When photographs begin to be evidence in the historical trial

Benjamin is one of the rare philosophers whose writing emerges from the visual. Most of his writings, including those who do not deal directly with visual questions, contain traces of a gaze and of images or objects. However, almost all of Benjamin’s texts were published without the images to which Benjamin referred or those quoted in his writing. This is true for earlier as well as for later editions, for journals as well as for books. In other words, most of the visual quotes have been erased. Even the texts Benjamin published during his lifetime, including those that explicitly grew out of visual materials or were directly related to them, usually appeared in a regular textual format without the accompaniment of photos. This, I believe, amounts to a publication of a piece of literary criticism without the quotes from the interpreted text. And in most cases the interpreters are not even aware of the fact that the text in front of them is actually incomplete.