SIGNED & DATED, published by Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg, 2018, hardcover, illustrated, 277 pages, condition: as new.
In this book, Terry Kurgan begins with a family snapshot made by her Polish grandfather in 1939 on the eve of the war. Presenting this evocative image as a repository of multiple historiespublic, private, domestic, familial and generationalshe sets off on a series of meditations on photography that give us startling insights into how photographs work: what they conceal, how they mislead, what provocations they contain.
Each essay takes up the thread of the story of her familys epic journey across Europe as they fleecountry by countryNazi occupation, until they reach Cape Town, South Africa. But Kurgan takes detours, circles back, diverts attention elsewhere, enriching and also disrupting the narrative with digressions on the way Google has changed our relationship to photography, on her grand-fathers eloquent daily journals, on the shipboard flirtations of her fascinating grandmother, on vanity, on self representation, on loss and return, home and exile. Kurgans richly satisfying essays are part memoir, part travelogue, part analysis and they demonstrate her sophisticated understanding of a medium that has long engaged her as an artist.
In a book propelled by a dedicated pursuit of clues and traces, perhaps the first of these lies in its elegantly paradoxical title: Everyone Is Present. In one sense, these words offer a hint as to the kind of book it is a narrative of intimate familial restitution or intergenerational recovery. In another, it is an impossible claim, for in the broader sweep of time ruptured by the trauma of history it is not possible for everyone to be physically present in the present. So the books title subtly gestures towards the maddening impossibility that underlies the writers project the all too real spectre of loss and the impossibility of fully restoring the past to the present. But there is another layer yet: the fevered idea at the heart of any serious narrative of restitution that the processes and mechanisms of building the narrative might play some magical role in restoring everyone to the present in a more abstract register. In this mystic tenor, Terry Kurgans Everyone Is Present could be understood as an ancestral dialogue, a conversation across time and geography with chosen members of her family both living and dead. In the tradition of Roland Barthes Camera Lucida (Barthes, 1981) which is at once a eulogy to the authors late mother and an inquiry into the essence of photography the conversation takes place largely through the medium of photography.
For Barthes, the very essence of the medium is its spectral conjuring of death in life. Loss and mourning are the substrata of this narrative too. But for Kurgan, the fixation is less with the mortality of the recorded moment than with the vital emotional information the photograph might carry for the living.
Her narrative loops back and forth in time driven by a forensic impulse an impassioned desire to piece together a coherent story from the notebooks, photographs and remembrances that linger in the wake of her familys flight from their home in the southern Polish town of Bielsko on 1 September 1939 as the German Luftwaffe launched air attacks on the major cities of Kraków, Łódź and Warsaw and on road transport routes, bridges and airports. Kurgan traces her extended familys epic flight from Nazi-occupied Europe country by country and onward to Turkey, Syria and Iraq, where they spend a few months in Baghdad, then aboard the HMS Bambara to Bombay via the Persian Gulf, then on to Mombasa where they are quarantined for more than a month due to smallpox. They have their Brazilian landing cards and their intended destination is Rio de Janeiro, but by a further twist of fate, they end up in Cape Town, South Africa, where they start their lives anew. Echoing her ancestors journey, Kurgans is a narrative of detours and deviations.
My Polish grandparents never discussed their past, she writes. There is very little evidence beyond a small, battered album of black-and-white photographs, each one captioned on the back in my grandfathers spidery cursive handwriting (p.14). In some ways, her quest recalls the protagonists search for an image of his lost mother in WG Sebalds Austerlitz (Sebald, 2001), a novel that was profoundly influenced by Camera Lucida. But whereas the images in Sebalds book are small, impressionistic moments of pause that punctuate his spell-like prose, here the photographs are the central pivots around which the armature of the text is built. They are blown out to their grainy limits, always extending to the outer edges of the page and often spanning the gutter in generous double-page spreads. In some instances, entire pages are given over to a telling detail in a single photograph that could provide some critical fragment or clue.
