Walter Benjamin

In his 1930s essay on mechanical reproduction, Benjamin used aura to describe the unique presence and authority of an original artwork. He argued that photography and film changed art by making reproduction central to modern culture.

The Arcades Project was Benjamin's vast study of 19th-century Paris, commodity culture, and modern city life. He was still working on it while fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe, and it remained unfinished when he died in Portbou in 1940.

Benjamin was closely associated with figures such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, even though he never fit neatly inside the Frankfurt School. His essays combine Marxism, Jewish thought, literary criticism, and media theory in a distinctive way.

Theses on the Philosophy of History, written in 1940, is the central short text for that topic. It includes his famous image of the angel of history and rejects the idea that history automatically progresses toward improvement.