The Image Arrived First
- Aug 12
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 20
An artwork’s image may live with us for years before we stand before the work itself. What, then, are we seeing for the first time?
From the Mona Lisa to a Chanel show, much of what we encounter now reaches us first as an image. If a physical encounter follows, the image has already circulated through books, advertisements and screens. This order now feels ordinary. In 1928, however, Paul Valéry imagined it before the means to make it ordinary had fully arrived. Radio was still finding its place in domestic life; television had yet to enter most homes.
Valéry saw works of art reaching us on demand. They would no longer remain in one place. Their images and sounds would travel, appearing at a gesture and disappearing just as easily. He called his essay La Conquête de l’ubiquité (The Conquest of Ubiquity).
The Image Comes Home
In The Conquest of Ubiquity, Valéry wrote:
“Works of art will acquire a kind of ubiquity. Their immediate presence or their recovery from the past will obey our call. They will no longer exist only in themselves but wherever someone with a certain apparatus happens to be.
They will become no more than sources or points of origin, their benefits available in full wherever we wish. Just as water, gas and electricity come from afar into our homes to meet our needs with almost no effort on our part, so we will be supplied with visual or auditory images, appearing and vanishing at the slightest gesture, almost at a sign.
Just as we have grown accustomed, if not enslaved, to receiving energy in various forms in our homes, so we will find it perfectly natural to receive these very rapid variations or oscillations, which our sense organs gather and integrate to form all that we know. I do not know whether any philosopher has ever dreamed of a company for the home delivery of Sensory Reality.” Translated from the French for Magelier.
The “certain apparatus,” the obedient image and the slightest gesture needed to make it appear or vanish all sound familiar now. The smartphone is the obvious comparison. Yet Valéry’s larger insight concerns distribution. He saw culture entering the home as a utility: produced in one place, received in another and available with almost no effort. The painting could remain on its wall while its image entered another room. A performance could end while its sound remained available.
Valéry’s wording also carries a warning. We would grow accustomed to receiving this supply, he wrote, “if not enslaved” to it. He does not take the thought further, but access may already have become something we no longer know how to do without. In 1935, Walter Benjamin began considering what this new form of access might do to the work itself.
What Could Not Travel With It
Benjamin had read Valéry closely. In a later version of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, a passage from Valéry appears before Benjamin’s own text begins; the comparison with water, gas and electricity returns in the opening section. The epigraph ends: “We must expect such great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an astonishing change in our very notion of art.”
Paul Valéry 
Walter Benjamin
Valéry followed the image as it travelled. Benjamin stayed with what could not make the journey.
For Benjamin, the accuracy of the copy was only part of the issue. Technical reproduction allowed a work to leave the conditions in which it existed. A photograph could take a fresco out of its chapel; a recording could carry a performance beyond the room in which it was played. Its visible or audible form travelled, while the original’s particular presence remained behind: its place, its history and its distance from the viewer.
Benjamin brought these conditions together in the idea of the aura. The word can suggest a mysterious glow, but his meaning was less mystical. Aura belonged to the work’s unique presence, to its existence here rather than elsewhere and to the history gathered around it. Distance, in this sense, was not simply an inconvenience to be overcome. It formed part of the encounter. Valéry described a work that would obey our call; Benjamin considered what might be lost in that obedience.
The Image Before the Object
Meeting a copy before an original is not new. Prints carried paintings across borders, and illustrated books introduced readers to objects and places they might never visit. The difference now lies in the frequency, speed and reach of that first image. For many of us, reproduction has become the usual way an encounter begins.
Before entering the Louvre, most visitors already know the Mona Lisa’s face, pose and expression. They may also know the protective glass, the raised phones and the crowd gathered around her. The encounter arrives with its own image already in place. What remains unexpected may be the painting’s size, its enclosure or the difficulty of looking at it without also watching everyone else look.
The same expectation precedes a fashion show, an exhibition or a building. A single runway frame may define a collection before the final model has appeared. A frequently published photograph can determine the view we search for when entering a place, leaving everything outside its frame to be discovered later, if we notice it at all. The image does more than preserve an encounter. It begins to tell us what to look for.
Benjamin often read broad cultural shifts through ordinary details: passages, shop windows, photographs and objects that had fallen out of use. They showed him how people looked, desired and moved through a city. Today, the image itself offers similar evidence. It often reaches us before we have decided what to look for.
Has the Aura Disappeared?
Benjamin’s argument is often summarised as a steady decline: reproduction increases and aura fades. But the abundance of images may also make us more conscious of what an image cannot carry. It can give us colour, form and a chosen view; it cannot give us a painting’s scale in relation to the body, the weight of an object or the effort required to reach it.
These limits don't return the work to a world before reproduction. They mark where the physical encounter departs from the image that prepared it. If something of the aura remains, it may be found in that difference: between what the image allowed us to recognise and what the work can reveal only in person.
Valéry foresaw images arriving at the slightest gesture. Benjamin recognised that their arrival would alter the works they carried. We now live within the system they described, but reproduction has become so routine that its place in the sequence is easily overlooked. It no longer waits for the encounter. It arrives first.
If we have seen something hundreds of times before standing in front of it, when do we meet it for the first time? Only when the work makes us realise that we had never really seen it at all.