The motif of photography illustrates the different ways in which characters perceive reality and remember the past; the photographs interwoven through the text serve a similar purpose. Austerlitz develops an interest in photography at Stower Grange, focusing on capturing the unique forms of everyday objects. This reveals the nature of his interest in the medium: He sees photographs as a means of capturing the existence of an object or a fleeting moment that would otherwise go unrecorded. His interest in photography is an interest in preserving the past, particularly the unremarkable details that would otherwise fade into oblivion.

He sees photography as something akin to remembrance and as an aid to memory: “the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them […]” (94). Austerlitz believes his own photographs will become the only record of his life, just as the photos of Llanwddyn became the only evidence of the drowned town.

From his first fascination with the Llanwddyn photo book, Austerlitz sees photographs as records of lost worlds. In presenting these lost worlds, photographs skirt the homogenized view of history; they don’t depict a world made familiar by a preformed visual vocabulary, but rather a world utterly different from the present.