Kafka was fascinated by photography all his life; His first literary engagement with images dates back to his student years, and he continued to write about them until shortly before his death. Photography and photographs appear in all three of his novels, in many of his best-known short prose works, as well as forming a particularly consistent theme in letters and diaries.
Indeed, over the course of his literary career, Kafka would come to explore the most important concerns of his writing—such as family, identity, gender relations, memory, and power—through the lens of photography.
Kafka allegedly described himself as a 'visual person', literally 'a man of the eye', for whom the magic of photography lay in its ability to open up previously unnoticed worlds of reality, thus provoking thought and interpretation.