legitimar e parar o tempo

"I think they [images] have possibly two purposes in the text. The first and obvious notion is that of verification - we all tend to believe in pictures more than we do in letters. Once you bring us a photograph in proof of something, then people generally tend to accept that, well, this must have been so. And certainly even the most implausible pictures in the Emigrants would seem to support that, the more implausible they are. For instance, the pohotograph of the narrator's great-uncle in Arab costume in Jerusalem in 1913 is an authentic photograph. It's not invented, it's not an accident, not one that was found and later inserted. So the photographs allow the narrator,as it were, to legitimize the story that he tells. I think this has always been a concern in realistic fiction. In the nineteenth century, certainly in the German tradition, the author is always at pains to say, well, this is where I got it from, I found this manuscript on top of a cupboard in this or that town in such and such a house and so on and so forth, in order to give his whole approach an air of legitimacy.

The other function that I see is possibly that of arresting time. Fiction is an art form that moves in time, that is inclined towards the end, that works on a negative gradient, and it is very, very difficult in that particular form in the narrative to arrest the passage of time. And as we all know, this is what we like so much about certain forms of visual art - you stand in a museum and you look at one of those wonderful pictures somebody did in the sixteenth or the eighteenth century. You are taken out of time, and that is in a sense a form of redemption, if you can release yourself from the passage of time. And the photographs can also do this - they act like barriers or weirs which stem the flow. I think that is something that is positive, slowing down the speed of reading, as it were. "

Sebald em The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald.