Walter Benjamin on photographic melancholy

The goal of this article is to analyse the different meanings of melancholy in photography following Walter Benjamin's book Kleine Geschichte der Photographie. The main idea that I am going to develop is that, following Benjamin's text, there are three different ways of understanding melancholy in photography, even if we understand melancholy just as a lost or a missing phenomenon. Firstly, photography is considered by Benjamin as a melancholic phenomenon because it shows a temporal loss: the course of time is unstoppable, even if images try to fasten time. Secondly, Benjamin introduces Barthes later concept of punctum in his book La Chambre Claire: photography would be melancholic because it would be a kind of premonition able to foresee the destiny of its characters. Thirdly, Benjamin shows that not only photography but also the history of photography is melancholic, because its history does not follow the theory of progress but is determined by the loss of aura.