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The seven essays in Shadows of Reality: A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials provide some terrific reading, not only about Sebald’s photographs and how he used images in his prose books, but how to look at and think about photographs. Shadows of Reality is a scholar’s dream come true. It’s a reference work that fully illustrates and documents every image that was used in the six prose books Sebald wrote which include images. It also reproduces every photograph that Sebald took for which the editors found “any indication” that he might have considered using in a publication, but didn’t, so that readers can better understand Sebald’s decision-making about images. I wrote about this aspect of the book recently, so now it is time to turn to the essays, about which I will write about very briefly.
Nick Warr, Associate Professor in Art History and Curation at the University of East Anglia, has the privilege of writing the opening essay for Shadows of Reality: A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials. “Sebald’s photographs,” he writes, “prefigure, configure, transfigure, inform, reflect, filter, subvert, obscure, and vivify his texts.” Sebald once referred to the images in his books as “tiny pools of timelessness,” and he went on to suggest that images operate like “barriers or weirs which stem the flow” of the texts that surround them. The “work,” Warr writes, that images do on the pages of Sebald’s books, “is to transform the act of reading into looking.” Thus, to consume a book by Sebald is to continually flip back and forth between these two acts.
Warr’s essay provides a theoretical underpinning for coming to terms in Sebald’s texts. He turns to the French philosopher François Laruelle and his theory of “non-photography,” a concept that even he admits is difficult to explain. Warr’s interest here is in the “epistemological misalignment of the images and the prose,” which is a fancy way of telling us what many writers have said—that the images Sebald places in his text often don’t illustrate or explain the writing that surrounds it. Laruelle’s non-photography suggests that this misalignment hints at the presence of an “independent consciousness,” and here Warr refers to something Sebald wrote about an observer who sees not only the characters and the narrator, but also the author himself. Among other things, this results in a form of “double-subjectivity.” So, the remainder of Warr’s essay is dedicated to exploring some of the ways in which this double-subjectivity manifests itself in Sebald’s books. For instance, Warr shows us the times when Sebald seems to map his own biography onto Kafka’s life and the moments when he “re-enacts” his grandfather’s life through several surrogate characters, most notably the writer Robert Walser.
A key point in Clive Scott’s essay, “Writing with Photographs: Sebald’s Art of Mirage,” is that “the meaning of a photograph develops with its use; it is susceptible to every contextual insinuation, to every way of looking at it.” The way a reader apprehends an image in one of Sebald’s books depends in part on whatever is visible in the image (more on that in a moment), on the text around the image (whether it relates to the image or not), and on the slow accumulation of images in the book, which are “constantly re-aligning their kinships and re-inventing their configurative cohesions.” Scott, who is Professor Emeritus of European Literature at the University of East Anglia, was a long-time colleague and friend of Sebald. His intimate knowledge of Sebald’s working methods allow him to write about the decisions that went into image quality, selection, and placement, and about his photographic practices. Scott confirms the widely held belief that Sebald often used mediocre photographs. He not only selected some images because they were mediocre, but he also sometimes instructed photographer Michael Brandon-Jones to make images more so in the UEA darkroom. “The blunting of focus” in a photograph, Scott writes, loosens its “moorings in time,” whereas a more sharply focused photograph stakes a greater claim for now! As Scott points out, Sebald was very careful about the placement of images on the pages of his books. Even the difference in page width and paper quality between German and British editions led him to adjust both image quality and placement. In Scott’s opinion, Austerlitz “is the book in which photography is the most fully integrated as a symptom of narrative consciousness, of its orientations and disorientations, of the way it can open up spaces in time and capture what is multi-dimensional and polymorphic in process of remembering.”
Angela Breidbach’s essay, “W.G. Sebald’s East Anglian Images: The Widening Circle of the Local,” focuses almost exclusively on his book The Rings of Saturn, although she offers up Austerlitz for comparison purposes several times. Breidbach begins by explaining that she will use the term “images,” even though most of them are actually photographs. She deliberately wants to call attention to the transformations that Sebald and Michael Brandon-Jones performed on the original images (whether they were photographs or not) and to the ways in which they appear on the printed pages of his books. While Sebald’s images lack captions, Breidbach, who teaches art in Hamburg and art history at Leuphana University, Lüneburg, wants the reader to think of the surrounding text as their “extended legends.” She discusses at length the iconotextual structure of The Rings and the iconographic program for its images. This is accomplished through a careful analysis of numerous images from the book, as can be seen in the reproduction below of two of the pages of Figures that illustrate her essay.
Gordon Turner was a close friend, colleague, and sometime neighbor of Sebald. He taught for many years at the University of East Anglia and has been creating a Sound and Video Archive for the University of recordings in which Sebald appears. In his piece, “Max (W.G.) Sebald and Photography,” he provides numerous extracts from these recordings “which give a flavour of the various views expressed by Max on photos and photography in particular.” One function of photographs in a text is to “arrest time,” Sebald said in one interview, by “slowing down the speed of reading.” Another function of photographs is to assure the reader. “The reader of fiction wants to, in a sense, be assured in the illusion, which he knows to be an illusion, that what he is reading is not just an invented tale but somehow grounded in a fact. And what better way of demonstrating this than including a photograph.”
Turner also includes quotes from Sebald on specific images from his books. “There is, for instance” Sebald says, “in The Emigrants a photograph of a large Jewish family . . . all wearing Bavarian costume, Lederhosen, Dirndl, the full works and that one image tells you more about the history of Jewish/German or German/Jewish assimilation than a whole monograph could.” In another example, Sebald explains in a public interview how he “doctored” a different photograph from the same book. “I had written this sentence that this hotel on the Normandy coast looked as if it was sinking into the sand and I had a photograph of this hotel which I had taken but, which, unfortunately, there was a street in front of the hotel and there were cars parked in it; so I cut them out with a penknife and so the sand goes right up to the hotel (laughter from the audience).”
The fifth contribution to Shadows, is “A Small History of Re-Photography: A Conversation with Michael Brandon-Jones on the Photography of W.G. Sebald,” a text edited down from several conversations with Nick Warr. Michael Brandon-Jones was a photographer in various departments of the University of East Anglia from 1966 to 2001 and he was responsible for making the black and white prints that were used in all Sebald’s books. In addition to making prints to Sebald’s own specifications from his negatives and color transparencies, he also copied from “library books, microfilm, postcards, photocopies, 16mm movie film, receipts, children’s drawings and an assortment of found photographs gleaned from anonymous family albums and the shelves of junk shops.” Brandon-Jones talks about what it was like to work with Sebald (“he was always very patient”) and answers numerous technical questions relating to various darkroom practices. He tells us that Sebald did “degrade” some of his images, but this was always done prior to the final printing—often in a photocopier—and was never done in the darkroom. After all the work that Brandon-Jones put in for Sebald’s books, he told Warr that Sebald “was a little nervous at showing me one of his books for the first time in case I was disappointed.”
“I first began to read Sebald during the years I worked in the deserts of Arizona as an agent for the US Border Patrol.” So begins Francisco Cantú’s essay “Lines of Sight.” “Sebald’s work, above all else, gave language to how violence had been made normal throughout history, how it had been embedded into our landscape, our cities, our culture, until it became something we breathe in and look upon each day without thinking.” In his essay, Cantú, a writer and translator, recounts a walk he took in which he set out from Dunwich to walk along the Suffolk & Essex Coast of eastern England aiming to find some of the key locations mentioned in Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn. He reports on what he sees, nearly three decades after Sebald walked this way. As Cantú walks, he also ponders over Sebald’s life and books and thinks about where his own life story has crossed the themes of Sebald’s works.
The final “essay” is the documentation of a performative slideshow commissioned by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts as part of its “Artist Interpretations” programs from July 2019. Glen Jamieson’s “When Lightning” demonstrates what can result when an artist (or scholar) is given free rein to roam throughout the Sebald Archive. Jamieson, a photographer from Norwich, noticed the frequency with which bright lights, reflections, or the use of flash illuminates and simultaneously obscures whatever Sebald was photographing. “It remains a mystery to me whether Sebald was conscious or not of the physical and metaphysical limitations and capabilities of using the camera flash.” But once Jamieson put enough of them together in a slideshow, he felt confident that “the images appear to embody a methodology.”
A four-page illustrated timeline that focuses on key events in Sebald’s life and his publications concludes the essay section of Shadows.
Trying to offer my synopses and thoughts on nearly one hundred pages of essays in a few condensed paragraphs is never fair to the richness of the various author’s writing styles and intellectual intentions. My primary goal is to encourage Vertigo readers to get this exceptional and affordable book to experience it for themselves. This is a beautiful and important book, certainly for anyone interested in Sebald, but also for a much wider audience.
Shadows of Reality: A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials. Edited by Clive Scott and Nick Warr. Contributing Editor Jo Catling. London: Boiler House Press & Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2023.
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The Worlds We Want Research Hub invites you to their Summer Showcase and an Artist’s Talk by Karen Stuke.
“STUKE AFTER SEBALD’S AUSTERLITZ: A memory journey with a pinhole camera”
Tuesday 24 June 2025
16.30-18.00
Round Studio
Canolfan y Celfyddydau
Aberystwyth Arts Centre
An installation by Berlin-based photographic artist Karen Stuke entitled “Stuke After Sebald’s Austerlitz” was first shown in London in 2013. Now two of the works can be seen in the “Unsettled Lives” exhibition in Gallery 2 of the Aberystwyth Arts Centre. Stuke uses an extended exposure time and a pin-hole camera to capture the journey stages—including to Bala in Wales—of fictional child refugee Jacques Austerlitz as portrayed in W.G. Sebald’s novel. In the frame of the exhibition: UNSETTLED LIVES: WAR AND DISPLACEMENT IN WALES, curated by Prof. Andrea Hammel.
alierak in dw_maintenance - Rebuilding journal search againbenegenetriivir - Римский папа служил в Ватиканеbenegenetriivir - Вот и всё, что я вынес с этой войныsebald_feed - Sebald’s Shadows of Reality – The Essaysbenegenetriivir - Перс, думая пульнуть в Беэр-Шеву, лупил по Хайфеsebald_feed - Karen Stuke Talks About her Austerlitz Photographs in Aberystwyth, June 24, 2025timeasmymeasurekrja
