It was through her brother, Ernst Joël (1893-1929), that the photographer Charlotte Joël managed to invite Walter Benjamin to her studio at 24 Hardenbergstrasse near Berlin’s Zoo station. The two lived together as young people, and it was through Ernst, who had become a doctor, that Benjamin experimented with hashish, opium and mescaline. These experiments led to the writing of an article for the magazine “Cahiers du Sud”, “Haschich à Marseille”, which is well known in his bibliography. The portrait she presents here is of the usual style: frontal, with no blurring, no pastoral effects, and none of the modernist tendencies that were flourishing at the time (the “Film un Foto” exhibition in Stuttgart opened in 1929, the high point of the New Vision - a major modern movement devoted exclusively to photography in Germany).