[1] Born to a Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main, Kracauer studied architecture from 1907 to 1913, eventually obtaining a doctorate in engineering in 1914 and working as an architect in Osnabrück, Munich, and Berlin until 1920.

Kracauer continued this trend over the next few years, building up theoretical methods of analyzing circuses, photography, films, advertising, tourism, city layout.

[3] His essays in Ornament der Masse shows Karacauer's fascination with popular culture, particularly within the capitalist society of the United States.

In a contemporary review of Die Angestellten, Benjamin praised the concreteness of Kracauer's analysis, writing that "[t]he entire book is an attempt to grapple with a piece of everyday reality, constructed here and experienced now.

In the last years of his life Kracauer worked as a sociologist for different institutes, amongst them in New York as a director of research for applied social sciences at Columbia University.

[7] Photography can also work to record time in a linear way, and Kracauer even hints that floods of photographs ward off death by creating a sort of permanence.

Photography allows for a depth of detail that can be to the advantage of a collective memory, such as how a city or town once appeared because those aspects can be forgotten, or overridden throughout time as the physical landscape of the area changes.

[7] Although he wrote for both popular and scholarly publications throughout much of his career, in the United States (and in English) he mainly concentrated on philosophical and sociological writings.

He had long ago abandoned writing in German, yet his research remained difficult to place within American scientific and academic categories.