Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" holds up the popular cultural object of industrial capitalism against the art object. The industrially produced object of mass consumption is popular, egalitarian and, hence, potentially democratic. Moreover the object of mass consumption accords with a mode of life in which distraction has taken the place of contemplation, displacing the reflective apprehension that the aura of the art object demands.

Eugene Atget, Mannequin, 1927

As photographs, being mechanically reproduced, cannot be said to have a unique or original existence, so a photograph cannot have an aura. The photograph is a print made from the same negative.

For Adorno, modern art cannot be understood apart from commodified popular culture: Adorno writes that the modern art object and the commodified popular cultural object are like two "torn halves" that do not amount to a whole. What is disclosed by photography is the identity the modernist art object in terms of originality and authenticity.

Adorno writes in AestheticTheory:

The simple antithesis between the auratic and the mass-produced work, which for the sake of simplicity neglected the dialectic of the two types, became the booty of a view of art that takes photography as its model and is no less barbaric than the view of the artist as creator. It is of interest that initially, in his "Small History of Photography," Benjamin in no way pronounced this antithesis as undialectically as he did five years later in his essay on reproduction. Whereas the later work adopted the definition of aura word for word from the earlier one, the early study praises the aura of early photographs, which they lost only with the critique of their commercial exploitation by Atget. This may come much closer to the actual situation than does the simplification that made the essay on reproduction so popular.

The role of the photographic object is linked to the historical development of modern art. Often this relationship is interpreted as the overthrow of art by photography in the sense that the arrival of photograph frees painting from an increasing demand for "photo-realistic" representation whilst photography is freed from being merely a better representation than painting.