W.G. SEBALD: Shadows of Reality

W.G. SEBALD: Shadows of Reality

A Catalogue of W.G. Sebald's Photographic Materials
Eds. Clive Scott & Nick Warr
ISBN: 9781911343660

468 pages

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This is the first-ever volume of the photographs of W.G. Sebald, exquisitely designed to shed new light on his creative process, as it chronicles the places, people, and events that shaped his writing life.

W.G. Sebald (1944–2001) is one of the most highly esteemed authors of the late twentieth century. His evocative and unclassifiable prose works – Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001) – combine text and image in ways that continue to challenge and beguile readers, writers and critics alike. His images were all made in collaboration with the photographer Michael Brandon-Jones, who assisted the writer in transforming various photographs, found images and objects into unsettling visual encounters that interweave with his prose to haunt the reader.

This groundbreaking volume presents, for the first time, a comprehensive and fully illustrated catalogue of Sebald’s photographic materials: an extraordinary combination of film negatives, prints and slides from the University of East Anglia’s photographic collections, the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach and the Sebald Estate. It reveals, in a compelling and visually innovative way, the story behind each of the images and their often surprising origins. Accompanying the photographic materials are a sequence of new essays, an interview with Brandon-Jones and other photographic pieces, which all offer different and revealing insights into Sebald’s life-long preoccupation with photographs – with their versatility, expressivity and their multiple narrative and poetic powers.

Edited by literary scholar Clive Scott and photography curator Nick Warr, this wonderfully comprehensive book covers every element of Sebald's published work and includes a substantial amount of material that has not been made public before.