Spojrzenia moich sióstr
The Glances of My Sisters

Summary/Abstract: In 2011 a collection of more than 2 500 glass negatives from the pre-1939 period was discovered in a townhouse attic in Lublin. Nothing is known about the author or the persons in the photographs. How are we to write and speak about photographs if they offer nothing more than visibility? The establishment and retention of a close relation with an image, in particular a photograph, is a choice made by the spectators. The wish to see someone in the photograph in the way one would want to see him appears to be a facile trick of the imagination. At the same time, it is also an act of assuming responsibility for those whom one sees as well as the unpredictable course of their possible and impossible biographies. In view of the acute absence of source knowledge about the Lublin collection of negatives this article attempts to examine them via publications by W. G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard.

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