Aura and Authenticity

After moving into my Lafayette dorm room and unpacking all of the basic essentials (clothes, food, school supplies, toiletries, and more food) I found myself somewhat excited to decorate my room with the posters I brought from home. But why? Technically they are just enlarged images, and beyond their aesthetic appeal what warrants this feeling of excitement?

As I write this blog entry and admire my various posters (one of the TV show Entourage, one for The Dark Knight, and a Lupe Fiasco "The Cool" album poster) I realize that these simple and mass produced images take on a completely different meaning within my own perspective. In a sense they have become images of my own making. The Lupe Fiasco poster will perhaps best describe this idea.

The poster is simple. It is black and white with 3/4 of the space used up by the enlarged text of "Lupe Fiasco, THE COOL, In Stores Now", and the rest of it showcasing 3 images stripped from the album artwork. In terms of acting as a "decoration" it's dull colors and heavy use of text don't really bring much to the table. If someone else were to admire it they'd probably have trouble understanding its appeal considering the many tears the poster has endured, as well as the fact that it is truly just a blatant advertisement. To me, however, I feel as certain connection to the poster, and not simply because it is for my favorite rapper.

The tears, for example, only exist because I ripped it off of the wall of a club where I went to a Lupe concert in Washington DC. When viewing the poster and seeing its tears I am immediately brought back to the time in which i captured the poster. That thought, in turn, reminds me of how after the concert my brother and I got lost in a pretty rough part of DC at 2 in the morning on a school night. What I'm trying to get at, is that the poster/image acts as somewhat of a vehicle for me to re-experience the crazy time I had at the Lupe concert.

Thinking about this reminded me of our our reading on Walter Benjamin and his discussion of aura and mechanical reproduction. Benjamin argues that "one-of-a-kind artwork has a particular aura... [and] the authenticity of the aura cannot be reproduced" (196, Practices of Looking). When Benjamin discusses this it is originally regarding images in photography, however the same applies to the poster as a whole. For a photo, this aura resides in the time and place of its creation: where the picture was taken, at what moment it was taken, and the experience of the person taking the photo. For me, this same aura exists within my poster. Seeing the worn poster with its tears and peeling reminds me of the circumstances of when I captured it, as one would capture an image with a camera. Additionally, the poster keeps its "authenticity" because its particular aura has not been reproduced. For example, if someone were to give me a new copy of the exact same poster I would not so easily associate with the concert because the tears and peels would be absent. Additionally, even though the poster itself was mass produced and many copies of them exist, the authenticity pertains solely to the meeting of the image with the admirer. In a sense, I have taken a mass produced image and identified a unique and original aura within it. This process, I believe, is one that is common in the age of mass media when almost every image is mass produced.