At last. This morning my copy of ‘Searching for Sebald’ arrived on an inter-library loan. A beautifully produced collection of essays and photographs edited by Lise Patt. It costs thirty quid, but is 650 pages of luxury. I have only had it in the house an hour and already I have the urge to splash out up the Amazon.
Subtitled ‘photography after WG Sebald’ this book answers and creates so many questions. Thoughts that have been ricocheting around in my head for the past few years. Now I realise that there are many people who have been having the same ambiguous feelings towards Sebald’s novels. Each contributor examines part of his fiction and looks again at the images used alongside the stories. The truth, the lies and the dubious evidence of authenticity. Reproducing the photo’s and often their source material in grainy black and white. Throughout the different essayists are skeptical, yet in loving awe of Sebald’s method and occasional dry humour. Are the pictures suggestive, rather than illustrations of the text? Are both edited and cropped? How and why? What does he leave out? What impression does the combination creates in the readers head? What can it mean to the state of literature and visual arts? Is it a movement?
As if to answer the editors own question, two parts of the book are well chosen reports and images from projects by other artists who use writing and fiction as one tool in their work. There is an intimate examination of all of Sebalds work, novels, poetry and essays. He oversaw the layout of the different translations and editions too so there is painstaking analysis of the different ways each edition is laid out, and what that says about Sebalds overall ambition. When Sebald died he was a lecturer in film studies in UEA so there are several articles dealing with his film references and his cinematic style. One regret that seeps out continually, in the essays and the photographs is the frustration and regret that Sebald died when he did. What would he have done next? What would he have thought to this thick brick of a book?
Searching For Sebald, PHOTOGRAPHY AFTER W.G.SEBALD. Edited by Lise Patt with Christine Dillhohner. The Institute of Cultural Inquiry. Los Angeles (2007)
