Three classic essays (“A Brief History of Photography”, “Paris - the Capital of the Nineteenth Century”, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility”), united by the theme of the changes that occur in art when it goes from unique to mass and replicable. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) proposes to look at this process not from a conservative position, but, on the contrary, to see in its origins new forms of social existence of art, a new anthropology of the “mass spectator” and a new communicative function of art in the space of the bourgeois world.