Bazin and the Immortality of Photography

First of all, I was really interested in the link between the language of Bazin and that of Benjamin. Bazin writes that "in achieving the aims of baroque art, [the invention of] photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness." For Bazin, prior to the onset of mass reproduction in the form of photography, art had a duty of replication, of manifesting reality. Benjamin also speaks of mass reproduction as freeing art of its previous obligations. Benjamin discussed how mass reproduction, in reducing the aura and cult value, emancipated art from its ties to ritual and tradition. It is interesting to me how both of these descriptions depict mass reproduction as freeing art of obligations it acquired in the absence of other media, and how through the development of these media, the so-called "plastic arts" were able to return to their essential purposes. For Bazin, photography enables plastic arts to regain their aesthetic autonomy...however, why can't painting and sculptury have the autonomy to create reality? The first counterexample that comes to mind, though this is by no means a perfect counterexample, is Michelangelo's "David." The two occasions on which I have been lucky enough to see the statue, I am in awe of how realistic the muscles and contours look; it seems to me there is merit to human hands replicating the work of a machine, the camera being a machine. Granted, Michelangelo carved David long before the age of mass reproduction, but the fact that we are still in awe despite the prevalence of photographs says something, to me.

I had a few issues with the role of time in Bazin's observations. He writes that "photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its propery corruption." Though I am not entirely sure of what he is saying, I understood the distinction as photography embalming a real moment in time whereas art creates an artificial immortality, "create" being a key word in this distinction. But for me there is a problem with this formulation. Yes, the moment itself that a camera renders permanent is "embalemed," but this moment merely becomes the subject, or in Barthes-speak, the studium?, of a photography which is itself immortal. Do photographs, as artifacts, not have the same immortality of paintings and sculptures?