As if It Were Over

»A book I never wanted to write.«

How does war change pictures? How does it change how we see? How does it change the people who live through it or those who observe it? With her photo columns – published in the newspaper between February 2022 and autumn 2024 – Katja Petrowskaja has unintentionally written a chronicle of the war in Ukraine.

It begins on the eve of the invasion, with a landscape in Georgia, somewhere along the great Military Road. Animals. The air is heavy with the threat of war. On the next page, the cry; My Kyiv! The inconceivable reality of the war, as monstrosity intrudes on the life of the writer.

The war destabilises our gaze. We see pictures of smiling people and instinctively wonder if they are still alive. A man stands in a hole in the middle of the street, »as if he were trying on a possible death, as if death were his new clothes«. A pale, laughing girl, clinging to an older woman. From the story behind this picture, we are surprised by the sudden realisation that the improbable is possible after all – that even miracles are possible in these times.

»[Petrowskajas] photo columns ... are major literature.« Andreas Fan, taz. die tageszeitung

»With her pictures and texts, Petrowskaja breaks through the madness that this war still hurls at us in Europe every day.« Nicolas Freund, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»With her new book, Katja Petrowskaja wakes us out of the sleep of repressing all the suffering in her homeland.« Björn Hayer, der Freitag

»[Petrowskaja] also writes to combat her own war fatigue. And she does so in her own unique, poetic language.« ttt – titel thesen temperamente

»Reading [On The Photograph Looked Back on Me] transforms the way we remember, as if these dialogues between words and photographs restored a perspective we had forgotten.« Michele Neri, Il Foglio

»What Petrowskaja is really doing is meditating upon what it means to see. What it means to live with and in history. To be a viewer, to be sure, but also a participant. The images stick with you.« Bodil Skovgaard Nielsen, Information (Denmark) on The Photograph Looked Back on Me

»With [On The Photograph Looked Back on Me] book, [Petrowskaja] enters the realm of great photographic literature, represented by authors like Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and W.G. Sebald. In the future, we will have to consider the author of this book a member of this circle as well.« Anton Holzer, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Switzerland)