2.2 Ton infix the image in the memory106: Photograph as residue Sebald’s writing architecture accommodates, amongst its pillars, a relevant point: the presence of black-and-white photographs, arranged according to the progress of the narratives. As one gets in touch with the author’s work, it is possible to say the use of photography reinforces its peripheral position in dealing with the image: there is often no more significant mention of the origin of the records. Still, in relation to this, it is also worth noting some effort to change the quality of the photographs107, a strategy that highlights the condition of residue. It is important to go back, first of all, to the heart of Sebald’s interest in photographs. According to the author, photography is a kind of manifestation of the dead, something that calls for a certain spectral presence108. Sebald’s point of view relates to a very familiar notion about death, still derived from his postwar experience. However, it is in a text dedicated to the notes on cinema written by Kafka109 that Sebald is closer to what he means by photography. First, the compatibility with Kafka’s view of the progressive annulment110 – or approach of death – made explicit by the photographs. In the text in question, there is an even more conclusive passage: (...) we can assume that the erotic radiation of these images, of these snapshots (…) is due to their proximity to death. (…) The look that reveals everything, that penetrates everything has the underlying force of repetition. It always wants to make sure it saw what it saw. All that remains is to look, an obsession in which real time is suspended while the dead, the living, and the unborn, as sometimes happens in dreams,
106
Title of a work by the artist Vija Celmins [To Fix the Image in Memory], borrowed here for the similarity with Sebald’s procedure in relation to the use of photographs. 107 “We do also have to know that these seemingly deteriorating and deteriorated pictures are very largely made to be that. He’s fabricating these things.” (RYAN, 2017) 108 “And photographs are for me […] one of the emanations of the dead, especially these older photographs of people no longer with us. Nevertheless, through these pictures, they do have what seems to me some sort of a spectral presence.” (SEBALD, 2007b, page 40) 109 See SEBALD, W. G. – Kafka no cinema. 110 “[...] as so often happens when we look at old photographs, it leaves him terrified [referring to Kafka] with the progressive annulment of his person and the approach of death.” (SEBALD, 2014a, page 149)
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