachment and personal involvement.
