I felt as if I had a good grasp of Douglas Crump’s argument because he frequently alluded to the ideas presented by Walter Benjamin in Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. But it all seemed to come together in the Sherry Levine story. Sherry Levine took pictures of an already famous series of photographs by Edward Weston. The photographs were of his young son. She showed them to her friend, who said that “they only made him want to see the originals.” She then replied, “and the originals make you want to see that little boy, but when you see the boy, the art is gone” (98). The point of the anecdote is that the “use value” of photography, to continue in the Benjaminian framework, is in the representation of the object rather than the original form. Although the little boy is the authentic form, the art is in the photograph—a copy of the original form. All other mechanical reproductions of his photo move further and further from his authenticity as a person. Walter Benjamin claims that photography is revolutionary because it removes the work of art from the aura. He describes aura as the quality of a piece of art that is derived from its unique existence and contextualization in a particular place and time. A photograph, Benjamin claims, cannot have an aura because it is never an original. Crump nuances this idea and argues that although an original photo does not have an aura, it has a presence. He describes presence as “…a kind of increment to being there, a ghostly aspect of presence that is its excess, it supplement” (92). The presence of a photograph is derived from the exact opposite reasons that an original painting has an aura. A photo demands a presence because there is no original. Crump says of postmodernists, “The extraordinary presence of their work is effected through absence, through its unbridgeable distance from the original, from even the possibility of an original” (94). Postmodern photographs are legitimated by their presence because there is no point of reference to which they are confined. This is to say that the art is in their depiction of reality rather than the authenticity of the object of the photograph.