ABSTRACT
As Dominique Baqué points out, the theorization of photography is only a relatively recent phenomenon, owing its inauguration, more or less, to Walter Benjamin and his 'Little History of Photography' of 1931, followed by 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' of 1936. 1 Despite the rapid expansion of writing on photography and photography's assimilation into academe, a short sequence of canonical texts and commentators has attracted to itself what looks to many like a disproportionate authority — Gisèle Freund, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, John Berger, Philippe Dubois, Rosalind Krauss — and kept the critical monopoly clearly in the Gallo-Anglo-American triangle. By and large, Max Sebald's reading in photography seems to keep to this critical highway. I have been perusing his annotations of Susan Sontag's On Photography (UK publication 1978), John Berger's About Looking (1980), Roland Barthes's La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (1980) in its English translation by Richard Howard (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 1984), and Clive Scott's The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (1999). 2 My immediate regret is that I cannot do comprehensive justice to these annotations: they are simply too numerous; much important material has to be relegated to footnotes, without discussion. But it is perhaps possible, even from a partial investigation, to construct a view of Sebald's abiding photographic preoccupations. I had intended to restrict myself to a systematic itemization of, and commentary on, Sebald's annotations in these four texts, but quickly realized that the need to cross-refer would scotch that plan and that I could not avoid opening my discussion onto the work of Siegfried Kracauer and Jan Peter Tripp, among others. Out of the resulting, barely controllable flow, I have carved a sequence of five roughly circumscribed sections.
