Written in exile and revised three times between 1935 and 1939 by a man who would be dead by 1940, at the French border, holding papers that were not quite in order.

He needed a word for the thing a painting has that a photograph of the painting does not, and which is not any property you could photograph. He took aura.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935–39 (Zohn)

The argument runs from there. Reproduction detaches the object from the tradition that held it. The copy travels, and meets the beholder halfway, in the beholder’s own situation, on a schedule that suits them. What cannot be reproduced is the authority of the thing — and authority, once it is not scarce, stops being authority and becomes one more property that can be specified.

The essay exists in three versions. The English text quoted for forty years is a translation of the last of them. In 2008 a new edition put the second in front instead, as its title piece, on the grounds that it is the more expansive. Which text is the essay is an editorial decision, and it has been taken more than once, by different people, after his death.

The essay on the authority of the original exists in three versions. Nobody can say which one is the work.