Katja Hock

'Memory encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance of a state of affairs nor its entire temporal course. Compared to photography, memory’s records are full of gaps. […] Memory does not pay much attention to dates – it skips years or stretches temporal distance. […] No matter which scenes an individual remembers, they all mean something relevant to that person, though he or she might not necessarily know what they mean. Thus, they are organized according to a principle which is essentially different from the organizing principle of photography. Photography grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum; memory images retain what is given only insofar as it has significance. Since what is significant is not reducible to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory images are at odds with photographic representation.'

Kracauer, S, “Photography” in The Mass Ornament, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1995, pp.46-63, p.50.

Landscape is an ordering of reality from different angles. It is both a vertical view and a side view. […] The vertical view is, as it were, objective and calculating. […] The side view, in contrast, is personal, moral, aesthetic. […] If the essential character of landscape is that it combines these two views (objective and subjective), it is clear that the combination can only take place in the mind’s eye.'

Yi-Fu Tuan, quoted by Kraenzle, C, “Picturing Place: Travel, Photography, and the Imaginative”, in Searching for Sebald, ed. Patt. L, The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles, 2007, pp.126-145, p.134.

'Every site is haunted by countless ghosts that lurk there in silence, to be evoked or not. These absences stimulate the imagination, encouraging the viewer to fill in the blank spaces in the landscape.'

Kraenzle, C., “Picturing Place: Travel, Photography, and the Imaginative”, in Searching for Sebald, ed. Patt. L, The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles, 2007, pp.126-145, p.138.

'They knew that rabbit warrens opened into underground lanes to the land of the dead, and that spider webs could become fetters as strong as steel, and that myriads of transparent creatures danced at the edge of the meadows, and hung and chattered like bats in the branches, only just invisible, only just in audible. Any juice of any fruit or flower might be the lotion that, squeezed on eyelids, touched to tongue or ears, would give the watcher or listener a way in, a power of inhuman sensing. Any bent twig might be a message or a sign. The seen and the unseen world were interlocked and superimposed. You could trip out of one and into the other at any moment.'

Byatt, A.S, The Children’s Book, Vintage Books, London, 2010, pp.81-82.

Sebald, W.G, The Ring of Saturn, Vintage, London, 2002, pp.59-62.

'When the moon came they set out, but they found no crumbs, for the many thousand of birds which fly about in the woods and fields had picked them all up. Hansel said to Gretel: “We shall soon find the way,” but they did not find it. They walked the whole night and all the next day too from morning till evening, but they did not get out of the forest, and were very hungry, for they had nothing to eat but two or three berries, which grew on the ground. And as they were so weary that their legs would carry them no longer, they lay down beneath a tree and fell asleep.”'

Brothers Grimm, Complete Fairy Tales, Routledge, London, 2002, p.69.