Artistic Memoir

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 histories public, private, domestic, familial, and generational she 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 family’s epic journey across Europe as they flee Nazi occupation, until they reach Cape Town. Kurgans 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.