On Photography presents a new translation of Walter Benjamin's 1931 essay 'A Short History of Photography', as well as a selection of Benjamin's other writings on photography, some of which are published here for the first time in English.
Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (2000), Hollywood Flatlands: Critical Theory, Animation and the Avant-garde (2002) Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005), and the editor and translator of On Photography by Walter Benjamin (Reaktion, 2015).
