Mindfulness Toward Memory in Four Photographic Objects, or How Benjamin's Objects Speak to Us

Jerry Zaslove

Simon Fraser University

I will trace the line of Walter Benjamin's demystifications of violence and memory from several of his meditations in "Berlin Childhood" around 1900 through the "Critique of Violence" to "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility" in order to show the continuity of his thought about art as form of reality that speaks to us as both object and dialectical image of that reality.

Jerry Zaslove is Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Simon Fraser University where he was the founding director of the Institute for the Humanities and the Prague Field School. He is a consulting editor for West Coast Line. His recent publications include "Talking Through: This Space Around Four Pictures by Jeff Wall," a dialogue with Glen Lowry in Locating Memory: Photographic Acts Berghahn Books, (2006); "Geological Poetics" in Unfinished Business, Photographing Vancouver Streets, 1955-1985 (West Coast Line Books, 2006); and "The Reparation of Dead Souls - Siegfried Kracauer's Archimedean Exile," in Exile, Science and Bildung (Palgrave/MacMillan, 2005). The topics of his writings and lectures range from literary modernism to public education and literacy, while his research on photography considers neighborhood mapping projects, as well as works by Alex Morrison and Jeff Wall.