"Image," "flash," "capture," "picture," "crystallize," "development." Photographic language and allegory permeates much of Walter Benjamin's philosophy. Apart from the essays dealing specifically with the emerging new media of photography, photographic themes and motifs are echoed virtually throughout Benjamin's entire oeuvre - the Theses themselves and One Way Street are snapshots in prose, the Arcades Project a linguistic photomontage. Most significantly, Benjamin utilises this language of photography to express his philosophy of history.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again (247). It is interesting to note that it is not the past that flits by, but a picture of the past; what threatens to disappear is not the past but an image of the past.

Benjamin suggests that the movement of history is neither linear nor successive. It is fragmentary and discontinuous, created by dialectical images. Benjamin rejects the notion of a historicism that presumes a true history present at all times in an "'eternal' image of the past" (254). In Thesis XVI, Benjamin proposes that the leap from predetermined history into a 'true' history takes place where time has come to a stop. In this condensation of past and present into a monad, time is no longer continuous but spatial.

This movement of history corresponds to the photographic event. The photographic image captures in space that which is transient in time. The photographic image is "dialectics at a standstill" (N; 49). In Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Cadava suggests that the radical temporality of the photographic structure coincides with what Benjamin calls a "caesura in the movement of thought" (67), and announces a point when "the past and the present moment flash into a constellation" (61). This moment interrupts history and opens up another possibility of history, one that spaces time and temporalises space. With this force of arrest, the image translates an aspect of time into something like a certain space, without stopping time and without preventing time from occurring (61). The arrest of history takes place only under the gaze of the historical materialist; the arrest of the photograph takes place only under the gaze of the photographer and camera.

Benjamin's belief in the crystallising potential, the possibility existing in every moment for the messiah to enter through the straight gate seemed to significantly propel his interest in the dynamics of photography. As mentioned earlier, much of Benjamin's works are attempts to recreate the arresting moment of the photograph in prose. As he puts it in A Short History of Photography, a viewer is always drawn to the possibilities within a photograph with an "irresistible compulsion to seek the tiny spark of accident, the here and now" (202).

Suzana Kukucka