The most famous image of philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin was taken by German photographer Germaine Krull in 1926. Around this time Krull was more preoccupied by machinery and metal structures than portraiture, while Benjamin was beginning to examine the 19th century Parisian origins of modern consumer culture. At the intersection of their interests were the city’s covered arcades or passages which, then around a century old and fallen far from fashion, presented a sorry spectacle. A series of photographs taken in 1928 shows Krull drawn to their dramatic lines and gloomy dishevelled allure, while Benjamin famously used his thoughts on these early temples of bourgeois materialism as the starting point for the Passagenwerk (Arcades Project), a vast collection of quotations and written fragments which remained unfinished at his death in 1940.
Further reading
Tiergarten
