1Looking at tiny things often requires adjusting the whole body: stopping and stooping, bringing the objects in the palm of the hand or between the fingers to the eyes and squinting at them, crouching at the magnifying glass or the eyepiece of a microscope. Such scoping gymnastics may be the reason why many think of miniatures as cancelling out our quotidian world and as a gateway to a universe liberated from the constraints of our material existence. For Gaston Bachelard, the canonical case in point of such dissociative understanding of the miniature, “[t]he man with the magnifying glass – quite simply – bars the every-day world” to indulge in solitary reverie (Bachelard 155). Similarly, for Susan Stewart, the miniature as a metaphor for interiority “does not attach itself to lived historical time [and] makes everyday life absolutely anterior and exterior to itself” (Stewart 65). By disconnecting the minuscule cultural form from life, both authors make way for close reading of poetic narratives of microworlds, and it is indeed literary descriptions stimulated by (imaginary) entrances into the miniature that they primarily attend to. Situating the miniature into a dreamy ahistorical and asocial space, however, bypasses the human mesocosm. More precisely, the human scale that used to serve to define both microscopic and macroscopic dimensions is erased by a compatible dichotomy of the miniature and the gigantic, reminiscent of the traditional microcosm-macrocosm analogy. The miniature can easily become the gigantic and vice versa in an abstract play of relations.
2Within this framework, the miniature object can easily slip through and become overshadowed by its lateral forms: the microscopic and the paratextual. Although both Bachelard and Stewart discuss reduced-scale objects such as toys, models or souvenirs, their understanding of the minuscule is often derived from the enchanting experience of microscopy, of seeing the invisible through magnification and enhanced resolution. Hence the emphasis on fantastic and detached worlds that are inaccessible to us except for heavily mediated glimpses that work as excellent catalysts of imagination. But the miniature is not microscopic. There is a difference between something being miniature (very small, tiny, minuscule) and something being a miniature (scaled-down, reduced, miniaturized). Whereas microscopic realms need to be enlarged and enhanced in order to become visible, the miniature typically rescales an already existing and visible model and the experience of the miniature is largely determined by seeing something known but in an unusually small size. While Bachelard tends to focus on the microscopic and Stewart places more emphasis on the miniaturised, both authors somewhat blend these two realms or, more precisely, experiences of the very different kinds of the miniature when e.g., playing with toys is framed as taking place in a dreamy, nostalgic, and more or less detached microcosm. If we conflate the two, we might lose sight of the specific material, historical and social practices of miniaturization that take place in the world occupied by our bodies and collectives, and of a more practical kind of imagination used to fashion individual identity and negotiate one’s place in the wider social fabric. The understanding of the miniature in both authors is largely metaphorical and directed at literary, poetic narratives of it. The miniature is most certainly embedded in discourse that guides its understanding and use, but those discursive practices can be of very different kinds, from poetic, instructional, or consumerist to technical, operative, and infrastructural. If we take into account paratextual practices of naming, labelling, and annotating and understand them as kinds of metadata miniaturizations, the miniature could be seen as a means of intervening into and coping with the everyday world rather than just escaping it.
3One of the examples given by Bachelard of the literary miniature is the “botanist’s daydream” (Bachelard 153), in which a minute, objective description of a plant gradually gives way to a psychological account of fanciful comparisons, conjuring up images that “no longer correspond to any sort of reality” (154). Here, the miniature (a flower observed under a magnifying glass) serves as a trigger for exuberant narration portraying a phantasmatic universe (in which seeds swing like children in a hammock and pistils are like little women, humble but with great authority at home). For Bachelard, the botanists’ vision becomes relevant only when they stop being botanists and regress into a childlike state of naïve amazement (the viewer of the miniature shrinks to a child). But we could also read the botanist’s likening of the flower to a household and the personification of its various parts and organs as a metaphorical description of their functions and relations, in other words as a narrative model of the plant. After all, the botanist’s observation of a particular flower under a magnifying glass is aimed at acquiring a generalized picture by means of various discursive and graphic strategies or by combination of both.
4The miniature does not rescale reality only in terms of size, as it simultaneously mediates between the specific and the generic. As Stewart noted in relation to its temporal character: “The miniature offers a world […] frozen and thereby both particularized and generalized in time – particularized in that the miniature concentrates upon the single instance and not upon the abstract rule, but generalized in that that instance comes to transcend, to stand for, a spectrum of other instances” (Stewart 48). The botanist’s daydream becomes embodied in a graphic and discursive figuration that combines and synthesizes various views of the flower in one single image according to taxonomic identification, thus corresponding to a more generalized sort of reality.
- 1 Although the book is best known in English as The Savage Mind, I share the reservations of Jeffrey (...)
- 2 The situation can be much more complex: In the film Maladie d’amour (Jacques Deray, 1987), Nastass (...)
5Claude Lévi-Strauss used one such illustration in his Wild Thought.1 The famous book features various figures and data visualizations such as charts, maps, graphs, and diagrams to represent abstract relationships and structures, some of them designed by Jacques Bertin’s graphic laboratory that helped to define the visual language of structuralism (Campolo 2020). However, the book does not use only data visualizations to render imperceptible phenomena intelligible but employs also a more subtle and cunning way of presenting conventional pictures. In the chapter “The individual as species” Lévi-Strauss tackles the fuzzy boundary between proper names and generic or species names with special emphasis on Brassica rapa, a turnip-like root vegetable. Lévi-Strauss discusses what the name Brassica rapa refers to, whether to an individual specimen or to the species, and how scientific nomenclature relates to other forms of name giving. He demonstrates that “in a large number of societies proper names are formed in the same way as the natural sciences construct the names of species” (Lévi-Strauss 227) if we understand them as part of a signifying system. In other words, botanists name their species and parents name their children in a similar, systematic way. We either class and classify the person/animal/plant with their name or we class and classify ourselves through naming them – or, most often, we do both things simultaneously as Lévi-Strauss exemplifies with his analysis of naming pedigree dogs and dog pets.2
- 3 Perhaps understandably so in the early 1960s but less so in our present age when (especially in th (...)
6Here and there Lévi-Strauss deviates from the systematic aspects of language to its pragmatics, e.g., when he notes that “[w]e do not use scientific nomenclature to enter into a dialogue with plants and animals” (Lévi-Strauss 229-30). But he quickly adds that some priests speak to plants, and moves on to borrowing plant names to address human beings. Although he tacitly assumes that (modern) people do not give proper names to plants, do not communicate with them, in other words, do not individualize them as singular beings,3 his examples show that there is a very fine, culturally and historically volatile difference between naming things and speaking with them.
- 4 Here is the illustration in the original edition (Paris: Plon, 1962): https://archive.org/details/ (...)
- 5 The “truth-to-nature” regime of vision or objectivity according to Lorraine Daston and Peter Galis (...)
7Lévi-Strauss supports his argumentation with a Brassica rapa picture taken from Edmond Lambert’s Traité pratique de botanique from 1883.4 I intentionally say supports rather than illustrates because, frankly speaking, the reader does not need to see the turnip at all for the sake of the argument. Lévi-Strauss does not even comment on the image as he is concerned with different attitudes to botanical nomenclature; our eyes notice the picture on the page almost incidentally, in passing. Its insignificance reinforces its message; the image is a rhetorical figure that suggestively displays “the individual as species.” For Lambert’s picture is a graphic illustration, not a photograph: it shows what seems like one example of the plant, but it is not a particular or individual specimen but rather an idealized type or model.5 It represents all plants of the given species that ever grew, grow, or will grow. When made, a botanical illustration often combines features from several individual plants or even different phases of the organism’s development to make it recognizable through its family resemblance. Lévi-Strauss cleverly plants the unnecessary picture in front of our eyes to observe what we could not ever see in a garden or at the greengrocer’s.
8The biological taxon is a miniature of the population of organisms that are phylogenetically related and share common characteristics. Such a taxon or taxonomic unit is usually known by a particular name: labelling qua classifying reduces the diversity of individuals (from their appearance to genetics) to conjure up a new, abstracted entity readily transformed into culture. With the idealized illustration, we acquire a visual model of a group of organisms as part of a coded hierarchy of nature.
9The very first image to appear in Wild Thought is a photographic reproduction of the Portrait of Elisabeth of Austria by François Clouet (c. 1571, Musée du Louvre).6 After discussing the differences between scientific knowledge and magical thinking, between engineers and bricoleurs, Lévi-Strauss turns to art as a field located midway between these forms of knowing and making things. “Let us now look at this portrait of a woman by Clouet, and ponder the reasons for the very deep aesthetic emotion aroused, it seems inexplicably, by the reproduction, thread by thread and with a scrupulous trompe-l’oeil effect, of a lace ruff,” begins Lévi-Strauss who continues: “The example of Clouet is not chosen at random, for we know that he liked to paint smaller than life-size: his paintings are thus – like Japanese gardens, miniature autos, and ships in bottles – what in the language of the bricoleur are called ‘scale models’” (Lévi-Strauss 26-27). In the French original, Lévi-Strauss uses the term modèle réduit, English translations work with “scale model,” “reduced model” or “miniature.” For Lévi-Strauss, the scale model is a universal type of a work of art; most artworks are reduced-scale models, and the intrinsic aesthetic quality and virtue of art is derived from the reduction of dimensions. The reduction does not concern only size; even life size or enlarged representations give up certain dimensions and qualities of the original object. The miniaturization or reduction in scale or properties has certain aesthetic and epistemic effects: rather than proceeding gradually, from one part to another as we do when wanting to know the real object, the scale model presents itself to us as whole, substituting sensible dimensions with intelligible dimensions. When quantitatively diminished, it becomes qualitatively simplified. Next to this reversal of the process of knowing, the model also manifests itself as artificial or fabricated, thus making it possible to know how it was made. It transforms the original into its human made homologue, which we can handle, manipulate, and exercise power over.
10The lace ruff in the Clouet painting that Lévi-Strauss focuses on exemplifies the nature of the artwork as a scale model:
“Everything I have said applies here, since in order to represent it as a projection in a property-space with smaller and fewer sensory dimensions than those of the object, it was necessary to proceed in a way symmetrical to and inverse from that which would have been taken by science if it had set out, as is its function, to produce – rather than reproduce – not only a new piece of lace in place of one already known, but also a real piece of lace instead of one in a picture. Indeed, science would have worked on the scale of the real, but by inventing a lacemaking machine, while art works on a reduced scale with a homologous image of the object as its goal” (Lévi-Strauss 29-30).
11The painting of the lace collar is not its replica or a technical plan; it accentuates some parts and properties of the original while synthesizing them with properties of the context; the collar is rendered in proportion and in relation to the face, hair, dress and jewellery of the sitter providing a balanced unity of artificial and natural structures and natural and social events.
12When we glance over the Clouet portrait while reading Lévi-Strauss’s narrative, everything seems to make sense. But we should notice that what we are looking at is a photographic reproduction of a painting that has been printed in a book. It is black and white, reduced in size and, most importantly, it is only a detail of the original work. Lévi-Strauss reduces the painting to present it as a reduced model, he miniaturizes it to make it look like a miniature. This is not solely a question of size; one could speculate that Lévi-Strauss opted for the detail to get a 1:1 reproduction of at least a part of the original 36x26 cm painting according to the format of the book. This seems unlikely, of course. Photographs naturally rescale things and the enlargement of a small detail only reinforces the sense of its smallness. Lévi-Strauss does not comment on the character of the figure again, as if it was a transparent stand-in for the original that is now in the Louvre. But it has been modified: both the cropping of the image and the narrative focus our attention on the lace collar. This close-up reading complicates the premise of Lévi-Strauss’s argument: “Contrary to what happens when we seek to understand a thing or an entity in its real size, with a scale model the knowledge of the whole precedes that of its parts” (Lévi-Strauss 28, emphasis in the original). Is the Clouet painting a scale model of the lace collar or rather of Elisabeth of Austria, a human being and a Queen of France?
13The emphasis on and interpretation of the lace ruff is rather peculiar. These delicate collars that evolved from small fabric ruffles at the neck of the shirt are not simply the elaborated edges of the textile. Instead, from mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century they became separately constructed and changeable pieces of cloth signifying wealth and social status. The lace ruff is already a kind of (textile) miniature itself. As if Lévi-Strauss mobilized a whole chain of miniaturizations: the ruff, the painting of the ruff, the reproduction of the painting of the ruff. While the ruff and the painting are handmade, the reproduction is made by a technical apparatus. In effect, this particular scale model comes in a large number of copies. Lévi-Strauss also speculates that science could produce a lacemaking machine, as it indeed did. The mechanization of textile production was the first and major stage of industrialization; framework knitting was adapted to lacemaking in the early 19th century with the bobbinet machines invented by John Heathcoat in 1808. Their point was, however, not only to produce “a real piece of lace instead of one in a picture” but to produce real pieces of lace in large volumes and in multiple copies. It is not a coincidence that in his Pencil of Nature, the first commercially produced book illustrated with photographs, William Henry Fox Talbot included a photogram of lace as Plate XX.7 The machine-made lace is presented in a machine-made image as a negative, as Talbot stresses in his commentary:
“In taking views of buildings, statues, portraits, &c. it is necessary to obtain a positive image, because the negative images of such objects are hardly intelligible, substituting light for shade and vice versa. But in copying such things as lace or leaves of plants, a negative image is perfectly allowable, black lace being as familiar to the eye as white lace, and the object being only to exhibit the pattern with accuracy” (Talbot, unpaginated, emphasis in the original).
14Talbot’s contact print is accurate in size but reduced in terms of black and white or greyscale monochrome range: it doesn’t represent a particular object but rather an abstract pattern, giving up some of its sensible dimensions for the sake of intelligibility.
15It is not only the treatment – the modification and interpretation – of Clouet’s painting that I find interesting but also the very choice of this particular artwork. I would argue that, rather than the painting as such, the main reason for including it in Wild Thought was indeed the lace collar depicted in it, an example of skilled craftwork to be compared only a few pages later with a carved Haida cedarwood club used to kill fish (the club is from Lévi-Strauss’s collection, reproduced in whole and detail in photographs by Huillard). The intricacy of the miniature lace evokes nostalgia for skills that are waning in the industrial age. But the detour or diversion via an artistic masterpiece exhibited in the Louvre is telling. Lévi-Strauss himself said that the “example of Clouet is not chosen at random, for we know that he liked to paint smaller than life-size…” François Clouet succeeded his father, Jean, as portraitist to the French court where he executed oil paintings as well as miniatures, earning reputation as one of the great miniature painters of the sixteenth century. Although smaller than life-size, the Portrait of Elisabeth of Austria is not, technically speaking, a miniature. Even if Lévi-Strauss wants to see it primarily – and reductively – as a homologue of the lace ruff on the queen’s neck, we should also acknowledge his somewhat passing reference to the tradition of miniature portraits, emerging among the sixteenth-century English and French elites. It might lead to a different understanding of a scale model, one that is not based on a reproduction and reduction of some original but rather on its social, cultural, and economic functions. Portrait miniatures were not only small pictures, but also portable objects used for exchange and circulation in various situations, from intimate and diplomatic to bureaucratic contexts.
- 8 There is a vast body of literature on portrait miniatures; my reading here is informed specificall (...)
16Miniature portraits are material things, objects to be looked at but also to be touched, handled, worn, collected, and interacted with.8 Their thingness is emphasized by mounting them in cases, frames and lockets that are often adorned with jewels and inscribed with mottos, symbols, and emblems. The miniature portrait is a three-dimensional object composed of disparate and often luxurious material components rather than a flat image. This causes its specific affordance: one does not simply observe it but must view it up close while holding it in the hand after removing it from a pocket or opening the medallion. The portrait miniature is a secret: it can be overtly worn on a necklace, bracelet or pendant, as a brooch or hung from a ribbon, integrated into a set of jewels or some utility artefact such as a snuffbox or a watchcase… so everyone can see the object but not necessarily the image itself, which has to be disclosed and shared, if the wearer pleases so. While strangers might not know who exactly is depicted in the miniature, the owners nevertheless demonstrate their affective engagement with someone and can casually caress or tightly grasp the locket, openly or covertly. This double in/visibility of the miniature allows for an intricate play of demonstration or hiding of the sentiment, depending also on whether it encapsulates a picture of a secret lover, official partner, or a noble patron.
17Portrait miniatures, often made in small number of copies, entangled the intimate with social as well as economic relationships. Already in the seventeenth century, some were stripped of their casing to be displayed in semi-private cabinets as part of painting or medal collections, arranged to demonstrate family trees and kin relationships. These proxies of absent and remote persons (distanced by death or physical or social constraints) can be understood as fetishes, not only representations but material surrogates that can be actively used to engage in, control and act upon the relationship. Miniatures are brought to life by their users and, in turn, enliven them. Simultaneously, the wearers display their social and emotional status, just like we do today with pictures that have migrated from wallets to the screens of smartphones or even to the skin as tattoos.
18The miniature is typically understood as a minor branch of portrait painting – the category itself is a reduced model of the portrait genre. The reduction implies a heightened mobility and circulation; the miniature portrait is not so much a reduced model of the sitter as a reduced model of the (real or hypothetical) larger painting hanging on the wall. Consequently, to borrow the terms of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari from their discussion of minor literature (1986), it deterritorializes the dominant codes of portrait representation by operating directly in society. Instead of merely representing, it foregrounds the materiality of the image-object, suppresses the artist-maker in favour of the model who presents their semblance as a gift and opens up the way to a non-hierarchical proliferation of self-made copies that expands from the field of high art into the wider social, cultural and economic fabric. The miniature transferred portrait painting from the realm of representation to the realm of logistics. The portrait-object was thus part of a broader tendency toward “the portability of interiority” (Park) alongside letters or novels that came in a smaller format of books, often in duodecimo-sized volumes.
19The larger history of miniature painting is framed, on the one hand, by book illumination (the somewhat confused etymology leads to the Latin minium, a red lead pigment used to mark particular parts of manuscripts such as paragraph signs, capitals or headings as well as small illustrations and decorative drawings) and, on the other hand, by photography which replaced miniature portraiture in the nineteenth century.
- 9 This move involves not only images as plane reductions of three-dimensional objects but also three (...)
20The transition from painting to photographic portraits was not direct but rather mediated by several more or less provisional techniques that mechanized portrait making and relocated it onto the plane of the cheap and numerous.9 The so-called silhouettes (Rutherford, 2009), profiles or shades were painted on ivory, porcelain, paper, or glass or cut from dark paper and pasted on a light background. They required only short sittings and could be easily produced in multiples. In 1783-84, Gilles-Louis Chrétien invented the physiognotrace, an instrument designed to trace a person’s profile and to reduce it in size with the help of a pantograph. These semi-automatic machines would trace the contours on a folded paper to produce multiples or would be attached to an engraving needle to produce aquatint prints. The vogue of profile picturing was stimulated not only by the desire to emulate elite practices but also by the necessity to orient oneself in the new and confusing urban environment crowded with strangers and to (re)define one’s identity: Johann Kaspar Lavater’s physiognomy provided the method of reading one’s character from their outer appearance. The simplified and abstracted profile silhouette, which stripped the head of its transient features to reveal the underlying shape of the skull, developed simultaneously with a hermeneutic technique that read meaning back into it. Just like the traditional portrait miniatures, the silhouettes were idealized and typically complimentary, serving self-glorification and affirming the social status of their subjects.
- 10 The translation of Freund’s book uses the French spelling of physionotrace rather than the English (...)
21In her 1936 dissertation, La Photographie en France au XIXe siècle, Gisèle Freund pointed out the relationships between silhouettes, physiognomy tracing machines and photography in terms of their political and social significance. In the book’s 1974 expanded version, Freund emphasizes that miniature was “one of the first portrait forms coveted by the bourgeoisie for the expression of its new cult of individualism” (Freund 10) and understands physiognotrace as the symbol of transition from the old regime to the new. The cheaper and faster mechanical technique of imagining that supplemented and gradually overshadowed painting was itself soon replaced by photography: “Although the physionotrace had nothing to do with the technical development of photography, it can be argued that it was its ideological predecessor” (18).10
- 11 Ingrid Vermeulen’s (2010) study of the emergence of the illustrated history of art affirms Jonatha (...)
22Similarly, photographic reproductions of artworks were preceded by a rich and heterogeneous culture of graphic reproduction that inevitably reduced originals to generalized impressions by erasing their particularities, such as texture, colour, or the character of brushstrokes. We should not judge this culture by the availability of photographic and photomechanical techniques as it involved a significantly different understanding of what an image is. Print collections and illustrated books in the second half of the eighteenth century often preferred reproductions to originals because larger numbers of representative artworks could be brought to one place and communicated to the readers. Descriptions and annotations coincided with reproductive prints as well as with more mechanical methods such as the tracing of the outlines of small-scale artworks or details of larger works.11 This “transmuting of famous works of art into a series of black-and-white patterns” (Symmons 592) was extremely popular at the turn of the nineteenth century: for example, Goethe called for outline engravings to accompany verbal descriptions and so furnish readers with better experience of the pictures: “It would thus be very desirable if the owner would publish reasonably sized and exact outline engravings of the pictures […], by means of which anyone not fortunate enough to see the pictures themselves would be able to test and assess what we have said so far” (Goethe 145).
- 12 Benjamin reviewed Freund’s published dissertation favourably and appreciated especially the inclus (...)
23Freund started working on her dissertation in Frankfurt under the guidance of Karl Mannheim and Norbert Elias; when facing possible arrest because of her activities in anti-Nazi protests she escaped to Paris in 1933 and continued her doctoral studies at the Sorbonne, supervised by Charles Lalo who held the chair of aesthetics. She forged a close friendship with Walter Benjamin and also took the famous portraits of her fellow exile in the Bibliothèque nationale.12 Her pioneering thoughts on photography were fuelled also by her experience as a practicing photographer. For example, she was commissioned by André Malraux to photograph a Mexican sculpture for his Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale and presented him with a series of photographs from different angles and under different light conditions to demonstrate that one object can look, in a photograph, as several different objects and to prove his point that a photograph can systematically alter the original artwork:
Photography has not only altered the artist’s vision, it has changed man’s view of art. […] Reproductions in art books change according to the scale of the reproduction. An unusually enlarged detail distorts the overall effect of the sculpture or a painting; a miniature can seem as large as Michelangelo’s David in Florence. In his Musée imaginaire, Malraux asserts that ‘reproduction has created fictitious works of art by systematically falsifying scale…’ (Freund 95).
24The problem of the miniature is addressed by Freund only in the early chapters of the book, in the context of bourgeois portraiture. It is understood as a specific, minor art genre thus overlooking the fact that all photographs are scale models (this point resurfaces explicitly only in the quoted passage on the reproductions of artworks). Benjamin likewise touched upon the issue in relation to reproductions rather than photographic views. In his Paris Diary, he records a visit to the bookshop of Adrienne Monnier (Freund’s dissertation publisher) on February 4, 1930. His entry is worth quoting in extenso:
I […] found myself fascinated to see how eagerly she leaped to the defense of photographs of works of art – an old bête noire of mine. At first she seemed struck by my statement about how much easier it was to ‘enjoy’ a painting – and especially a piece of sculpture, and even architecture – in a photograph than in reality. But when I went on to call this kind of preoccupation with art impoverishing and nerve-racking, she resisted. ‘Great creations,’ she said, ‘cannot be thought of as the works of individuals. They are collective objects, so powerful that a condition of enjoying them is to reduce them in stature. In the last analysis, the methods of mechanical reproduction are a technique for reducing them. They enable people to obtain the degree of domination over the works without which they cannot enjoy them.’ In this way I exchange a photograph of the vierge sage of Strasbourg, which she had promised me at the beginning of our conversation, for a theory of reproduction that may be even more valuable to me (Benjamin, “Paris Diary” 348).
- 13 It is not a coincidence that Holmes chooses these Roman monuments, “colossal” in their size and hi (...)
25This diary entry found its way into Benjamin’s first essay on photography, the “Little History of Photography” from 1931. He repeats that great works of art were transformed by the techniques of reproduction so they can “no longer be regarded as the products of individuals; they have become a collective creation, a corpus so vast it can be assimilated only through miniaturization” (Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” 523). Mechanical reproduction, the transformation of an object into a large number of more or less identical versions of that object is simultaneously a technique of miniaturization, diminution or reduction of that object (Benjamin’s German terms are Verkleinerung or Verkleinerungstechnik). In his later writings on reproducibility, the aspect of miniaturization disappears or gets at least overshadowed by the emphasis on accessibility, manipulability, and mobility of images. Miniaturization does not entail only the reduction but simultaneously the multiplication of its object and thus a transition from a specific to a generic kind of object. “There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed, – representatives of billions of pictures, – since they were erected!” (Holmes 747-748).13
26Benjamin’s “Little History” is itself a miniature: both of the history of photography and of the later “Artwork essay(s)” (similarly, Benjamin conceived of his book on Baudelaire as a miniature model of the “Arcades project”). In the text, miniaturization refers not only to the technological process that oscillates between enlargement and reduction (the maximization of production through the minimization of production costs and formats), or to the regulation of overwhelming affect through filtering and compression (thus making it contagious and diffusive), but also to a technique of attentive reading, stimulated by the optical unconscious and directed at the details and fragments, at “the smallest things – meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable” (Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” 512).
27Here, Benjamin seems to allude to the evocative and magnifying kind of miniature reading that we have already seen in Bachelard: Blossfeldt’s plant photographs reveal to Benjamin ancient columns in horse willow or a bishop’s crosier in the ostrich fern (512). Such immersive contemplation of the miniature always requires certain kind of optics or attention: “Attention by itself is an enlarging glass,” says Bachelard (158). An entrance into the microworld could be provided by a diverse number of material or imaginary instruments, from zogroscopes to stereoscopes (Pietrobruno), that would bestow extra volume and resolution to the barely perceptible and induce verbose narratives of its inner structure, akin to the romantic tradition of reading ruins and fragments. The photographic miniature is thus particularized, in the already historical form of the daguerreotype or through supplementary viewing devices.
28But towards the end of the essay, Benjamin envisions a different form of miniature paratextuality: “The camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret images whose shock effect paralyzes the associative mechanisms in the beholder. This is where inscription must come into play…” (Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” 527). The viewer’s perception is blocked rather than mobilized and must be guided by labels, captions, and annotations that simultaneously attach images together to produce larger sets, clusters, and classes of images in order to extract information from them. As Allan Sekula already claimed, the ceremonial presentation of the bourgeois self is inextricable from the instrumental realism of photographic archives (Sekula). It is possible to identify processes of miniaturization within the field of photography – the shrinking of images and cameras as part of their technological development and standardization (Pietrobruno; Wiedenmann) – but I would suggest understanding all photographs as miniatures or reduced models, more precisely as elements produced by and producing concatenated operations of miniaturization and reduction within which each miniature is further miniaturized. In our current visual culture, the problem of image reduction shifts from physical size to pixel resolution, where it is again the minor image that incites exchange and circulation at the expense of representation (Steyerl). The mobility and portability of such images is enabled by machine-readable metadata, which represent the complexity of images in a simpler form, serving as their miniature models that build up our massive, instrumental, and generic visual culture.