In his aggressive commentary on photography at the opening at Salon de 1859, Baudelaire seems to depict a self-portait of an anti-bourgeois aesthete. Nevertheless, Baudelaire’s position regarding photography is ambiguous, and must be understood in the context of his paradoxical admiration for modernity and hatred for progress. By reading this commentary, I intend to demonstrate the important role it plays in Baudelaire’s theory of the imagination, and to show how it can reveal a certain blindness of poets and literary scholars vis-à-vis new technologies of image (re)production.
Baudelaire; Photography; Image; Poetry; Media