Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

href="https://dergreif-online.de/www/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/07_Sebald-1024x7681.jpg"> There is a single photograph of the character of Austerlitz as a young pageboy, which adorns the cover of the book itself—it is the only photograph of Austerlitz, and he is presented to us as a child, costumed from another time. This presentation of the Austerlitz as his former, forgotten self, prescribes how his identity must be defined in the context of his relationship to his parents—both for us as reader and participant, and for Austerlitz himself. In the photograph he stands defiantly, in a fog-filled landscape, staring steelily at the camera: It is an adult’s gaze, an adult’s posture, as if the older, wiser Austerlitz were embodied in the eyes of his former, childhood self. There are only a handful of photographs depicting human subjects on the pages of Austerlitz, and of these photographs, even fewer maintain what Roland Barthes referred to as “the frontal pose [...] of looking me straight in the eye.” For Barthes, the gaze of the subject (the Spectrum) toward the eye of the camera is the ultimate affirmation of the photograph’s noeme (what differentiates the photograph from other, non-photographic images), from the point of view of the Spectator (the viewer). This single photograph of a boy looking straight down the lens of the camera and directly at us, the viewer, as we learn from an interview with Sebald, is the foundations where upon the entire novel of Austerlitz is constructed—it is the point zero of the novel. As the search for his parents culminates, Austerlitz discovers a photograph of an anonymous actress in the Prague Theatre Archive, whom his former nanny identifies as his mother. The photograph appears later in the novel, and shows a “ghostly white face, marked by the mother’s penetrating eyes and ominous expression.” The spectral quality of her face is exaggerated by the surrounding darkness, her face receding into the photographic black beyond, exaggerating the ghostly quality of her presence. Rather than bringing closure and structure to Austerlitz’s perceived past, the photograph works to reinforce his inability to order time, his inability to reconstruct his parents’ past, and he is haunted by the spectre of his mother gazing back at him. Furthermore he rejects this photograph “as a memento”, a mere likeness, and not the mother-image he so desperately seeks: “That’s almost the way she was!,” wrote Barthes, noting the absolute pain of approximation in the search for the essential mother-image. Austerlitz’s ethical responsibility to the past does not end with the discovery of this photograph, he is bound to continue, in search of his father, and thus placing our protagonist into an indefinite bind with a past he is unable to adequately define in time. Austerlitz seems to have a central motif of the tracing of paths. Paths across the countryside, and paths backwards, two principles that seem to be pushing against each other. Inevitably, Sebald is a mythologist; he leads us through villages and roads, planting non sequitur’s along away, his prose hiding in the shadows and fog-filled English landscapes, that are inevitably containers of as much fiction as reality. Sebald, like his protagonist Austerlitz, is bound to the past, to the fate of his parents, and he is both implicated and entombed by his writing. He has self-mythologised to the extent that personal history has become bound and transfigured through the lens of collective, shared experience, and in the wake of his death, we look for him in the pages of his books, and the road that he walked. Unlike Barthes, Austerlitz’s search for the essential mother-image is unfulfilled. Late in the novel, he re-examines, with the aid of a magnifying glass, the photograph of himself standing in an empty field at dawn, his piercing gaze looking out through the photograph’s surface, and back at the older Austerlitz. Rather than discovering the mother-image as he so desperately desires, and as Barthes successfully finds, what Austerlitz discovers, is the image of himself, at five years old—the eternal age of Barthes’s mother—in the very last moments of seeing her. That Sebald never mentions the dark star around which his characters constantly orbit—sleeplessly in Austerlitz’s case—is significant. He knew too well that to speak directly of the horrors of the holocaust would militate against its proper discussion, would scorch the memory of the very thing he was attempting to countenance, to comprehend. Instead he refers to it tangentially, obliquely. It is better regarded as one does the sun during an eclipse, he seems to be saying, by projecting the light onto a board through a pinhole.