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Yes I think they are principally about rhythm, or, as you say, more specifically about breaking rhythm. However, they also effect, for me, an unsettling of narrative visualization, which operates alternately as subliminal guides of, and cues for, depicturing the reading. If they were purely and directly illustrative of the text, I think the effectivity would be questionable. As it is however, the abstracted and often tangential quality of image choice has more in common with a rorshach-esque associative molding of response than the literal didacticism of e.g., science text book illustrations. Also, the source-less scrapbook quality of image assemblage throughout the text, its essential otherness to me (as reader), the story, and (the) writing as such, ties into Sebald's overarching concerns re: memory and history by implicating the reader into the equation as a schizophrenic hybridization of observer and participant, thereby confusing self and other, reader and text and author (how I read the narrator's story as my own / how the "I" of the narrative and the "I" of (my)self are both the same and different) . . . Sorry if I'm doing a bad job of explaining myself. I could write a whole essay on Sebalds use of photographs, and it would probably take the full length of that essay to clearly explain my thoughts.
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Yes I think they are principally about rhythm, or, as you say, more specifically about breaking rhythm. However, they also effect, for me, an unsettling of narrative visualization, which operates alternately as subliminal guides of, and cues for, depicturing the reading. If they were purely and directly illustrative of the text, I think the effectivity would be questionable. As it is however, the abstracted and often tangential quality of image choice has more in common with a rorshach-esque associative molding of response than the literal didacticism of e.g., science text book illustrations. Also, the source-less scrapbook quality of image assemblage throughout the text, its essential otherness to me (as reader), the story, and (the) writing as such, ties into Sebald's overarching concerns re: memory and history by implicating the reader into the equation as a schizophrenic hybridization of observer and participant, thereby confusing self and other, reader and text and author (how I read the narrator's story as my own / how the "I" of the narrative and the "I" of (my)self are both the same and different) . . . Sorry if I'm doing a bad job of explaining myself. I could write a whole essay on Sebalds use of photographs, and it would probably take the full length of that essay to clearly explain my thoughts.
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