Is it possible for photographers to work in terms of dialectical images? These would be images that embody contradictions within them because they are sediments of history:

aerosol, originally uploaded by poodly.

The concept of dialectical images is associated with the work of Walter Benjamin, particularly his Paris Arcades project and begins with photography reflecting on history in which n rescue and redeem these desires and impulses from within a tradition in which “progress” and “catastrophe” are deeply intertwined. Benjamin sifts through the ruins of the arcades to see in their decay the traces of failure alongside the traces of hope; and above all, how the two are dialectically related in the visual culture of commodity capitalism. For Benjamin, the dialectical image is one that has “movement at its interior. ”

The general understanding of a dialectical image for Benjamin is that evanescence—the decay of material reality as it is lived in time—is accurately transfixed; and yet, in being so held back from time, it is sublated in a sense of acute historical crisis. Benjamin's concern is to dissipate the illusion of continuity in history, and that it is possible only if the past and the present are polarized, that is, if the past puts in critical condition the present.

Benjamin's specific point of view is to seek the future in the past by deciphering the history of culture in which in which traces of the past continue to persist within the ever-changing present. This involves “brushing history against the grain” so that we can awaken from the dreamworlds of commodity culture.