EVERYONE IS PRESENT In this fascinating portrait of a family, Terry Kurgan, a well-known South African artist/photographer, uses the medium of writing for a series of meditations on photography that give us startling insights into how photographs work: what they conceal, how they mislead, and what provocations they contain. Each essay takes up the thread of the story of her own family’s epic journey across Europe as they flee – country by country – Nazi occupation and eventually reach Cape Town, South Africa. It is a powerful,
Everyone is Present By Terry Kurgan Publisher: Fourthwall Books ISBN: 9780994700964
intimate and beautiful portrait of a family,
was to become one of the greatest atrocities of the twentieth
and an important historical document of
century, my grandmother was fucking Doctor Lax. He is the
a time that should never be forgotten –
man in the photograph and that child is my – then, four years old – little mother,’ writes Kurgan. But, as her mother Leonia
both their journey and their years in South
is still alive, and was involved to an extent in the creation of
Africa, which she shared in an interview
masks a secret. A secret that is too big for this page.’
with Creative Feel’s Lore Watterson.
‘M
the book, Kurgan doesn’t reveal everything. ‘This photograph Upon Kurgan’s grandmother’s death, her mother Leonia packed and emptied her parents’ house. Among the personal objects that Leonia preserved were her father’s
y Polish grandparents never discussed their
handwritten diaries that her mother had left largely
past. There is very little evidence beyond a
undisturbed with other documents and papers in the
small, battered album of black-and-white
drawers of his desk.
photographs, each one captioned on the
‘The diaries begin with an air raid alarm, which wakes
back in my grandfather’s spidery cursive handwriting,’ writes
my grandfather from a dream at 5:20 am on the first day of
Terry Kurgan. This ‘small, battered album’ and the daily diary
September in 1939. Germany has just attacked and invaded
that Kurgan’s grandfather kept for 30 years form the basis of
Poland. The first years of the diaries describe the family’s flight
Everyone is Present and give the book a unique depth. Through
from their hometown of Bielsko, east towards the city of Lwów,
these essays, Kurgan explores family dynamics and lets us in
and then several years of their difficult, sometimes desperate
on some of the family secrets and by the end, the reader feels
journey, through and ultimately out of Europe; an unwieldy,
part of the family.
combative extended family group of ten people. Refugees,
At the centre of the family’s story is one particular image.
unwelcome every place they turned. They lived in Bucharest,
‘But this photograph in my family’s album records a day in the
Istanbul, Ankara, Aleppo, Baghdad, Basra, and sailed via the
summer of July or August 1939. And, at the very outset of what
Persian Gulf to Muscat and Karachi, then to Bombay. Then to
84 / Creative Feel / December 2018 / January 2019
