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# From the Bookshelf
- URL: https://photopedagogy.ghost.io/school-of-night-1/
- Published: 2026-10-17T08:45:52.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-17T08:45:52.000Z
- Description: Karl Ove Knausgaard — The School of Night (Part 1)
- Author: Jon Nicholls
- Tags: Bookshelf

### A tall man by the checkouts

I'm fairly sure I've seen Karl Ove Knausgaard in the local supermarket. Maybe. He had his back to me and I didn't follow him down the aisle to check. It's the kind of sighting that would never stand up in court.

He lives round here, or has done, and [*The School of Night*](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/457862/the-school-of-night-by-knausgaard-karl-ove/9781529967494?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) is set in these parts too. Its narrator, Kristian Hadeland, is a Norwegian photography student who arrives in Deptford in the late summer of 1985 with a camera and bags of ambition. He buys his records at Solid Cut on the high street and photographs the shopfronts from the pavement. He wants to go inside but doesn't dare.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Deptford_London_1980s_13.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Deptford_London_1980s_18.jpg)

Peter Marshall - **Watergate St.*, Deptford, 1982 and **Solid Cut Records*, Deptford High St., Deptford, 1988

Kristian is about the same age as me. In 1986, the year his story gets going, I was about to start an MA in literature and the visual arts at Reading University. It was also the year I was given my first proper camera, a Nikon EM, for my 21st birthday. I moved to London in 1990 to train as a teacher and have lived in south-east London ever since. I began by teaching literature and now teach photography. So I'm reading a novel about a young man learning to see with a camera, on streets I know, by a man I may or may not have seen buying milk.

The story is told by Kristian much later. Early on he tells us he intends to kill himself. We aren't told why. I'm writing this halfway through, listening to the audiobook while walking and reading the paper copy at home. I don't yet know how it ends. Part 2 will deal with that. This one stays where I am: relatively spoiler free, in the middle, with the questions still open.

### The figure on the pavement

Kristian befriends Hans who is Dutch, ten years older and works in a garage full of mannequins, skulls, seashells and gutted televisions. He’s stopped taking photographs. He has opinions instead. Looking at Kristian's college admission portfolio, he says the pictures are "connected to an idea, instead of the world", and asks the question that hangs over the rest of the book: how do you get rid of the photographer's intention?

A few months later, drunk in a pub at Christmas, he tells Kristian about Daguerre's *Boulevard du Temple*. A Paris street in 1838, emptied of activity by the long exposure. Only one figure seems to have stayed still long enough to register on the polished plate, a man with one leg raised. Hans says it's the Devil, a being out of time.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Boulevard_du_Temple_by_Daguerre-1.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Daguerre-Boulevard-detail.png)

Louis Daguerre - **Boulevard du Temple*, 1838 and detail

I've heard Knausgaard describe his own first, astonished encounter with this picture. But Hans gets it slightly wrong. There are two figures, a man having his boots polished and the bootblack doing the polishing. And there wasn't only one exposure. Daguerre made three of the same view, over two days, at different times. Following Kaja Silverman, [Duncan Wooldridge](https://photopedagogy.ghost.io/bookshelf-wooldridge/) points out that a piece of the architecture shifts position between the plates and within them. Hans's theory needs something permanent. But in these plates even the buildings move. The originals, given to Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1839, have since turned black, finished off by a restoration that went wrong in 1970\. The image we know is a copy of a copy. 

Hans's question about intention has an answer Knausgaard himself has written about. [Stephen Gill's *The Pillar*](https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/the-pillar-stephengill?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io) (2019) is made by a camera fixed to a post in a field in Sweden, triggered by whatever lands on it. Nobody pressed the shutter. In his preface Knausgaard writes:

> I’d never seen birds in this way before, as if on their own terms, as independent creatures with independent lives. Ancient, forever improvising, endlessly embroiled with the forces of nature, and yet indulging too. And so infinitely alien to us.

Kristian would have hated it. Or he'd have said he could do better.

### A ghost portfolio

We never see Kristian's photographs, of course. Knausgaard describes them and I find myself speculating about them with pictures I already know. What follows is a portfolio assembled from other people's work, all of it made before 1986\. Some of it Kristian might have seen, if he were a real person, although given that much of his information about photography comes from [Helmut Gernsheim's *The Origins of Photography*](https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-origins-of-photography/author/gernsheim-helmut/?ref=photopedagogy.ghost.io), it's unlikely.

Previously, I've [written about Italo Calvino's Antonino](https://photopedagogy.ghost.io/adventure/), who, in *The Adventure of a Photographer* tries out several ways of making photographs until he runs out of options. Kristian is doing something similar, though less systematically. No grand theme has announced itself yet. These are the exercises of an apprentice, the kind of thing a sixth-former or undergraduate might try in a first year of looking.

His way into art school is a series of portraits: different people in the same chair, the same bath, at the same kitchen table, in the same pose and the same clothes, so that only the faces change.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/JB1.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/JB2.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/JB6.jpeg)

Judith Black - from **Where the Light Came In*, early 1980s

In his first weeks in London he photographs Deptford from the pavement, shopfronts that seem to belong to the 1920s.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-07-at-18.05.52.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Henderson-shop-1.png)

Eugène Atget - **Boucherie, Rue Christine*, 1923 - 1924 and Nigel Henderson - **Untitled* **(Browsing, Shop Front)*, 1949-1956

At Christmas in Norway he shows his mother a series called *Vertigo*: converging lines running away to a vanishing point, "high on contrast, low on detail". She loves it. His sister Liv says it's all been done before. She's right, and it doesn't much matter.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Harry-Callahan_FHCB_3-728x745.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/The-Road-West-US-54-in-New-Mexico-1938.jpg.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/KHP-Switch.png)

Harry Callahan - **Chicago*, ca. 1949, Dorothea Lange - **The Road West*, New Mexico, 1938 and Keld Helmer-Petersen - **Switch, Copenhagen*, 1960s

On Christmas Eve Liv is taken to hospital after an overdose. Kristian had accused her of using drugs and failed to notice what she'd taken. Left alone in the house, he photographs her room from the doorway, the bed, the rucksack, the open drawer, then the dinner table with its half-eaten plates. He photographs the room, not her. It reads to me like someone trying to get hold of an event he can't otherwise fathom.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Calle-2.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Calle-1.png)

Sophie Calle - from **The Hotel*, 1981

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/IMG_0213-3.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/IMG_0216-1.jpeg)

Alphonse Bertillon - From an **Album of Paris Crime* Scenes, 1901–8

Then, with the self-timer, he photographs himself by the kitchen door, hoping to come out as "a blurry, shadow-like figure". This is weeks before Hans tells him about the man on the boulevard.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-07-at-23.02.12.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Woodman-2.jpeg)

Duane Michals - **Portrait of Joseph Cornell*, 1970 and Francesca Woodman - **Untitled, from Angel Series*, Rome, 1977

Back in England he photographs lone bare oaks for a series called *Frameworks of Life*, everything as a construction. He admits the pictures are always less impressive than he imagined.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/William-Henry-Fox-Talbot-An-Oak-Tree-in-Winter.jpg)

William Henry Fox Talbot - **An Oak Tree in Winter*, 1842

Then he steals a dead cat from a vet. He boils it, gives up trying to clean the bones, and photographs the carcass on the chopping board instead, standing on a chair, then wide enough to take in the sink. It's the best thing he's made. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/wols_5_wr_wols3283.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-07-at-23.15.20.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-07-at-23.18.29.png)

Wols - Untitled, 1938, Eli Lotar - Aux Abattoirs de la Villette, 1929 and Frederick Sommer - **Negative #77*, 1939

On the Tube he sees identical twins in pale pink tracksuits and can't stop looking.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-08-at-12.26.20.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Screenshot-2026-10-08-at-12.27.05.png)

Henri Cartier-Bresson - **Twins on Street, Downtown*, Houston, 1957 and Ed van der Elsken - **Twins*, Iceland, 1968

And for the portrait course he photographs his reflection in a dark window with the self-timer, the camera kept out of sight, the whole lit room behind him.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/IMG_0183-2.png)

Louis Faurer - **Third Avenue El Looking Toward Tudor City, New York*, 1947

He’s a restless photographer, shifting from one idea to another, searching for a sustainable practice and a distinctive way of seeing. The pictures he talks about with the most feeling are singular images: the eviscerated cat and the picture of a girl called Hanne coming up out of a river in summer rain, taken when he was seventeen.

### Teachers

Kristian is mostly absent from college. He reads his history of photography from books he buys on Charing Cross Road and avoids the lectures. In 1985 those lectures might have been about Victor Burgin or Jo Spence. We don't hear of them. Either the theory wasn't taught or it was taught in rooms he avoided.

He does turn up for a crit with a guest lecturer, Rafael Figueroa, a Magnum war photographer, a pale, silent man in black. Kristian lays out *Vertigo* and says he'd like "the photographs to speak for themselves". He remembers school presentations fondly: attention "*bestowed*" on him like a gift, the chance to talk without interruption. But a crit is meant to interrupt. One student says the pictures only work together. Another says they're flat, with no internal tension and "no contrasts". Kristian had wondered about contrasts himself a few weeks earlier, drunk, and decided against them. Figueroa says: "You can take pictures of something mundane, but you can't take mundane pictures." Kristian is offended, pretends to be sick and stays away for two weeks.

Then he tracks Figueroa down to his hotel near Piccadilly with twelve better prints, and they end up in a café in Soho. Figueroa is kind and devastating. The pictures are true to reality but have no life in them. A living picture "grabs you. It asks you questions." And then the question no student wants to hear: "You are sure this is what you want to do?" Perhaps photojournalism, he suggests. Kristian associates this with breakfast news, cries in the toilets and on the way out insults two young women at the next table who suspect he’s gay. 

Gert Biesta distinguishes between learning, which takes in what we already want, and being taught, which brings something we didn't ask for. Kristian is very willing to learn. Being taught is harder. Doctor Faustus, whose story the novel follows, begins by walking out of the university and taking a tutor who promises more. Kristian's other tutor is Hans, who looks at the cat and says, "Kristian, this is bloody *good*.”

### The figure at the gate

Sartre's example of shame is a man looking through a keyhole who hears footsteps behind him. Until then he was doing the looking. Suddenly he’s the one being seen. A camera is a very good way of staying on the looking side of that door and, for much of the book, that’s where Kristian is. He photographs his family's house and not his family. Even his self-portraits keep the camera out of sight.

Then, in the middle of the book, a rough sleeper dies after what Kristian calls "a minor altercation". Soon afterwards, at a café table, he opens a newspaper and finds a picture of himself going through a gate near the spot. "It was blurred. But it was me." The police want a witness to come forward. Nobody knows who took the picture. Neither do we.

He‘d wanted to be a blurred figure on Christmas Eve. Now he is one, in someone else's photograph, and the caption beside it decides what it means. The man who arranged always to be the one looking has now been seen. Kristian dismissed photojournalism as the stuff of the paper his father read over breakfast. Seventy pages later he's in it.

A few pages on, a thin parcel arrives: a print of the *Boulevard du Temple*, mounted on card, with a pencilled message on the back. "Choose life, Kristian, and you shall do well." He doesn't know who sent it. Looking at the print properly for the first time, he sees no Devil, only a man having his boots done. Then he thinks he sees another figure, a man seated on a chair with something white in his lap, a newspaper. I've looked hard at good reproductions and can only find a dark shape with a white patch in it. Hans saw the Devil. Kristian, on the morning he has read about himself, sees a man reading a paper. Neither of them sees the bootblack.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/Faustus-tragedy.gif)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/cc/10/cc10dd61-f9df-448c-99a4-1ae3f24596e3/content/images/2026/10/000088920008-1.jpeg)

Right: Jon Nicholls - Deptford, 2026

### Marlowe's London

Kristian is offered a job: making photographs for a fringe production of *Doctor Faustus*. One evening, with a biography of Marlowe beside him, he spreads out a map and rings the places. Newgate, by the Old Bailey, where Marlowe was held after a fight in Hog Lane in 1589 in which his friend Thomas Watson killed a man and was later pardoned on grounds of self-defence. Shoreditch. The Rose in Southwark. Scadbury, at Chislehurst, where he was staying when the warrant for his arrest was issued. Deptford, where he died. "I could cover them all in a week."

I don't yet know whether he does. I've decided to do it anyway, on foot and by train, with an old folder, some XP2 and the audiobook. It's how I usually photograph: the voice in my ears keeps the part of my head that wants to comment on everything busy and leaves the rest of me free to look. This time the voice will be Kristian's, describing his photographs while I stand where he stood making mine. 

Those pictures might be in the second post, if they're any good. So will the ending and whatever explains why the man telling this story has decided to tidy up his rented house before killing himself. It's worth remembering that Kristian is telling the story of his own young life. A man who’s decided to end it all may not be the most sympathetic judge or reliable narrator.

---

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