Photography reveals mass movements more clearly than direct vision does.

Evidence

Mass movements are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by the naked eye. A bird’s eye view best captures gatherings of hundreds of thousands. And even though such a view may be accessible to the human eye as it is to the camera, the image received by the eye cannot be enlarged the way a negative is enlarged. (Benjamin, 1968:244) From this perspective the medium and the message are important if we are to understand the dynamics of these movements. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2543

Categorization

• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone interested in media theory — Benjamin’s crisp line on why cameras, not eyes, made Nazism’s mass character newly visible.