Kafka and Photography | Caroline Duttlinger

Kafka was fascinated by photography throughout his life; his first literary connection to images dates back to his school years, and he continued writing about it until shortly before his death. Photography and photographs appear in all three of his novels, in many of his most famous short prose works, as well as forming a particularly fixed theme in his letters and diaries. In fact, throughout his literary career, Kafka would explore his most important interests—such as family, identity, gender relations, memory, and power—through the lens of photography. It is said that Kafka described himself as "a visual person," literally "a man of the eye," where the magic of photography for him lies in its ability to open worlds of reality that no one had noticed before, thus provoking thought and interpretation.