|||
For Sebald everything is an uncanny memento mori: even a photograph is a device through which the dead scrutinise the living.
I read this quote by Peter J. Conradi in a book called The Lost Pilot: A Memoir by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman. The quote reminded me of anthropologist Lucy Suchman’s article Subject Objects in which she discusses how human-robot interactions shift subject-object relations. We humans-as-subjects view the robots-as-objects but in the interactions the robots take on subject-hood.
In the Conradi quote about Sebald, I’m caught by how we rightly give subjecthood to the dead in photographs. The photograph becomes a medium through which we — the living — are seen.