BOOKS
BOOKS EVERYONE IS PRESENT:
Essays on Family, Photography and Memory
BY TERRY KURGAN Fourthwall Books, 2018
A Terry Kurgan
rtist Terry Kurgan (MA 2016) has always been interested in the transactions involved in photography and the power of photographs as objects. She has now written a book of essays evoked by her family’s photos and diaries, starting with an image taken in Poland in 1939 just before her grandfather fled the German invasion. “Part memoir, part travelogue, part analysis”, the book offers “startling insights into how photographs work: what they conceal, how they mislead, what provocations they contain”, according to the publishers. Kurgan produced this work as part of her MA in Creative Writing at Wits. In discussion with Professor Gerrit Olivier at the book launch, she spoke about reaching a time in her life when she needed to make sense of herself and of what had been “subliminally
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communicated” to her by previous generations. Writing felt like the right medium for this process. She had just completed Hotel Yeoville – a public art project in which people (many of them migrants and exiles) could tell their stories – and it chimed with her own family story. This connection between intimate personal experience and “big picture” history is one of the themes she explores in this book. She is also interested in the interaction between photographer, subject and viewer. “I realised quite late [in the writing process] that my grandfather was my subject. Through a forensic examination of every photograph, I tried to understand him and his impact on my mother (who has written her own memoir).”
