WHAT IS AURA ACCORDING TO WALTER BENJAMIN?

 “Strange web of space and time”   “the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be.” “The moment or the hour become part of their experience-to breathe the aura”. Benjamin: selected writings volume 2.  1927- 1934.

As described by Benjamin, that is the concept of aura. Aura presents itself in still photographs, in arresting moments (released as déjàvu), in the unspoken history of a photograph, (ghosts waiting to be awakened) in its ethnographic markers.  In the latter so much of these can be seen in the film “Nanook of the North”, where images have a relationship to experience, and trace the historical history or the ruins of the event or time.

In the film Nanook of the North, one could look at it today, and see the anthropological or evolutionary events of a people by thesigns and symbols the film exposed that were beneath the seeming banal or mundane snapshots of the film.  Nanook is seen tugging on a line that disappears in a hole in the ice, is one flat scene.  Nanook is seen urgently slicing the flesh of a large seal and eating hungrily. The line is still attached to the animal.

The revelation is that there was a struggle going on under the ice and above the ice.  Nanook won, and the animal is now his food and that of his family.  The information received told of the way the people of the North survived on a daily basis.  These connected scenes/images capture a time, a pain, and desperation, and if youremotions stay with the imagery one could perhaps invoke the smell of fish blood riding on the almost patently cold wind, visible only as much as the fur on Nanook’s headgear flutters, augmenting the stark dramatic, heart stopping beauty of the arctic nature. -“to breathe the aura” That’s the film’s ethnographic aura impressed on the viewers’ consciousnesses.

When we speak of arresting images I believe this is where some of the most riveting auras are experienced in “a strange web of time and space”.  Kathleen Stewart best captions these moments in engaging themes of ‘Shocks and Awakenings,’ to expose aura as a thing lying in a state of arrest until some new image or a passing stimuli invokes the experience. When the affect makes the jump from the unconscious to a new experience based on a past experience; the photographic imagery gains a new layer and a sense of ‘something other’ is felt as a new invocation- an aura comes to bear upon the scene and a new but related emotion is awakened.

In a raw shocking experience the aura is so blazing that it is not grasped or noticed immediately, instead it is seared to the consciousness for a later recovery.

At the scene of a dreadful crime, police pictures are taken for the record.  The surviving victim of such a crime recalls perhaps, only the moment of the painful impact of whatever the crime was, but in review of the photograph shown to them with its history layered and dormant, a small thing as a green car parked under a tree recalls a single moment just before the impact when, “I saw the green car and remarked how green it was for a car” and then, “I felt myself floating.” That’s the aura released from the arresting moment in the photograph. 

A strange nostalgia or memory/or awareness is now present and offers more emotional clarity or further pain. The distance in time and space closes to refresh the history as new evidence of a thing past, yet still present.  Being awake and conscious at the same time is an obligation Cadava says, that is vital for historic recall for the sake of judgment, even after the initial response that shockingly froze the aura.  Elie Wiesel’s book ‘Night,’ brings vivid testimony of this statement for when one reads the book, his aura was clearly unsealed to bring the events of the holocaust and it’s severity to create a new yet informed emotion for the reader, and no doubt released thousands of striking auras for himself as he recreated each scene moment by moment, frame by frame.

Is photographic aura then an {invisible} halo, a chiaroscuro experience in real-time as well as dreamscape? Or is it a marker for history, ethnography, and anthropology? Tangible, yet as frothy as cotton candy in a child’s mouth, a fleeting experience to be repeated ad infinitum.