Walter Benjamins early attempt to understand a still young technology, remarkably prescient and topical even today.



The illiterate of the future [] will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph. Benjamins essay, published in two parts in the periodical Literarische Welt in 1931, was one of the earliest essays on this technology and precedes his better-known essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction(1935).