Everyone is Present

EVERYONE IS PRESENT: Essays on Family, Photography and Memory

BY TERRY KURGAN

Fourthwall Books, 2018

Terry Kurgan (MA 2016)

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 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).”