A photograph can interrupt the story we think we know about ourselves. In La photo me regardait, Ukrainian writer Katja Petrowskaja begins with images encountered through travel, chance discoveries and the accumulated records of other lives. Photographs by named makers sit alongside anonymous images. Each becomes an occasion to consider memory, personal experience and the historical violence that continues to shape eastern Europe. The essays originated in the Sunday supplement of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung between 2015 and 2021.

Petrowskaja turned toward this fragmentary form after the war begun in Ukraine in 2014 made her feel unable to write as before. That background gives the book a particular tension: an image preserves a trace, yet cannot deliver a complete account of the life or event it records. Reading becomes a movement between what can be seen and what must be recalled, questioned or left unresolved. The collection extends the autobiographical inquiry of her earlier Peut-être Esther through encounters with photographs.

Jean Torrent translated the essays into French for Éditions Macula’s Opus incertum series. This 2025 first edition brings together 30 colour and 38 black-and-white illustrations across 256 pages. Its compact 13 × 19.5 cm format places the work close to the scale of a reading book. Photography and prose share the task of carrying the narrative; the images are occasions for thought as well as objects of attention.

For collectors interested in the relationship between literature and photography, the book offers an example of an author building a dispersed self-portrait through images made by others. Its appeal lies in this exchange between looking and remembering, and in the way an individual response opens onto collective history. It received the photo-text category’s special mention at the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles book awards.