Introduction

           It has been forcefully argued that modernity’s project was most effectively achieved through the privileging of ‘sight’ and that modern culture has, in turn, elected the visual to the dual status of being both the primary medium for communication and also the sole ingress to our accumulated symbolic treasury (Jenks 5). The modern period is considered as a ‘seen’ phenomenon. Sociology however, itself in many senses the emergent discourse of modernity, has been rather neglectful of addressing cultural ocular conventions and has subsequently become somewhat inarticulate in relation to the visual dimension of social relations

           Due to the previous of works of different individuals in the past, people in the modern world are being more knowledgeable and comprehensive in viewing different perspectives including the contemporary visual culture. One of the most recognized individual who had become famous because of his significant literary pieces is Walter Benjamin. In his classic literary piece, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", 1936, which argued for the epochal significance of the mechanical means of modern visual reproduction (from lithography to film), Benjamin highlighted the material role of mass mediation as a modern invention and drew attention to the ideological performance of images in the politics of modern culture. Benjamin's premise was that the development of the mechanical reproduction of images undermined the "aura" of the cult image, that is, its uniqueness and authenticity. Fascinated as a Marxist by the decay of proprietarily status that the democratizing power of mechanical reproduction entailed, Benjamin theorized that the uniqueness or essence of the original cult age was eliminated as the object was replicated and appropriated to contexts for which it was not originally intended. Deprived of its sensuous presence and its authorization in the religious rite, the authenticity of the work of art was compromised. Benjamin believed that mechanical reproduction would liquidate heroes; myths, gods, and cult figures, since reproducing them in film eliminated the "traditional value of the cultural heritage" by adapting the image of the original to the period and place of subsequent viewers.

           Primarily the main goal of this paper is to assess the significance of the study made by Walter Benjamin regarding photographic image in the understanding of the contemporary visual culture. This paper will try to discuss the concept of contemporary visual culture and link this to the perspective of Walter Benjamin.

The Concept of Visual Culture

           It is said that vision comes before texts. An individual, specifically, a child looks and recognizes before it can speak. However, there is also other sense in which seeing or perceiving comes before words. It is the kind of seeing which creates an individuals position in the surrounding world; it is explained that world within texts or words, but texts alone can never undo the fact that people are bounded by it. The link between what people see and what people know is never settled (Berger 7). Any effort to institute a social premise regarding visuality seems to be hindered by paradox. Within the Western society, it comes to regard sight as providing the immediate access to the external world. But beyond this, and perhaps because of this belief, visual ability has become conflated with cognition, and in a series of very complex ways. On the one hand, vision is lionized among the senses and treated as wholly autonomous, free and even pure. Yet on the other hand, visual symbols are experienced as mundane and necessarily embedded, and their interpretation is regarded as utterly contingent.

           Conversely, vision is lionized among the senses and treated as wholly autonomous, free and even pure. Yet on the other hand, visual symbols are experienced as mundane and necessarily embedded, and their interpretation is regarded as utterly contingent. Looking, seeing and knowing have become perilously intertwined. Thus the manner in which different individual have come to understand the concept of an ‘idea’ is deeply bound up with the issues of ‘appearance’, of picture, and of image. The content and form of things is to be approached in terms of how they ‘look’. Modern power has the deft touch of a ‘look’ in interaction. It no longer requires the hard-edge and the explicit realization of the ancient regime, through a ‘look’ it can absorb all and do so without being noticed, or say all without ever revealing its true intentions. Modern power is pervasive, though not omnipotent, because it cautiously acts on and in relation to the sceptic regime; but it is not in its sway. The ‘gaze’ and the conscious manipulation of images are the dual instruments in the exercise and function of modern systems of power and social control (Barnard 116).

           The term visual culture initially arose out of efforts to revive and update the scholarly discipline of art history in the 1970s. The art historian Svetlana Alpers is generally credited with coining and disseminating the term ‘visual culture’ to give a name to the context of ‘image-making devices’ and ‘visual skills’ of a particular culture as they impinged upon the making of art (Evans & Hall 212; Walker & Chaplin 65). Art historians recreated cultural contexts in order to illuminate what remained central to their quest: the works of art (Clark 105). Later writers of the 1980s and 1990s, by contrast, increasingly questioned the centrality of ‘Art’ and turned their attention to the context for its own sake.

           In the 1990s and early 2000s, a growing number of books, journals, conferences and new academic departments have transformed visual culture from a context or subtext into the central field of inquiry, incorporating the term in their titles. These initiatives herald a new commitment to the category of visual culture. However, it is a category that is still in flux and has not yet (some may argue, fortunately not yet) resulted in any stable definitions or disciplinary demarcations. Writers on visual culture share an allegiance to the multidisciplinary and multi-medial character of the field; however, in other respects they can diverge widely.

           Further, visual culture’ is a term used conventionally to signify painting, sculpture, design and architecture; it indicates a late-modern broadening of that previously contained within the definition of ‘fine art’. Broadening this designation further we might suggest that ‘visual culture’ could be taken to refer to all those items of culture whose visual manifestation and appearance is an important feature of their being or their purpose (Barnard 220).

           Some writers apply the phrase ‘visual culture’ to all visual aspects of culture. They use it as an umbrella term to signal the broadening of the range of objects beyond the established categories of fine art and habitually produce lists of the various images and media that include film, television, video, advertising, photography, fine art, design, and digital imagery (Sturken & Cartwright 65; Carson & Pajaczkowska 119) Other scholars avoid the taxonomy of objects and argue that the new field of visual culture is less about artifacts than about the connections between and across various cultural practices of meaning making.

Walter Benjamin and the Visual Culture

           "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", which is written by Walter Benjamin in 1936, is a seminal essay. It puts popular culture on the map by singling out what makes it structurally and socially distinct from other kinds of high art. By focusing on the technology's transformation of the methods of production and reception of art, Benjamin creates a set of standards by which to judge popular culture on its own terms. Before it, writers on aesthetics considered mass culture a deficient version of classical art. After it, even those who disagreed with its proposals had to take popular culture seriously--at least on the level of intellectual argument. In his essay, Benjamin brings to light many of popular culture's implications for political life, implications that are more fully drawn out in the essay following. It was Benjamin thesis in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" that just as the infrastructure of capitalist society is constantly transformed by technological development, so is the superstructure, the difference being that the pace of change is slower in the super- structure (Benjamin, 217).

           The recent technology of mechanical reproduction has inaugurated a new epoch in sense perception analogous to that brought on by the printing press. Benjamin's models were radio and newspaper, film and photography, because they were the most advanced instances of the trends he was describing. Since the processes he distinguishes, however, persist into the present, our examples will not be limited to what was available to Benjamin.

           Benjamin's brief survey of past techniques of mechanical reproduction (coinage, woodcutting, lithography) should not detain us as much as his central trope: the aura. The aura of a work of art is its presence in space and time, its distinctive existence at the place where it happens to be. Authenticity is one meaning of aura. Mechanical reproduction's indiscriminate replication of the art object, its dispersion of it into "a plurality of copies," dispensed with authenticity as a measure of value or even a meaningful concept in art. It did this by destroying the work's temporal and spatial individuality, by causing it to lose its context and 'place on line' in the continuum of tradition (Ridless & Lang, 3). No longer moored to a specific physical location, the work of art could be activated through its image in places having nothing to do with its origins, usual environs or customary social uses and receptions.

           The rise of mass culture thus coincided with the propagation of countless simulacra of precious works of art as well as their free-for-all dissemination to the public. Benjamin calls mechanical reproduction's influence on classical culture "a far-reaching liquidation." This liquidation or "catharsis" came about as a result of culture coming to be composed of free floating images that could be concatenated without regard for received meanings or past affinities. The technique of radical juxta-positioning, as practiced both by the early twentieth-century Surrealism and modern-day advertising, is ultimately the exploitation of a license inherent in culture's material construction. To differentiate the new art from the irreplicable art of the Classical era, Benjamin invents the concept of the aura (Benjamin 218). Aura that mysterious sense of presence that an image often possesses when it is wrapped in the mantle of rite, reputation, or cultural prestige, vanished with the rise of mechanically reproduced images, according to Walter Benjamin (Morgan, 339). The cult status of Benjamin's essay has only encouraged the ease with which his thesis has been accepted by people interested of art, film, and modern visual culture. The significant investigation of the past or history of photography has been regarded by literary scholars who discovered in Benjamin one of the useful connections between photography and text required to position their work within the rapidly expanding field of cultural studies. Walter Benjamin writes that the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction loses its aura of originality, of genius, through its sheer re- producibility (Benjamin, 220). But he finds that early photographs transferred "cult value" from works of art (which are only valuable as "originals") to human faces: "The cult of commemoration of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture" (226). It seems to me that he makes a mistake in limiting the cult value of portrait photographs to the early era of photography, for the idolatry of human images persists even now, both in the adoration of loved ones and in the worship of celebrities (Mitchell, 91). Benjamin apparently distinguishes between early portrait photographs of loved ones and "the cult of the movie star," which does not "preserve” the unique aura of the person but the 'spell of the personality,' the phony spell of a commodity" (231). In addition, Benjamin clams that our perception of the image depends on our associations with the subject pictured. Yet the fascinating aspect of photographic portraits lies in how sensations of "knowing" can be conjured for those we do not know, and the sense of longing can be aroused in us for those who are neither absent nor dead. The body's image, in other words, projects both familiarity and distance, no matter who is pictured. When a human body is infinitely reproduced and disseminated in photographs, the body's aura grows as more and more people see the photographic image. The body is the original, fully imbued with the power of authenticity through its existence as model for copies.

           Since photography arrests the flow of life and creates memorials to moments, persons, and objects, the medium was from the first associated with death; early photographer Hippolyte Bayard enacted this when he took a photograph of himself as a drowned man, and consumers of photographs clearly understood it as well, as evidenced in a nineteenth-century enthusiasm for photographs of the dead. The posing of daguerreotypes during the early days of photography involved the use of a brace to force the subject into absolute stillness, and the combination of such devices with a stifling bourgeois decor, arranged and controlled by a Rasputin-like photographer, led Walter Benjamin to compare the studio to a torture chamber (Benjamin, 261).

           Further, the use of photographs in the service of bureaucracy introduces the threat of surveillance. Walter Benjamin had lived under the eye of dictatorship, which employs photographs in the oppression of the individual: the identification papers, the passport and the records of the secret police. For this author, photographs of him would serve as incriminating evidence—and not surprisingly, they exclude photographs from their autobiographies. Benjamin erases traces of his photographed physiognomy.

           In dealing only with absent photographs, however (and this is important), Benjamin acknowledges the referential power of photograph. Walter Benjamin remove this photographed images from the public eye, but they retain references to photography and photography's influence; Benjamin structures his autobiography in "images," alluding to his theory that history is experience in photographic flashes of that conjoin and illuminate past and present experience (Rugg, 195). In addition, Walter Benjamin contemplates photography at a meta-level, not as photographs but as the idea of photographs. In his writing, the photographic idea becomes the determinant metaphor for aesthetics, politics, and history in the twentieth century. Where ancient people read stars, entrails, and runes, modern people read mechanically reproduced images.

The Contemporary Visual Culture

           Modern artists are progressively generating works that imitate the fashion photography, which was derive from television, or otherwise striving to contend with the creation values of the contemporary visual culture. Herein, the academic and notional argument of the modern art as a cultural practice is still principally dependent on old-fashioned notion that the concept of "art" describes itself in crucial resistance with mass culture. The gap between the authenticity of the sensibility of the artist and the conjectural tools of most of the art criticism recommends that the comprehension of the link visual culture and the fine arts requires a main theoretical renovation to become more in maintaining with what's actually happening. The revisiting aspects of the 20th century or contemporary art that gives a standard for modern movements, and that have been methodically excluded from the convention of what has come to be known as modern art history, is a useful place to begin (Anderson 21).

           The historical and significant discussion of contemporary art that has been developed with modernism in concepts and the advanced ideology at its core does not have the ability to seek for a place in its premise for that visual creation that shapes the engagement with the contemporary life thru emblematic imagery or an animated dialogue with the mass media. However, such creation is indisputably new in its visual contexts and needs a conceptual discussion that involves the link between the visual culture and the fine arts in its popular, commercial and vernacular materialization. There has to be a means to consider seriously early 20th century visual contexts of reactions to contemporary life which were not solely involved with either exceeding it in favor of a general language of concept or notion or with radical political exclusion. When the plan of visual modernism is reconsidered with these works supporting the familiar coordinates of concepts and ideologies and the advanced notion, the landscape of the modern art will be fundamentally reconfigured to involve works whose visual types adheres to the 20th century modernism, but which draw on visual customs outside of the fine art (Mirzoeff 215).

           The visual figures of the modern world, fine art and commercial alike, have been reconfigured by the historical viewpoint of photographic images and the study of Walter Benjamin. For Walter Benjamin, if the notion that the same people made important contributions to both commercial realms and the fine arts in the early 20th century looked like a radical concept, this is due to the premise that the act of connecting the visual culture to fine art was perceived as transgressive. The utilization of photographic imagery for commercial and visual purposes already had an established a good reputation, and the movement of images back and forth across the borders of fine and commercial art produced a pattern for a the same migration of forms of masterpiece’s composition, presentation, and communicative rhetoric (Sturken & Cartwright 215).

           The misuse of photographic imagery and sketches that occupies the pop art and then postmodern works of art are just a part of an extensive history of such alternatives, each with its own historical charges and features. The major analysis of the assortment of substances in photographic images is that it kept so nearly to the history of advanced or modern art and graphics. With such an approach, there exists the risk of repeating the errors happened within modern art history and emphasizing the extremist forms, arithmetical tendencies, and photographic modernism that attributed an essential strain of design. But it allows aside the illustrational piece that characterized prominently in product and ad campaigns done in the modern of the period (Osborne, 3) In effect, the study of photography by Benjamin makes a bid for the art status of graphic design and, in so doing, truncates the field along lines quite similar to those established by canonical modernism. Since much of that work shows up in venues other than that of poster art, such as the papers of contemporary magazines, it would have required an unwieldy expansion of the exhibition to include them. But it would be regrettable if the heterogeneous spectrum of graphic design history were reduced to those strains that originate within the gene pool of high modernism just at the point when contemporary visual culture is being challenged to expand above those artificial limitations.

           Nevertheless, the optimism of the curators seems a bit overstated: the incorporation of the history of graphic design into modern art history is still a highly elusive and controversial goal. It can be argued that the history of visual culture needs an artificial integration of the work in graphic design, imagery in advertising, editorial, and commercial contexts, into the history of fine art. The dialogue that artists themselves have with these varied histories and visual vocabularies could be better understood by enlarging the scope of modern art to include visual culture broadly defined (Osborne, 21).

           All throughout the historic features of the modern visual culture, whether separated from the onset of different ideologies of romanticism, impressionism, or early 20th century activities, the identity of art practice has been intimately surrounded by mass culture. Keepers of the flame of critical modernism cast this relation as a type in which visual culture is the privileged term in any opposition like high or low, elite or popular, authorial or industrial, and they carefully guard the distinctions between them.

           But the complex nature of the relation of fine art to mass-media imagery requires a more subtle characterization of the interlinked identity of the two domains. Modern visual culture and art has become intensively dependent on media culture, and on the appearance of visuality produced within mass media, for its vocabulary of images. The tail of flue art no longer wags the monster dog of commercial production, and thus it seems urgent to develop the historical comprehension of this relationship by looking more carefully at those materialization of contemporary visual culture that can help lay the critical groundwork for a nuanced discussion of this relationship in terms not circumscribed by a disdainful dismissal of the early twentieth-century dialogue of modern art and mass media (Barnard, 65).

           In the willingness to perceive in the most precise and detailed way at the work of the contemporary, and at the masterpiece of graphic design, including other areas and aspects of modem visual culture, a primary understanding of these forces will begin to emerge. These are the forces that shape our current lives, and ignoring them in the designation of an elite critical stance of aesthetic negation and an embrace of the esoteric features of early modern art and the avant-garde is something we do only at our peril.

           It has been noted that, different registers of the visual were engaged to target heterogeneous audiences: scenes of the mining settlements were circulated in print culture, but not in the elite forms of exhibited paintings. There were numerous exchanges between the visual domains of photography, tourist picture postcards, and paintings. Whereas art-historical accounts tend to foreground painting, assigning tourist materials to a discrete area called ‘context’, the emphasis here on the reciprocities between media and the historical specificity of pictorial visuality for artists and audiences assists an understanding of the continuum as well as the distinct registers of visual culture.

Conclusion

           Analysis shows that through the study made by Benjamin, people have been able to understand that the concept of the contemporary visual culture depends on how an individual interpret the image. In addition, with the exceptional essay of Walter Benjamin entitled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, has been known to be a milestone in comprehending and understanding the effects of this technological transformation and changes of the importance of the image, now known not just a representation of the real but a producer of a new reality, a sur-reality, i.e. the image in its pure and simple form.

           The visual image of today’s generation are perceived and recognized as having it own features, and status together with the materials presence. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) produced some of the twentieth century's most provocative and influential analyses of photography as medium and metaphor. The importance of Benjamin's writing on photography, particularly the literary piece, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction", has been widely acknowledged in order for our modern world to fully understand the concept of contemporary visual culture. Benjamin left us a series of words "to learn to read”. Death, corpse, decay, ruin, history, mourning, memory, and photography: Words of Light puts each of these Benjaminian motifs through its paces to reveal not only its pervasiveness within Benjamin's writings on history and photography, but also on literature, autobiography and material culture more generally. Fragmentary encryptions within Benjamin's legendarily fragmented oeuvre, these words form the basis for a series of meditations that traverse the modern and the postmodern, the Marxist and the mystic, the apocalyptic, and perhaps even the redemptive. Thus it seems especially significant that Benjamin appears as a "sophisticated" theoretician of nineteenth-century visual culture.

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