Photography as a “Space of Experience”: On the Retrospective Legibility of Historic Photographs

Abstract

The historian and theorist Reinhart Koselleck, having posited a distinction between “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation,” has suggested “that during Neuzeit (literally “new time,” the period since ca. 1500) the difference between experience and expectation has increasingly expanded; more precisely, that Neuzeit is first understood as a neue Zeit from the time that expectations have distanced themselves evermore from all previous experience.” The temporalization of the arts was not without consequences for the pictorial representation of history: in the history painting, the “space of experience” becomes visible as the past. Against this backdrop, and drawing in detail on the thinking of the Weimar-era writer and theorist Siegfried Kracauer, the following essay is an inquiry into the historiographic potential of photography. As fixed evidence of a past world, every historic photograph is a record of survival. The photographic “space of experience” radicalizes the tendency toward temporalization that Koselleck has described as a characteristic of Neuzeit. The finality of the past corresponds to the temporality of the photographic image: photography constantly produces that which is past. The visual “space of experience” does not recreate the past; on the contrary, it is the visible evidence of its being over.

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