SEbald photos

A sentence by WG Sebald, like a sentence by James Joyce, winds sensuously around your mind if you give it the space granted by reading aloud. The description of Mr Bloom making breakfast is one, as is Sebald's description of the anglers on a beach near Lowestoft. What Sebald's writing includes, in addition, are photographs. Carefully placed on the page, as if to illustrate a point being made, but uncredited, without caption and usually of poor quality, they add depth and mystery rather than clarification. Sebald world is a complicated fiction; perhaps the murky photos are a bridge back to a non-fiction world, but often they seem to intensify the mystery of the space in which the story is unfolding. In Vertigo, the narrator recalls losing his passport and obtaining a replacement. The text includes an image of a voided passport in which Sebald’s photograph and signature remain visible, but the face is obscured. It is what Rick Poynor has called writing with pictures.