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We have learned to trust the photographic image. Can we trust the electronic image? With painting everything was simple. The original was the original, and each copy was a copy - a forgery. With photography and then film that began to get complicated. The original was a negative. Without a print, it did not exist. Just the opposite, each copy was the original. But now with the electronic, and soon the digital, there is no more negative and no more positive. The very notion of the original is obsolete. Everything is a copy. All distinctions have become arbitrary. No wonder the idea of identity finds itself in such a feeble state. Identity is out of fashion.

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— Wim Wenders, A Notebook On Clothes and Cities, 1989 (via Just focus)

This statement is from 1989, before the world-wide-web or the first digital camera (The Kodak DCS100) were created. It’s accurate in some ways, though deceptive — the conversation about the aura of an image, particularly in photography and film, is at the center of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin discusses at length implications of originality and the diminishing value of an image as it is commodified and consumed en masse. Unlike Wenders, he doesn’t simply denounce reproducibility, he arrives at a transformation of intent — “the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice — politics.” via commedesfuckdwn, oldworldwisdom)