Benjamin & Reproduction

In his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” Benjamin acknowledges that art has always been capable of reproduction. Yet even with this acknowledgement, I feel Benjamin needs to clarify his argument a bit more. When he talks about reproduction he is mostly talking about reproduction of a finished product, and I agree with Benjamin that advances in technology have made it easier to reproduce a finished product such as a photograph or movie. However, Benjamin seems to be contrasting two different things when he compares students copying a master’s work (creating their own copy of a work) and just making infinite copies of a negative print. Thus, really there are two different kinds of reproduction happening here: reproduction of process and reproduction of a finished product.

I wonder whether Benjamin believes reproduction of process is just as easy to accomplish. For example, say somebody takes a picture of a sunset. Instead of merely making a copy of that sunset photo, if another photographer tried to take another picture of that same sunset does Benjamin see this as two distinct works of art or as mere reproduction even though these two pictures would likely be slightly different? Furthermore, is this reproduction of process also as harmful to the other qualities of art Benjamin brings up (i.e. aura)? Benjamin argues that reproduction of a finished product lessens value and decays the aura of a work of art. Yet, if other artists/photographers/etc are all trying to capture the present, aren’t all of these different viewpoints an aid to us as we can gather them and use them to then piece together the “aura” of the object being represented?

These are questions I haven’t formulated answers to but find interesting nonetheless.