Walter Benjamin paid much attention to photography. He saw it as a new medium in that it had the power to redefine the distance between people, and between people and objects. Questions of proximity and distance, integration and alienation, the transfer of concepts and perceptions between people and cultures, the impact of the subjective historical perspective on literary creativity and on the world in general, and no less so the tension between eternity and apocalypse, refined society versus primal forces of violence and destruction – all these make Walter Benjamin an exceedingly relevant thinker at the beginning of the 21st century.