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He had selected thirteen of her photographs and placed them in the archive for his Arcades project.^§MS0b No merely textual philosophy of modernity and theory of history, he had intended the book to be richly visual.

Germaine Krull had been a contributor to Paris-based Vu magazine since its inception, an early example of the photo news magazine, notable for its innovative modernist imagery. Vu’s photographers captured evocative abstracted moments with small hand-held cameras, rather than the descriptive, front-on pictorialism of large cameras on tripods. Krull contributed articles on many of the things that interested Benjamin in his Arcades project: the Paris arcades themselves; iron and steel in architecture and industry; shopping; and street life. Perhaps Benjamin was thinking of a format like Vu for the Arcades book. True to this vision, when an exposé of the project²⁰⁹ and then the full version of his convolutes was finally published,²¹⁰ they were full of images.

Krull had been in the crowd of “women, children, soldiers, intellectuals, workers, all together” who marched on the royal palace in Munich in November 1918, bringing to an end the Bavarian Monarchy. She was close friends with Kurt Eisner, leader of the Bavarian Independent Socialist Republic, the first parliamentary republic in Germany, murdered by a right wing militia in January 1919. When that government fell, she became closely involved with the Bavarian Soviet Republic,^§MS1.1.3h also short-lived. Escaping the conservative reaction, she spent nearly two years in Moscow working for a Soviet photographic press service. She was there in person for Lenin’s five-hour-long speech at the Third World Congress of the Communist International in 1921.²¹¹

During those revolutionary days in Munich she had met and developed a lasting friendship with Max Horkheimer, later a founder of the School for Social Research in Frankfurt, and after that the New School for Social Research in New York, another friend of Walter Benjamin. Krull met Benjamin in 1926, and the two remained friends, staying in regular communication until 1938. There were, said Benjamin referring to Krull and other photographic innovators, “lessons inherent in the authenticity of the photograph … The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever ready to capture fleeting and secret images.” Photography is an “act of unmasking.”²¹²

When she comes to picture them, Krull’s Paris arcades are dark, melancholy places. Once marvels of architectural novelty, pedestrian streets enclosed and covered with steel and glass roofs, by the time she was photographing them and Benjamin was writing about them, they were old, relics of the previous century’s modernity.

Of their past allure, Benjamin said, in the arcades “art enters the service of the merchant.” “The Phalanstery” – a group of people living in a shared utopian community – “is a city composed of arcades … street galleries … The arcade is a street of lascivious commerce … wholly adapted to arousing desires … [T]he commodity proliferates along the margins and enters into fantastic combinations … In this ville en passages,” this city of passageways, “the engineer’s construction takes on a phantasmagorical character.”²¹³ With their glass and steel roofs and pedestrian-only, shop-lined passages, nineteenth-century Paris arcades prefigure certain motifs for Victor Gruen’s considerably larger, suburban “shopping towns” in the second half of the twentieth century.^§AS2.3c

As for the people of the arcades and the city, in 1928 Krull contributed a series of images to a story in Vu on “Tramps in the Lower Depths of Paris.”²¹⁴ She and Benjamin were both interested in the marginal, street-strolling denizens of the commercial city, capturing a critical relation to the commodity in its urban presentation. Benjamin’s emblematic street person was the flâneur, a person who is at once anonymous – “The flâneur seeks refuge in the crowd”²¹⁵ – but at the same time one in a collective, a representative of the mass. “Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally unquiet, eternally agitated being that – in the space between the building fronts – experiences, learns, understands, and invents.”²¹⁶ Sartre spoke in similar terms of the transitory modulations of the collective in the streets of Paris.^§AS1.5

The flâneur has a way of seeing, where the “city appears now as landscape, now as room,” and this “seems later to have inspired the décor of department stores, which has thus put flânerie to work for profit.”²¹⁷ Or beyond reach, the “commodity whispers to a poor wretch who passes a shop window containing beautiful and expensive things.”²¹⁸ “[T]he flâneur becomes attuned to the commodity. … he takes the abstract concept of ‘For Sale’-ness on a stroll through the streets.”²¹⁹ “The flâneur is the observer of the marketplace. His knowledge is akin to the occult science of industrial fluctuations.”²²⁰

No mere flunky of commercialism, the flâneur is equally capable of seeing into and seeing through the commodities on display: “The more conscious he becomes of his mode of existence, the mode imposed on him by the system of production … the less he will feel like empathizing with commodities.”²²¹

Germaine Krull photographed scenes of Paris shopping: in the shop windows, reflected images of the street overlaying the fashions on display; some mannequins woodenly re-enacting life; and other mannequins stripped-naked, commodity-less, starkly waiting to be dressed. These are images taken at the intersection of use value (wish images, embodied aesthetics, culture) and exchange value (the imminent possibility of sale, the reduction of material things to an abstract monetary equivalence).^§AS2.3a But they are not sales images. They are reflections of a transformative moment in the life of a commodity where these things, awkwardly, uneasily, coincide.

Even in his most polished and coherent moments, Benjamin is elusive, which makes a selective reading more than convenient; it is necessary. So this is what we would say for his reading of what Germaine Krull was showing us in the shop windows of Paris: if we perform an act of historical recovery, behind each commodity exchange we might trace a history of laboring, a division of labor and a bringing to market which involves conflicting interests, as between seller and purchaser, capitalist and worker.

Every commodity has a material and social genesis; as do commodities in general, in a broader historical frame. But in the narrowed experience of shopping, the object takes precedence, its allure and the imagination of its imminent use – hence “reification.” Its immediate quantification is price, the most immediate calculator in the lowest common denominator of monetary equivalence.

Now, push the wish-images in commodity aesthetics and we test the constraints of the market, the pragmatics of inequality. The implications, for Benjamin, are revolutionary – a desire for utopia, where the material temptations of the commodity stretch to a breaking point the social structures of inequality. Utopian imagination involves uncovering meanings obscured by reification and commodity fetishism. This he calls “profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration.”²²²

For our grammar of transpositions, we find Benjamin exploring the social history and potential destiny in commodities that are only mundanely material in a first, superficial and reifying glance. We also find him exploring the movement of bodies, laboring to produce, streetwalking to purchase or not to purchase, and mental prefigurations of consumability, the conjunction of (or unaffordable inability to conjoin) use value and exchange value.

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²⁰⁹ Susan Buck-Morss, 1989, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

²¹⁰ Walter Benjamin, 1999b, The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eidland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

²¹¹ Kim Sichel, 1999, Germaine Krull: Photographer of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 18–25; Michel Frizot, 2015, Germaine Krull, Paris: Editions Hazan, pp. 17–19.

²¹² Walter Benjamin, 1931 [1999], “Little History of Photography,” pp. 507–30 in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, edited by M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 526–27.

²¹³ Walter Benjamin, 1939 [1999], “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” pp. 14–26 in The Arcades Project, edited by H. Eidland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 15, 17; Walter Benjamin, 1999b, The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eidland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 42.

²¹⁴ Michel Frizot, 2015, Germaine Krull, Paris: Editions Hazan, p. 96.

²¹⁵ Walter Benjamin, 1939 [1999], “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” pp. 14–26 in The Arcades Project, edited by H. Eidland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 21.

²¹⁶ Walter Benjamin, 1999b, The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eidland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 422.

²¹⁷ Walter Benjamin, 1939 [1999], “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” pp. 14–26 in The Arcades Project, edited by H. Eidland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 21.

²¹⁸ Walter Benjamin, 1938 [1999], “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” pp. 3–94 in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, edited by M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 32.

²¹⁹ Walter Benjamin, 2003, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 208.

²²⁰ Walter Benjamin, 1999b, The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eidland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 427.

²²¹ Walter Benjamin, 1938 [1999], “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” pp. 3–94 in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, edited by M.W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 33.

²²² Walter Benjamin, 1929 [1999], “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” pp. 207–21 in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, edited by M.W. Jennings, H. Eidland, and G. Smith, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 209.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 255–258. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Germaine Krull’s Shops of Paris §AS2.3e