w.g. sebald observes that we get more out of other people's photographs than we do out of our own, even though he is taking lots and lots of photographs himself. that sense that he wants us to approach the world that he's presenting to us through things that we don't recognize and we don't have any kind of take on. so that somehow it makes us spectators, wonderfully clean sheets as it were, and therefore responsive to lots and lots of things we might not have expected ourselves to be responsive to, and that this kind of idea that it's photographs that are searching you out, that are as it were the masters of destiny and that are inquiring, every time you look at them, into you, so that they may become the subject of some associations or involuntary memories. but as i say, images that one is that much more vulnerable to because one is completely unfamiliar to them. clive scott on w.g. sebald's austerlitz