Where do images come from? 
Detours around Ted Serios’s “thoughtographic” photographs
Uniarts 2022
Editor: Marjaana Kella
Book design: Petri Summanen

“He writes like the dead, said one of W. G. Sebald’s students of creative writing, I read. Indeed, I recognize, there is a strange unworldly atmosphere in Sebald’s books. He writes about a trauma he actually did not have – others had it, and he stole it. He writes about the Holocaust from the perspective of the collectively guilty, as one and every European floating in time, using long and complicated sentences which he calls “periscopic,” where the narrator is always one or two steps away (he perhaps said, I might have read somewhere). 

He uses photographs in the same manner. The photographs, placed here and there in the text like punctuation, are uncaptioned and fascinatingly reticent about their particular subjects. Yet they seem to anchor his writing in individuals having- been-there and appear to dig into historical specificities in amazing detail just because they are photographs. Then, after extensive research into his interviews and other stories, it turns out that the photographs may as well be undated, unidentified flea market treasures. The image on the cover of Austerlitz, printed in tens of thousands of copies, looked at again and again, is not of an actual Holocaust child victim or any real historical person who inspired Sebald in creating the character Jacques Austerlitz. The image is of a random English child in a masquerade.

So why use photographs, then, he asked. What do they authenticate?”

For this essay book, I published my first-ever literary endeavour written in English. The piece is titled “Seven Exercises” after Raymond Queneau, and the exercises are “Queneau’s Notation”, “All Fairy Tales are of One Type in Regard to their Structure”, “Deus ex Machina”, “The Image Bank”,  “Sebald”, “The Documentary Project”, and “Epilogue/Eugolipe”. In my exercises, I elaborate on the idea of telling a true story of the evolving of certain documents – photographs – in different ways. What actually happened in Ted Serios’s mind and how that produced images, no one yet knows.

My thanks to Laura Jones-Katz for the thoughtful proofreading. The book is available online: https://taju.uniarts.fi/handle/10024/7652

“She had a nightmare of a humungous drunken Ted Serios approaching her through a narrow corridor like some sort of dark and unfriendly animal. “You can’t do this to me” the creature repeated until she woke up.

She had an exhibition in a gallery. She installed in the space a wall-sized collage of her reproductions of Ted’s Polaroids. In a separate darkened space, she installed a two-channel video work featuring the wildly galloping microfilm and a pulsating still of a newspaper article zoomed in to the maximum, showing an indefinite typographical shape. She made enlargements of several details from one portrait of Ted Serios and hung big prints of them on the wall opposite the video installation space. She put her own “thoughtographs” of the wall and the mirror with a looking-glass on a table in the middle of the gallery space. She organized a discussion event with two academics on the new epistemologies of documentary photography.

“Fascinating,” said one critic. “Elegant,” said another.”