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Shadows of Reality: A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald’s Photographic Materials, Eds. Clive Scott & Nick Warr, Boiler House Press, Paperback, pp. 468.

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‘There is something utterly mysterious in old photographs, that they are almost designed to be lost,’ says W. G. Sebald in an interview of 1997: ‘they’re in an album which vanishes in an attic or in a box, and if they come to light they do so accidentally, you stumble upon them.’ Speaking at an event in London in September 2001, just weeks before his death, Sebald returns to this idea of photographic reappearance. ‘Photographs have something nomadic about them; they wander about, they get lost for a while […] and then they turn up again,’ exerting a magnetic pull. ‘[T]hey have something of an appeal,’ he continues, an appeal ‘that you should tell the story that is behind them.’
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In an introductory note to Shadows of Reality, Nick Warr describes his own experience of stumbling on a cache of unexpected pictures, ‘a small Ilford photographic paper box with ‘Sebald’ written faintly in pencil on one side’. A few years later, Warr – who works as the Curator of Photographic Collections at the University of East Anglia [UEA], where Sebald taught for much of his career – finally explored the contents of the box, discovering a wealth of photographs and prints whose cryptic notes uncovered further documents, long buried in the archives. Reunited, the papers represent a generous stash of Sebald’s photographic prints and source materials, which – as readers of his books will know – play an important role in the historical and genre-blending texture of his work. Arriving in the wake of several recent exhibitions, mounted in celebration of the 75th anniversary of Sebald’s birth, Shadows of Reality tells the story behind Warr’s discovery, offering a comprehensive catalogue of the materials housed at UEA. ‘We hope that all readers steeped in and captivated by Sebald’s writing will look upon this catalogue as a shared family album,’ write Warr and fellow editor Clive Scott, ‘a set of familiar and cherished photographs rich in textural reminiscences.’
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A compulsive collector of found images, from postcards and old photographs to maps and plates from a variety of eccentric volumes, the catalogue reveals both the extent and meticulous nature of Sebald’s visual research; each of his novels includes dozens of images, which appear – at least initially – to support and illustrate the texts. Alongside those that he clipped and collected, Shadows of Reality reproduces a great many of the author’s own photographs, taken during trips across Britain and Europe, many of which formed the basis of his semi-fictionalised narratives. The catalogue arranges its contents as they relate to the chronology of Sebald’s career. Those familiar with his writing will recognise distinctive pictures – from Manchester and Normandy; from London, Corsica and Prague – contextualised within the journeys later outlined in the novels. Of special notice, perhaps, are the photographs taken during the author’s walking tour of Suffolk, the blueprint for his celebrated book, The Rings of Saturn (1995). Painstakingly thorough, complete with an exhaustive inventory, the catalogue also reproduces rolls of negatives in actual size, an effort ‘to provide, as fully as possible, a record of Sebald’s peculiar photographic mode of working’. ‘What […] we wish to explore are the triggers of his creative perception,’ state the editors, ‘to discover what, in images, fascinates him, what reveals itself to him, what visual connections he makes, what stories are […] made possible.’

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The photographs in Sebald’s publications have aroused much speculation regarding both their function and reliability. On one level, they seem to corroborate the novels’ many histories and anecdotes, adding a layer of documentary reality. (As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has suggested, Sebald often appears ‘more like a new kind of historian than a new kind of novelist’.) Sebald himself acknowledged the authenticating power of photography, commenting that ‘we [tend to] believe in photographic evidence more than in anything else’. And yet, uncaptioned and unverified as they appear within the texts, the sense that what we’re looking at cannot be fully trusted soon comes to undermine the very images in question, complicating their performance. As Warr concedes in one of several essays in the first part of the catalogue, it is often ‘difficult to differentiate between [the pictures] Sebald took and those he found,’ eroding any sense of authorship. ‘I had never before encountered anyone who kept boxes of photos,’ recalls Gordon Turner, ‘so many of which had no connection to his life’.
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As if the use of found imagery were not enough, Shadows of Reality also betrays Sebald’s habit for manipulating and obscuring pictures, working in collaboration with Michael Brandon-Jones (a member of technical staff at UEA’s School of Art History), who produced the photographic prints for each of Sebald’s publications. The catalogue includes handwritten notes to Brandon-Jones, instructing him on documents to print, develop and re- photograph, experimenting with the contrast, tone and saturation; William Wyld’s Manchester from Kersal Moor (1852) – a watercolour reproduced in Sebald’s second novel, The Emigrants (1992) – receives additional distortion once the author runs it through the photocopier. ‘I remember him telling me that he had asked his German publisher to use a particular grade of paper,’ says Brandon-Jones in an illuminating interview, included here, ‘so that the photographs within the text did not appear as sharp or clear as they would when reproduced on better quality paper’. ‘Where documentary witness and fidelity is sacred,’ writes James Wood for The New Yorker, ‘Sebald introduces the note of the unreliable.’ I’m reminded of the work of German sculptor and photographer Thomas Demand, whose pictures seem innocuous enough until you find that everything within them – chairs and computers, petals and leaves – is made entirely of paper.
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To some extent, this method of obscurity is linked, inherently, to Sebald’s greatest theme, concerning the distortions of both history and memory, the blurriness around the edges, the uncertainty of how to piece together what remains of the collapsing past. (However else it functions, history in Sebald’s novels has something in common with the Suffolk coast at Dunwich, mentioned in The Rings of Saturn, which continues – foot by foot – to fall unstoppably into the sea.) ‘Both the photograph and the remembered depend upon and equally oppose the passing of time,’ writes John Berger: ‘Both stimulate, and are stimulated by, the interconnectedness of events.’ Sebald’s highly associative, essay-like fiction is certainly stimulated by interconnectedness, often to a dizzying degree, but it also understands that history and memory are liable to fade, as if deteriorating over time. Along with evidence of deliberate distortion, it is no surprise to find that many of Sebald’s own photographs have a quality of obscurity, whether soft focus or haziness, a lens flare or a camera flash. Taken together, the effect is to create a sense that we are looking not at photographs but memories (which in a sense, of course, we are). ‘What served in place of a photograph, before the camera’s invention?’ asks Berger: ‘The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory.’ Perhaps it’s this that brings to mind the blurry, photographic paintings of Gerhard Richter, who also invites questions about history and recollection. Two photographs of Sebald’s, showing the rippled reflection of the Mauritshuis museum in the Hague, are particularly reminiscent of the distinctive feathering of Richter’s canvases – see Cathedral Square, Milan (1968), for instance. Another picture, taken from a speeding train, shows a derelict warehouse in Nottinghamshire; tilted and fuzzy, it bears more than a family resemblance to Richter’s curious Administrative Building (1964).
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‘Fiction is an art form that moves in time, is inclined towards the end,’ suggested Sebald, speaking to Eleanor Wachtel, ‘and it is very, very difficult in that particular form […] to arrest the passage of time.’ But photographs ‘act like barriers or weirs,’ he continues, stemming the flow, somehow holding what they show us back. For Nick Warr, ‘The interruption of reading, performed by the images [in Sebald’s books], confirms the irregular chronological dynamic of the work.’ ‘Constantly hindered and sent back into countless eddies and still backwaters,’ he argues, ‘time in Sebald’s work percolates as much as it flows.’ Studying the images in Shadows of Reality, we discover Sebald’s interest in this percolation. It is not that his photographs and chosen images are timeless – showing ‘a world without time’, to borrow a phrase from the American poet Wallace Stevens – so much as they appear to pool, collect, or gather time, a process of ‘sedimentation,’ writes Clive Scott, that ‘gives chronology and geography a certain disorienting flexibility.’ Like the labyrinthine rooms of Somerleyton Hall, related in The Rings of Saturn, Sebald’s photographic materials reveal uncanny layers of palimpsest; an eccentric rural estate, filled with peculiar artefacts, Sebald’s narrator winds through Somerleyton unable to determine ‘which decade or century it is, for many ages are superimposed here and coexist.’
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Whether crumbling hotels or derelict factories, ancient trees or faded headstones, to say nothing of the coastlines, ruins and generic period clothing that appear in so many pictures, Sebald’s images contain not one present or past, but many. More than this, they often seem to show a moment captured from the future, a haunting post-human environment, ‘as if mankind had already made way for another species,’ says the narrator of Vertigo (1990). Sebald makes the same apocalyptic gesture when describing the abandoned military testing site of Orford Ness, now a nature reserve off Suffolk’s coast, known for its odd, temple- like structures. ‘[T]he closer I came to these ruins,’ reads a passage from The Rings of Saturn, ‘the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe.’ In 1971, as Sebald was working towards his doctorate at UEA, Gerhard Richter produced a set of photographs in Venice; green and murky, obscured by thick, poisonous-looking fog, St Mark’s Square looks to be submerged, as if already underwater.

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The distinctive emptiness of Sebald’s photographs appears to indicate aloneness, what biographer Carole Angier has called the novelist’s ‘essential solitude’. Through anecdotes and recollections from those who knew him – including colleagues and friends – Sebald emerges as an enigmatic figure, difficult to get to know; even his relationship with Brandon-Jones, with whom he worked so closely for so many years, seems to remain inherently reserved, friendly but professional. Indeed, what Sebald writes about the novelist Robert Walser (1878-1956) could just as easily apply to him: ‘The traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have almost been effaced altogether’; ‘from the very beginning, he was only ever connected with the world in the most fleeting of ways.’ While Shadows of Reality includes a generous timeline of the author’s life, he is perhaps best glimpsed in minor recollected details: Gordon Turner mentions ‘his infectious giggle’; Francisco Cantú, in a reflective essay, records ‘his habit of highlighting text with markers that matched the color of the book’s cover.’ Nevertheless, the overwhelming sense produced here is of Sebald’s persistent and enduring absence. More than anything, Shadows of Reality resembles a Missing Persons file, an attempt to trace the whereabouts of someone who has disappeared, to piece together their last-known movements. In another context, we wouldn’t be surprised to find these documents pinned loosely to a corkboard, connected with red string.
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‘The first thing to be said about W. G. Sebald’s books,’ writes Geoff Dyer, ‘is that they always had a posthumous quality to them. He wrote – as was often remarked – like a ghost.’ The spectral nature of the novelist is equally apparent here, in which Sebald both appears and doesn’t. After all, notes Adam Phillips, ‘The camera […] is the object that at once includes you and excludes you.’ Writing about Nabokov in 1996, Sebald reflects on his ability to create, ‘through barely perceptible nuances and shifts of perspective, an invisible observer’. While Sebald appears in several of these pictures – including as a shadow, a hand, and occasionally in costume as a character from his novels – he is typically obscured, often blurred or reflected. In a striking photograph taken in Paris in 1999, we see a narrow, patinated mirror on the corner of an empty street. Sebald’s reflection is completely missing, like a ghost, even a vampire.
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‘One leaves behind one’s portrait / Without intent,’ read lines from Sebald’s poem ‘Giulietta’s Birthday’. The portrait we encounter in Shadows of Reality is a strange one, a kind of silhouette, revealing a meticulous, exacting figure, somehow hidden in plain sight. The catalogue ends with a clearer photograph of Sebald, standing in something like a wooden bus shelter; he appears to be squinting, as though struggling to see us. ‘The figures in photographs have been muted,’ he once remarked, ‘and they stare out at you as if they are asking for a chance to say something.’ In Sebald’s absence, care and careful scholarship of the trail he has left behind are all the more valuable. This publication is a gift that we are lucky to receive. At the same time, it carries the same ‘underlying wish of all [Sebald’s] books,’ to quote Carole Angier: ‘that time stop, as it does in photographs, and the lost return to us.’

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Rowland Bagnall is a poet and writer based in Oxford. A Few Interiors, his first collection, was published by Carcanet Press in 2019. His poems, reviews and essays have appeared in Poetry London, PN Review, The Art Newspaper and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

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