This is the book most often taken as the starting point for novels illustrated with photographs. At the least, it could have supplied Breton with the idea of deserted streets for the novel Nadja, and it echoes in Sebald’s sense of wandering, anomie, and mourning. (Although it needs to be said there is no proof that Breton knew Rodenbach’s book in its original version, with photographs instead of drawings; see my remarks in the text on Breton.) There is a family resemblance of images and themes in Bruges-la-morte, Nadja, and Vertigo or Rings of Saturn: their relation is close for books separated—in the case of Sebald and Rodenbach—by over a hundred years.
Even books like Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul seem to show Rodenbach’s influence: Pamuk writes nostalgically about the yalıs, Ottoman wood-frame buildings that were still common in Istanbul when he was growing up, and he illustrates Istanbul with photographs of yalıs. Many images are of nearly or completely deserted streets and waterways, as in Breton, as in Rodenbach.
http://writingwithimages.com/georges-rodenbach-bruges-la-morte/
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