In a familiar sense, an image offers something that was once present but is no longer there, or in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the image is a cadaver,” representing something to itself at the moment of its withdrawal from the world. Blanchot was describing the literary image but his words speak equally to the photograph: to its inescapable link to the documentary.

In Craigie Horsfield’s case, though, this version of the nature of the photographic image proves less than adequate, even as what is shown appears to chart such a process of withdrawal. Ul. Gabrieli Zapolskiej, Kraków. May 1994,