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Blind Spot
In this innovative synthesis of words and images, the award-winning author of Open City and photography critic for The New York Times Magazine combines two of his great passions.
To look is to see only a fraction of what one is looking at. Even in the most vigilant eye, there is a blind spot. What is missing?
When it comes to Teju Cole, the unexpected is not unfamiliar: He s an acclaimed novelist, an influential essayist, and an internationally exhibited photographer. In Blind Spot, readers follow Cole s inimitable artistic vision into the visual realm as he continues to refine the voice, eye, and intellectual obsessions that earned him such acclaim for Open City.
Here, journey through more than 150 of Cole s full-color, original photos, each accompanied by his lyrical and evocative prose, forming a multimedia diary of years of near-constant travel: from a park in Berlin to a mountain range in Switzerland, a church exterior in Lagos to a parking lot in Brooklyn; landscapes, beautiful or quotidian, that inspire Cole s memories, fantasies, and introspections. Ships in Capri remind him of the work of writers from Homer to Edna O Brien; a hotel room in Wannsee brings back a disturbing dream about a friend s death; a home in Tivoli evokes a transformative period of semi-blindness, after which the photography changed. . . . The looking changed.
As exquisitely wrought as the work of Anne Carson or Chris Marker, Blind Spot is a testament to the art of seeing by one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature."
To look is to see only a fraction of what one is looking at. Even in the most vigilant eye, there is a blind spot. What is missing?
When it comes to Teju Cole, the unexpected is not unfamiliar: He s an acclaimed novelist, an influential essayist, and an internationally exhibited photographer. In Blind Spot, readers follow Cole s inimitable artistic vision into the visual realm as he continues to refine the voice, eye, and intellectual obsessions that earned him such acclaim for Open City.
Here, journey through more than 150 of Cole s full-color, original photos, each accompanied by his lyrical and evocative prose, forming a multimedia diary of years of near-constant travel: from a park in Berlin to a mountain range in Switzerland, a church exterior in Lagos to a parking lot in Brooklyn; landscapes, beautiful or quotidian, that inspire Cole s memories, fantasies, and introspections. Ships in Capri remind him of the work of writers from Homer to Edna O Brien; a hotel room in Wannsee brings back a disturbing dream about a friend s death; a home in Tivoli evokes a transformative period of semi-blindness, after which the photography changed. . . . The looking changed.
As exquisitely wrought as the work of Anne Carson or Chris Marker, Blind Spot is a testament to the art of seeing by one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature."
352 pages, Hardcover
First published June 13, 2017
About the author
Teju Cole
39 books1,248 followersI was born to Nigerian parents and grew up in Lagos. My mother taught French. My father was a business executive who exported chocolate. The first book I read (I was six) was an abridgment of Tom Sawyer. At fifteen I published cartoons regularly in Prime People, Nigeria’s version of Vanity Fair. Two years later I moved to the United States.
Since then, I’ve spent most of my time studying art history, except for an unhappy year in medical school. I currently live in Brooklyn.
Since then, I’ve spent most of my time studying art history, except for an unhappy year in medical school. I currently live in Brooklyn.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 106 reviews
October 6, 2017
Cole, taking inspiration from Marker's excellent San Soleil (and, with this particular format, La Jetée), has created a hybrid work of his photos and prose that, though a bit uneven, is a uniquely contemplative read. Continuing his work in OPEN CITY, we are led along by a peripatetic narrator, here taken to an extreme as Cole wanders the world - Lebanon to Jamaica; Switzerland to Brooklyn during a BLM protest - capturing liminal images. He seems preoccupied with frames within frames (the best photo in the book, I think, is of a painted ocean liner moving diagonally across a bus), construction equipment, and miniature cities that can be found within larger ones. The photos, though not necessarily arresting, are always pleasant to think on, especially when they work in counterpoint to the text.
The writing itself is a bit uneven, which is not a fault of Cole's stylistic abilities, but the format itself. He has structured this book so that certain thru-lines surface repeatedly, and some (the refugee crisis, an interval of blindness he suffered from) simply outshine others (a recurring fascination with Christ and Jacob's Ladder). It would be equally easy to pull an amazing paragraph as a slightly weak one, but more fun to discuss a highlight:
"ZURICH: On tram No. 15 to Bucheggplatz, a woman sat in the seat in front of mine. She was in her late twenties or early thirties. Late afternoon light. Her hair was pulled up, and I could see her neck tattoo clearly. It was in two lines: a woman's name, a date. I wrote both down. Later, when I looked up the name, I found an old newspaper article: a woman of that name had died in a small town near Phoenix, Arizona, in 2007, and it had happened on the date in the tattoo. In the car that night, the article said, had been two other people, both of whom survived the crash, and both of whom, at that time, like the woman who died, were in their early twenties, a man, the article said, and another woman." (282)
This passage, with its intentional repetitions and symmetry, is paired with a photograph of a woman on a bus whose neck is completely obscured by shadow. We see light through her hair. There are maybe a dozen sections, out of about 110, that are of this quality, and they tend to be the standalones. I recommend this book for them. In another fabulous moment, one that encapsulates my complaint, Cole believes he is speaking to a woman who is curious about him, before suddenly realizing that he is the subject of a small-scale grift, a request for money embedded in a well-rehearsed story. He thinks: "I saw the script"
The writing itself is a bit uneven, which is not a fault of Cole's stylistic abilities, but the format itself. He has structured this book so that certain thru-lines surface repeatedly, and some (the refugee crisis, an interval of blindness he suffered from) simply outshine others (a recurring fascination with Christ and Jacob's Ladder). It would be equally easy to pull an amazing paragraph as a slightly weak one, but more fun to discuss a highlight:
"ZURICH: On tram No. 15 to Bucheggplatz, a woman sat in the seat in front of mine. She was in her late twenties or early thirties. Late afternoon light. Her hair was pulled up, and I could see her neck tattoo clearly. It was in two lines: a woman's name, a date. I wrote both down. Later, when I looked up the name, I found an old newspaper article: a woman of that name had died in a small town near Phoenix, Arizona, in 2007, and it had happened on the date in the tattoo. In the car that night, the article said, had been two other people, both of whom survived the crash, and both of whom, at that time, like the woman who died, were in their early twenties, a man, the article said, and another woman." (282)
This passage, with its intentional repetitions and symmetry, is paired with a photograph of a woman on a bus whose neck is completely obscured by shadow. We see light through her hair. There are maybe a dozen sections, out of about 110, that are of this quality, and they tend to be the standalones. I recommend this book for them. In another fabulous moment, one that encapsulates my complaint, Cole believes he is speaking to a woman who is curious about him, before suddenly realizing that he is the subject of a small-scale grift, a request for money embedded in a well-rehearsed story. He thinks: "I saw the script"
May 17, 2017
Teju Cole’s art is exceptional at the same time it is accessible. In my experience, the confluence of these two things happens only rarely, which is how Cole has come to occupy an exalted place in my pantheon of artists. If I say his photography can stop us in our tracks, it says nothing of his writing, which always adds something to my understanding. Today I discovered his website has soundtracks which open doors. And there it is, his specialness: Cole’s observations enlarge our conversation.
This may be the most excellent travel book I have read in recent years, the result of years of near-constant travel by the author. Scrolling through the Table of Contents is a tease, each destination intriguing, irresistible. Each entry is accompanied by a photograph, or is it the other way around?
Cole calls this work a lyric essay, a “singing line” connecting the places. There is some of that. What connects all these places for me are Cole’s eyes…and his teacherly quality of showing us what he is thinking. It is remarkable, and totally engrossing.
My favorite among the essays, if we can call them such, filled as much with what Cole did not say as with what he did, is the piece called “Black River.” Cole evokes the open sea, Derek Walcott, crocodiles, and white egrets. A tropical coastal swamp filled with crocodiles also had white egrets decorating the bushy green of overhanging mangroves, the large white splashes almost equidistant from one another, the closest they can be for maximum happiness, I like to think, though it could also be minimum happiness, I guess. Any closer and there will be discord, like the rest of us live.
The arrival in bookstores of a book by Teju Cole is an event. His pictures makes us look, and his words are like the egrets, spaced for maximum pleasure. Whether or not you read this as a series or alone, make sure you pick it up, just to gaze. You need have no agenda. His magic does not make much of itself. He takes us along for the ride. Bravo!
This may be the most excellent travel book I have read in recent years, the result of years of near-constant travel by the author. Scrolling through the Table of Contents is a tease, each destination intriguing, irresistible. Each entry is accompanied by a photograph, or is it the other way around?
“I want to make the kinds of pictures editors of the travel section will dislike or find unusable. I want to see the things the people who live there see, or at least what they would see after all the performance of tourism has been stripped away.”Yes, this is my favored way of travel, for “the shock of familiarity, the impossibility of exact repetition.” It is the reason most photographs of locales seemed unable to capture even a piece of my experience. But Cole manages it. In the entry for “Palm Beach,” his picture is of a construction site, a pile of substratum—in this case, sand—piled high before an elaborate pinkish villa. His written entry is one of his shortest, only three sentences, one of them the Latin phrase Et in Arcadia ego, washing the scene with knowledge of what we are viewing, and what is to come.
Cole calls this work a lyric essay, a “singing line” connecting the places. There is some of that. What connects all these places for me are Cole’s eyes…and his teacherly quality of showing us what he is thinking. It is remarkable, and totally engrossing.
“Human experience varies greatly in its externals, but on the emotional and psychological level, we have a great deal of similarity with one another.”Yes, this insight, so obvious written down, is something I have been struggling with for such a long time, going back and forth over the idea that we are the same, we are different. Cole tells us that this book stands alone, or can be seen as fourth in a quartet addressing his “concern with the limits of vision.” I want to sink into that thought, in the context of what he has given us, because outside the frame of a photograph, outside of our observation, outside of us, is everything else.
My favorite among the essays, if we can call them such, filled as much with what Cole did not say as with what he did, is the piece called “Black River.” Cole evokes the open sea, Derek Walcott, crocodiles, and white egrets. A tropical coastal swamp filled with crocodiles also had white egrets decorating the bushy green of overhanging mangroves, the large white splashes almost equidistant from one another, the closest they can be for maximum happiness, I like to think, though it could also be minimum happiness, I guess. Any closer and there will be discord, like the rest of us live.
The arrival in bookstores of a book by Teju Cole is an event. His pictures makes us look, and his words are like the egrets, spaced for maximum pleasure. Whether or not you read this as a series or alone, make sure you pick it up, just to gaze. You need have no agenda. His magic does not make much of itself. He takes us along for the ride. Bravo!
June 26, 2017
(3.75) Whether a short novel of Sebaldesque wanderings in the Big Apple (Open City), or a collection of essays on literature, art and travel (Known and Strange Things), Teju Cole’s works all share a dedication to seeing clearly. This book is composed of about 160 one- and two-page spreads in which images are matched with commentary. Each piece is headed with its location, with Lagos, Berlin, Brooklyn and various towns in Switzerland showing up frequently. The author’s philosophical approach elevates a few slightly undistinguished photographs. It is, at times, difficult to spot the relevance of certain photographs that cannot stand alone without captions. Others, though, are striking enough to require no clarifying prose, with tricks of scale or tricks of the light, reflections, shadows and layers providing visual interest. This serves as a prime example of memory taking on visual permanence, which is precisely the aim of this hybrid text — no mere collection of tourist snaps, but a poetic reflection on the confines of vision and knowledge.
See my full review on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette website.
See my full review on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette website.
December 17, 2020
One morning in 2011, at the age of 35, Teju Cole woke up blind in one eye. Medical appointments and investigations led to the diagnosis of papillophlebitis, also known as “big blind spot syndrome”. Cole underwent surgery to repair his retinal perforations and restore his vision. After that, he writes, his photography changed: “The looking changed”.
This book is a series of lyric essays exploring the limits of vision, literally and figuratively. Each essay consists of two parts — a photograph by Cole and accompanying text, the text functioning less like a caption to the photo and more like a soundtrack to the visual narrative. The result is a synaesthetic mix of poetry, reflection and travelogue, tackling similar themes to those explored in Known and Strange Things: “porous boundaries, shadow regions, ambiguities and the idea of embodied intermediaries.” I think, in fact, it is essential to read Known and Strange Things first, as Blind Spot acts as an extension of this earlier conversation.
Some essays are tightly argued. Others feel more elusive. Some hit you with an emotional-intellectual force. Others read like a series of observations that build up to a missing punchline. That said, there is a satisfying sequencing to the pieces, like a series of musical motifs, that, over time, gather up into a larger thesis — the sacredness of looking.
Cole’s travel photography, I must caution, is deliberately unpoetic, requiring “patient seeing” and an appreciation of unconventional aesthetic choices. His images are less about the “decisive moment”, and more about an intensity of attention applied to neglected peripheries:
“What I visit less often is what has been labeled beautiful ahead of time, what has been verified by the tourist board. I want to see the things the people who live there see, or at least what they would see after all the performance of tourism has been stripped away.”
Recommended for seasoned Teju Cole fans.
Mood: Pensive
Rating: 8/10
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Related review
Known and Strange Things
November 5, 2021
Teju Cole is a writer who has my utmost admiration because the intelligence of his work enables me to gain a more compassionate understanding of the world. Cole is, however, much more than a craftsman of words and sage ideas. He is also a renowned photographer, and his greatest gift may be his ability to synthesize artistic mediums in order to deliver an even more profound view of humanity. In Blind Spot, he achieves a graceful merging of his poetic prose with his thoughtful photographs. This is a unique book that is a travelogue with memorable observations, and also a stunning collection of images that resonate with voices from both the past and the present in the places where Cole has visited.
Each of the 150 photographs in this captivating book is complimented by a text entry. These nuggets of prose are a remarkable blend of vignettes, musings, histories, metaphors, analogies, revelations, meditations, philosophies, and politics. They add immediacy and context to the keenness of each photograph, but sometimes they seem to stand solitary in the empathy and compassion they express, the same way the power of the photographs can generate emotions beyond words. This alliance of literary flashes and contemplative images has a page-turning quality. Journeying through Cole’s visual and written reflections is both exciting and humbling.
Cole says of his travels, “I want to see the things the people who live there see, or at least what they would see after the performance of tourism has been stripped away.” Perhaps, then, the best way to praise the originality of Cole’s work is to associate his goals to those of other great minds. Toni Morrison has said she attempts in her novels to “make the ordinary extraordinary.” Seamus Heaney has said that art relies on “getting started, keeping going, and getting started again.” And Hermann Hesse has said that the greatest art is music because music is essentially the highest level of language. Cole’s Blind Spot captures the extraordinary within the ordinary day, and his work constantly feels as though it’s starting anew and meticulously keeping going, while striving to attain a musicality with its lushness of words and images.
Each of the 150 photographs in this captivating book is complimented by a text entry. These nuggets of prose are a remarkable blend of vignettes, musings, histories, metaphors, analogies, revelations, meditations, philosophies, and politics. They add immediacy and context to the keenness of each photograph, but sometimes they seem to stand solitary in the empathy and compassion they express, the same way the power of the photographs can generate emotions beyond words. This alliance of literary flashes and contemplative images has a page-turning quality. Journeying through Cole’s visual and written reflections is both exciting and humbling.
Cole says of his travels, “I want to see the things the people who live there see, or at least what they would see after the performance of tourism has been stripped away.” Perhaps, then, the best way to praise the originality of Cole’s work is to associate his goals to those of other great minds. Toni Morrison has said she attempts in her novels to “make the ordinary extraordinary.” Seamus Heaney has said that art relies on “getting started, keeping going, and getting started again.” And Hermann Hesse has said that the greatest art is music because music is essentially the highest level of language. Cole’s Blind Spot captures the extraordinary within the ordinary day, and his work constantly feels as though it’s starting anew and meticulously keeping going, while striving to attain a musicality with its lushness of words and images.
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December 15, 2023Avoiding the Art History Lecture; Dangers in Following Sebald
Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American photographer, critic, and novelist who is also the photography critic of the "New York Times." (I imagine their choice puzzled some academics: there are many qualified people, who know the literature better than Cole.) "Blind Spot" is the kind of book that can only be produced by an author with popular appeal: it's 330-pages, all-color, with heavy coated stock and a cloth cover with an embossed tipped-in front cover image. Yet the text is more like an artist's book than a popular novel: it has no continuous narrative, and it's full of allusions. Most of the book has photos on the right and brief texts on the left, and each text is titled with the name of the place where the photo was taken. (There is also a map at the end of the book, and a two-page Postscript explaining how the author likes to travel.)
The narrator doesn't describe why or how he travels, which makes him seem much as he actually is: the privileged recipient of invitations "to literary festivals and to teaching programs," as he says in the Postscript. In the book, the narrator is simply a wandering observer of a number of cultures, superficially like the narrator of Sebald's books. But Cole's wanderings aren't directed like Sebald's were: he isn't circling around specific cultural memories. Instead he samples various atrocities and genocides as he goes (Balinese, First Nation, German, Syrian, even Swiss). When he's not commenting on historical events, the narrator usually wants to tell us about his own photographs. On a number of pages we're told what to look at--effectively, we're told why the photos are good. There are several sequences of text/image pairings that work as self-contained lectures, in which the narrator tells us how to notice things in his images (for example, pp. 64-71). These passages are unintentionally teacherly, for example this text, which faces an image of tables in a restaurant in Ferrara, with a panoramic painting of Ferrara on the wall:
"Only later did I see what was at stake. I had assumed that the image was merely saying something about the unsteady boundary between the real and the painted... But obvious as it was, I didn't see it until I saw it: the way the table on the left announced a phantom cityscape of its own, in homage to the old city of Ferrara, grouped glasses for towers, porcelain houses..." [p. 128]
It doesn't make the prose natural or conversational to pretend the narrator didn't see the virtue of his own photograph, and then to tell us about it. As a writerly device, this doesn't work, because it brings us out of the narration and into a lecture hall, where Cole, just offstage, uses a red laser pointer to show us the interest of his art.
Images that are not accompanied by historical facts, allusions to classic texts and artworks, or ekphrastic inventories, are explained by texts about dreams, memories, Christian themes, and a miscellany of travel ancedotes. Despite this variety the photographs are nearly always formal compositions of depopulated corners of cities, or people seen from behind: Cole's is a common contemporary photographic practice.
Unlike Sebald, Cole is just learning Western history and art, and it shows. In the Postscript he undertook research "as an art historian in training." His references are commonplaces of the art historical literature. Siri Hustvedt, who wrote a rambling poetic introduction to the book, lists "Caravaggio, Duerer, Degas"; there's also, for example, a text and image pairing inspired by Carel Fabritius's goldfinch. Cole's allusions are common, and often both pretentious and precious. Here is the text about Fabritius, called "Tripoli," in its entirety:
"The date to remember is 1654. He paints 'The Goldfinch' that year. The color harmonies are cool, the wall is as full of subtle character as a face. His life is like a brief and beautiful bridge. He studies with Rembrandt in Amsterdam. He teaches Vermeer in Delft.
"I am walking in the narrow alley between the castle of the Crusaders and the busy souk. There are children wild in the alley. There is a bird on the wall. It is him, Carel Fabritius. The bird suggests it (though this bird is a bulbul) but it is the wall that confirms it. Suddenly the gunbowder depot explodes. Fabritius is killed, and most of his paintings are lost to history. But not all is lost. The bridge has been built and it has been crossed, the bridge from shadow into light. He is not yet thirty-three years old." [p. 20]
The next-to-last line is an allusion to a cliche of art history, that Fabritius put light into Rembrandt's dark interiors, paving the way for Vermeer. It's also meant, I think, to resonate with the book's recurrent Christological themes. Fabritius's studio was near the Delft gunpowder storage facility. Cole's idea is to let Fabritius's story and his most famous painting (recently re-popularized in Donna Tartt's "Goldfinch") echo in his photograph of a bird in a cage hung on a scarred plaster wall. The photo itself is unremarkable; the wall could be an artwork by Tapies or Villegle or any one of hundreds of recent photographers who have fetishished the overlooked textures of cities. The birdcage only contributes another cliche.
What's worst about this is the way Cole twists his prose to avoid the appearance of lecturing. "The date to remember is 1654" is both teacherly and artificially literary. "Blind Spot" is full of pretentious allusions--Homer's catalogue of ships, an Ara Pacis style relief, the Divine Comedy, Ondaatje, Alkman (as Hustvedt notes). These allusions are settled uneasily into Cole's high-art prose, as if they were treasures brought up from a shipwreck. This is the opposite of Sebald's allusions, which are much more informed and more naturally spoken. Sebald is not uneasy about showing off his knowledge, because he is comfortable in what he knows. His history is woven into his concerns: Cole's is "research." He drops names: a picture of a detail of a map reminds him of something "Elizabeth Bishop, Luigi Ghirri, and Italo Calvino have in common" (p. 24). What he retrieves from his allusions is often thin: in one photo, "the city is shorn of all superfluity and reduced to its essentials, as in a play by Beckett" (p. 226). Given that Sebald's recurring center of interest, the black hole that keeps drawing him back in time, is the Holocaust, it is especially trite that Cole doesn't develop the title of his own book: it isn't until p. 80 that we learn that his retina was detached, making him temporarily blind in one eye; and it isn't until the very last line of the Postscript that he thinks to tell us that "To look is to see only a fraction of what one is looking at. Even in the most vigilant eye, there is a blind spot. What is missing?" (p. 325).
More successful pairings
"Blind Spot" can be read for individual text/image pairings, because some are very inventive. "Lagos," pp. 48-49, pairs a one-paragraph story about how the narrator's mother once forced him to stop striking out what he was trying to write, resulting in a clean page of "elegant-looking writing," with a brief second paragraph about the narrator's fascination with the white spaces around Cy Twombly's scribbles, and a photo (taken in Lagos), of a mirror or pane of wind glass resting one some newspapers in someone's a back yard. The slant rhymes of clean pages, blank margins, and empty reflections works well. The same dynamics, with similar imagery and a text on Swiss politics, can be found on pp. 12-13.
The pairings that work best, I think, are the ones where the text doesn't try for literary tone, doesn't try to instruct us about how to see photographs, and doesn't propose one-to-one correspondences between historical events and the everyday objects that are taken to allegorize them. Cole will be a better writer if he can give up his repertorial habits (as in novels like "Every Day Is For the Thief," about his return to Lagos and its politics), his art-historical ambitions, and his emulation of Europeans like Sebald. His photographs aren't often remarkable by themselves, but sometimes he finds things to say that glance off them, producing the kind of back-and-forth reading and looking that really illuminates both the writing and the images.
Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American photographer, critic, and novelist who is also the photography critic of the "New York Times." (I imagine their choice puzzled some academics: there are many qualified people, who know the literature better than Cole.) "Blind Spot" is the kind of book that can only be produced by an author with popular appeal: it's 330-pages, all-color, with heavy coated stock and a cloth cover with an embossed tipped-in front cover image. Yet the text is more like an artist's book than a popular novel: it has no continuous narrative, and it's full of allusions. Most of the book has photos on the right and brief texts on the left, and each text is titled with the name of the place where the photo was taken. (There is also a map at the end of the book, and a two-page Postscript explaining how the author likes to travel.)
The narrator doesn't describe why or how he travels, which makes him seem much as he actually is: the privileged recipient of invitations "to literary festivals and to teaching programs," as he says in the Postscript. In the book, the narrator is simply a wandering observer of a number of cultures, superficially like the narrator of Sebald's books. But Cole's wanderings aren't directed like Sebald's were: he isn't circling around specific cultural memories. Instead he samples various atrocities and genocides as he goes (Balinese, First Nation, German, Syrian, even Swiss). When he's not commenting on historical events, the narrator usually wants to tell us about his own photographs. On a number of pages we're told what to look at--effectively, we're told why the photos are good. There are several sequences of text/image pairings that work as self-contained lectures, in which the narrator tells us how to notice things in his images (for example, pp. 64-71). These passages are unintentionally teacherly, for example this text, which faces an image of tables in a restaurant in Ferrara, with a panoramic painting of Ferrara on the wall:
"Only later did I see what was at stake. I had assumed that the image was merely saying something about the unsteady boundary between the real and the painted... But obvious as it was, I didn't see it until I saw it: the way the table on the left announced a phantom cityscape of its own, in homage to the old city of Ferrara, grouped glasses for towers, porcelain houses..." [p. 128]
It doesn't make the prose natural or conversational to pretend the narrator didn't see the virtue of his own photograph, and then to tell us about it. As a writerly device, this doesn't work, because it brings us out of the narration and into a lecture hall, where Cole, just offstage, uses a red laser pointer to show us the interest of his art.
Images that are not accompanied by historical facts, allusions to classic texts and artworks, or ekphrastic inventories, are explained by texts about dreams, memories, Christian themes, and a miscellany of travel ancedotes. Despite this variety the photographs are nearly always formal compositions of depopulated corners of cities, or people seen from behind: Cole's is a common contemporary photographic practice.
Unlike Sebald, Cole is just learning Western history and art, and it shows. In the Postscript he undertook research "as an art historian in training." His references are commonplaces of the art historical literature. Siri Hustvedt, who wrote a rambling poetic introduction to the book, lists "Caravaggio, Duerer, Degas"; there's also, for example, a text and image pairing inspired by Carel Fabritius's goldfinch. Cole's allusions are common, and often both pretentious and precious. Here is the text about Fabritius, called "Tripoli," in its entirety:
"The date to remember is 1654. He paints 'The Goldfinch' that year. The color harmonies are cool, the wall is as full of subtle character as a face. His life is like a brief and beautiful bridge. He studies with Rembrandt in Amsterdam. He teaches Vermeer in Delft.
"I am walking in the narrow alley between the castle of the Crusaders and the busy souk. There are children wild in the alley. There is a bird on the wall. It is him, Carel Fabritius. The bird suggests it (though this bird is a bulbul) but it is the wall that confirms it. Suddenly the gunbowder depot explodes. Fabritius is killed, and most of his paintings are lost to history. But not all is lost. The bridge has been built and it has been crossed, the bridge from shadow into light. He is not yet thirty-three years old." [p. 20]
The next-to-last line is an allusion to a cliche of art history, that Fabritius put light into Rembrandt's dark interiors, paving the way for Vermeer. It's also meant, I think, to resonate with the book's recurrent Christological themes. Fabritius's studio was near the Delft gunpowder storage facility. Cole's idea is to let Fabritius's story and his most famous painting (recently re-popularized in Donna Tartt's "Goldfinch") echo in his photograph of a bird in a cage hung on a scarred plaster wall. The photo itself is unremarkable; the wall could be an artwork by Tapies or Villegle or any one of hundreds of recent photographers who have fetishished the overlooked textures of cities. The birdcage only contributes another cliche.
What's worst about this is the way Cole twists his prose to avoid the appearance of lecturing. "The date to remember is 1654" is both teacherly and artificially literary. "Blind Spot" is full of pretentious allusions--Homer's catalogue of ships, an Ara Pacis style relief, the Divine Comedy, Ondaatje, Alkman (as Hustvedt notes). These allusions are settled uneasily into Cole's high-art prose, as if they were treasures brought up from a shipwreck. This is the opposite of Sebald's allusions, which are much more informed and more naturally spoken. Sebald is not uneasy about showing off his knowledge, because he is comfortable in what he knows. His history is woven into his concerns: Cole's is "research." He drops names: a picture of a detail of a map reminds him of something "Elizabeth Bishop, Luigi Ghirri, and Italo Calvino have in common" (p. 24). What he retrieves from his allusions is often thin: in one photo, "the city is shorn of all superfluity and reduced to its essentials, as in a play by Beckett" (p. 226). Given that Sebald's recurring center of interest, the black hole that keeps drawing him back in time, is the Holocaust, it is especially trite that Cole doesn't develop the title of his own book: it isn't until p. 80 that we learn that his retina was detached, making him temporarily blind in one eye; and it isn't until the very last line of the Postscript that he thinks to tell us that "To look is to see only a fraction of what one is looking at. Even in the most vigilant eye, there is a blind spot. What is missing?" (p. 325).
More successful pairings
"Blind Spot" can be read for individual text/image pairings, because some are very inventive. "Lagos," pp. 48-49, pairs a one-paragraph story about how the narrator's mother once forced him to stop striking out what he was trying to write, resulting in a clean page of "elegant-looking writing," with a brief second paragraph about the narrator's fascination with the white spaces around Cy Twombly's scribbles, and a photo (taken in Lagos), of a mirror or pane of wind glass resting one some newspapers in someone's a back yard. The slant rhymes of clean pages, blank margins, and empty reflections works well. The same dynamics, with similar imagery and a text on Swiss politics, can be found on pp. 12-13.
The pairings that work best, I think, are the ones where the text doesn't try for literary tone, doesn't try to instruct us about how to see photographs, and doesn't propose one-to-one correspondences between historical events and the everyday objects that are taken to allegorize them. Cole will be a better writer if he can give up his repertorial habits (as in novels like "Every Day Is For the Thief," about his return to Lagos and its politics), his art-historical ambitions, and his emulation of Europeans like Sebald. His photographs aren't often remarkable by themselves, but sometimes he finds things to say that glance off them, producing the kind of back-and-forth reading and looking that really illuminates both the writing and the images.
July 31, 2017
Teju Cole might be one of the coolest dudes in the world. Art historian, novelist, photographer, globetrotter. These photos are not awesome natural landscapes or vibrant, stunning portraits that you'd want to put on your wall. They're mostly of the fairly mundane and banal, or of wonderful places, framed in obscuring ways. Perhaps if they were devoid of text, I wouldn't enjoy them as much, as I'm not very good at thinking deeply about visual art. But the prose is a helping hand that takes you through the book, points things out or simply suggests them; makes you think critically about the photos, as well as about religion, politics, philosophy. It feels very in-keeping with the themes of Known and Strange Things. Maybe now it's time for me to read his novels.
October 3, 2024
The first time I travelled alone, I went to Berlin. It was an impulsive decision. I had a naive, romantic feeling, the words of Isherwood in my head: "Berlin, to me, meant boys." It was a hot unrequited summer and I mostly ate strawberries and döners by myself. Naturally, I took pictures of the Brandenburg Gate, I visited Charlie's Checkpoint, I saw the fenced-off fragments of the Berlin Wall. But often I found myself more interested in the outskirts of the city—the empty apartment lots and the abandoned Olympic village. I went to the Museuminsel and I saw some of its oldest Roman antiquities (the duenos kernos!) but I became more interested in the construction work that stretched around the perimeter of the buildings, big blue pipes and thick slabs of concrete on which someone had painted philosophical aphorisms. I went around photographing each block and its quotation, the diligent work of a nameless graffitist who had tried to decorate these ephemeral objects with immortal wisdom. Berlin is a city heavy with history: the imperial palaces of Potsdam, the holocaust memorials around the Tiergarten, the vestiges of the Wall and the Soviet era. Spread throughout the city are little placards inscribed with the word Denkmal, "monument". But the monuments are not the whole city. Tourists too easily forget that the city is not a fossil fixed in amber. It's moving and its historic facades are constantly changing. It's also a 24-hour party city.
Teju Cole's Blind Spot is a collection of photoessays which trouble the idea of seeing. Traveling around the world, Lagos, Zurich, São Paulo, Selma, Brooklyn, Beirut, Bali, Berlin, Cole takes pictures of random objects—a mound of dirt, a man sleeping beside a wall, a woman's back, tree branches, fold-up chairs squeezed together on the streets leading to a BLM march. These are not holiday snaps, vacation souvenirs, happy mementos. As he tours the world, he takes these pictures simmering with pensive rage. In the photoessay titled "Ubud", we see a covered car sticking out from a half-open garage. In the essay he writes,
It is an essay on genocide and erasure, the hidden horror and silences of history, people killed and, for the sake of diplomatic comity, forgotten. What is the image doing? Cole could have shown the sites of the massacres, the built-over locations where Chinese shops were destroyed and the owners murdered; alternatively, to pinpoint the hypocrisy of modern tourism, Cole could have shown the contrasting beauty of a Balinese resort or an ancient, heritage-listed temple. Instead, the picture of a half-open garage, dirt and leaves on the ground, a creeper growing up the wall, so trivial, so mundane, is an evocative metaphor for a cosmopolitan blindness: the covered and closed parts of the city that no one looks at and the histories no one mentions—the conscious blindspots of collective memory.
"Almost all go unseen, and almost none are recorded, unless photography intervenes", Cole writes in one essay, juxtaposed beside the image of a man in a wheelchair staring at a map of Lustgarten. Just as a sound leaves no permanent mark in the air, Cole explains, so too the arrangement of bodies in space is impermanent—the city is never the same (one here might think of Heraclitus who said that no one ever enters the same river twice, because the molecules of water are always in motion, always reconfiguring themselves). So too for the city: the cathedral and the museums of Lustgarten may be meticulously maintained and restored, repristinated for all time, but the people around it are always moving. There are new visitors. New encounters. Photography then is not simply an act of recording a place and time—but of intervening, rescuing time from itself. Photography captures a unique moment. But a camera is also not the same as an eye. A photograph allows us to see what may have escaped our first seeing—to re-see the past resaturated with new light and coloration, developed and redeveloped in the darkroom.
In his essay on Saint Moritz, Cole begins by noting that peripheral vision is instinctive. Even when we focus on a single object, we will still notice movement in our periphery. However, if objects in our periphery move in a regular way, they fade from our attention—a cognitive phenomenon known as "Troxler's fading". Troxler, as Cole notes, was also a physician and activist who advocated for a more liberal constitution in 1848, wanting rights enshrined like in the US constitution. In the accompanying picture, we see linens swinging on a clothes line; beyond that, we see vehicles, distant vacant apartments, and then far beyond, we see the looming Alps. The photographer is on the edges, not in the ritzy alpine resort, but on the margins, focusing the camera not on the idyllic mountains but on the clothes billowing in the wind. As is typical of many of the photoessays, Cole's essay equivocates on the literal and the metaphorical: we see literal centers and literal peripheries, we almost feel Toxler's illusion, but we also intuit an underlying moral. If the margins are to be noticed, they have to move in an irregular way. It's not just a neurological illusion of perception but an ethical one about how social movements need to move (unexpectedly and unpredictably, never complacently).
I found this a beautiful collection to read, a melange of literary exposition and philosophical pondering, musing and protest all in one. Cole never puts the central thesis in focus for the reader; you have to squint into the margins and interstices. At one point, he uses the phrase "dreamwork bricolage" and it feels like an apt description of the book.
Teju Cole's Blind Spot is a collection of photoessays which trouble the idea of seeing. Traveling around the world, Lagos, Zurich, São Paulo, Selma, Brooklyn, Beirut, Bali, Berlin, Cole takes pictures of random objects—a mound of dirt, a man sleeping beside a wall, a woman's back, tree branches, fold-up chairs squeezed together on the streets leading to a BLM march. These are not holiday snaps, vacation souvenirs, happy mementos. As he tours the world, he takes these pictures simmering with pensive rage. In the photoessay titled "Ubud", we see a covered car sticking out from a half-open garage. In the essay he writes,
We are advised not to say: "1965." We are advised not say: "The events of 1965." We are advised not to say: "In 1965, following a failed coup, the Indonesian Army stoked communal hatreds leading to a massive anticommunist purge."
It is an essay on genocide and erasure, the hidden horror and silences of history, people killed and, for the sake of diplomatic comity, forgotten. What is the image doing? Cole could have shown the sites of the massacres, the built-over locations where Chinese shops were destroyed and the owners murdered; alternatively, to pinpoint the hypocrisy of modern tourism, Cole could have shown the contrasting beauty of a Balinese resort or an ancient, heritage-listed temple. Instead, the picture of a half-open garage, dirt and leaves on the ground, a creeper growing up the wall, so trivial, so mundane, is an evocative metaphor for a cosmopolitan blindness: the covered and closed parts of the city that no one looks at and the histories no one mentions—the conscious blindspots of collective memory.
"Almost all go unseen, and almost none are recorded, unless photography intervenes", Cole writes in one essay, juxtaposed beside the image of a man in a wheelchair staring at a map of Lustgarten. Just as a sound leaves no permanent mark in the air, Cole explains, so too the arrangement of bodies in space is impermanent—the city is never the same (one here might think of Heraclitus who said that no one ever enters the same river twice, because the molecules of water are always in motion, always reconfiguring themselves). So too for the city: the cathedral and the museums of Lustgarten may be meticulously maintained and restored, repristinated for all time, but the people around it are always moving. There are new visitors. New encounters. Photography then is not simply an act of recording a place and time—but of intervening, rescuing time from itself. Photography captures a unique moment. But a camera is also not the same as an eye. A photograph allows us to see what may have escaped our first seeing—to re-see the past resaturated with new light and coloration, developed and redeveloped in the darkroom.
In his essay on Saint Moritz, Cole begins by noting that peripheral vision is instinctive. Even when we focus on a single object, we will still notice movement in our periphery. However, if objects in our periphery move in a regular way, they fade from our attention—a cognitive phenomenon known as "Troxler's fading". Troxler, as Cole notes, was also a physician and activist who advocated for a more liberal constitution in 1848, wanting rights enshrined like in the US constitution. In the accompanying picture, we see linens swinging on a clothes line; beyond that, we see vehicles, distant vacant apartments, and then far beyond, we see the looming Alps. The photographer is on the edges, not in the ritzy alpine resort, but on the margins, focusing the camera not on the idyllic mountains but on the clothes billowing in the wind. As is typical of many of the photoessays, Cole's essay equivocates on the literal and the metaphorical: we see literal centers and literal peripheries, we almost feel Toxler's illusion, but we also intuit an underlying moral. If the margins are to be noticed, they have to move in an irregular way. It's not just a neurological illusion of perception but an ethical one about how social movements need to move (unexpectedly and unpredictably, never complacently).
I found this a beautiful collection to read, a melange of literary exposition and philosophical pondering, musing and protest all in one. Cole never puts the central thesis in focus for the reader; you have to squint into the margins and interstices. At one point, he uses the phrase "dreamwork bricolage" and it feels like an apt description of the book.
March 2, 2023
“To look is to see only a fraction of what one is looking at. Even in the most vigilant eye, there is a blind spot. What is missing?”
Teju Cole travels the world with his camera and his matchless eye. His vision is profound (and perhaps even more profound, given his brush with blindness), and his words are electric. A piecemeal travel diary of sorts, poetic asides paired with cityscapes. (To me, he is perfect.)
December 4, 2018
Teju Cole's Blind Spot is an uncommon book: a combination of writing and photography that try to meet each other on equal footing. This is rare because, while many people think of themselves as photographers and writers, few people are good enough at both to combine the two without some sort of imbalance. The usual compromise is to include an introduction or interlude in a photobook, or to include a series of photos before or after a text. Blind Spot is neither a photobook nor an extended essay. In its 300-odd pages there are enough images, series, and ideas to fill multiple photobooks, and while the essays in this book dance around recurring themes (seeing and lightness/darkness, Christ and stories from the New Testament, Greek and Roman Myth, interaction between the senses, and of course, photography) they do not by themselves add up to a complete work. The photographs (which often use symbols, mirrors, paintings, and signs as well as obstructions and distortions of scale and distance) also rely on the text and in certain ways the two prop each other up. But the real through-line that holds the work together is simply Teju Cole, and this is where part of my confusion regarding Blind Spot begins. Blind Spot is a personal work. All the places (Cole features photographs taken in 6 continents), disparate images, and short texts are held together by Cole. And yet, Blind Spot is not a particularly personal book. There is much about Cole's work habits, his travels, and, somewhat annoyingly, his own interpretations of his writing (both inside Blind Spot and in his other work) and his photography. But there are few clues to who he is as a person. And while I'm not sure that more of a personal view into Teju's life would've saved Blind Spot for me, I wish that he'd spent a little less time explaining his work to me and a little bit more making me feel something. In the end I felt like Blind Spot was a good idea for five or six different photobooks, a novel, and a few essays all combined into the space of 300 glossy pages. But I wasn't sure that I "got" it.
November 8, 2017
If I were a book I would like to be like Blind Spot; apparently sleek, beautiful and voluminous but edgy and dark on the inside. With words that draw lasting images in one’s mind and images revealing words and meanings you have always pictured in your mind but never found the means to express. And with a foreword by Siri Hustvedt.
August 15, 2020
Small pictures, big words. Gives you vivid dreams.
July 13, 2023
I enjoyed the writing more than the photographs. I still feel like I don't have enough practice analyzing/interpreting/appreciating photography to enjoy it sometimes.
July 10, 2017
Blind Spot
Teju Cole
This work has a straight-forward pattern. One page has several paragraphs of commentary. On the facing page is a photo. Sometimes there is a common element between the commentary and the photo, but not always, at least for me.
Nor is there a common theme from one commentary to the next. At least none I could detect.
Page 52. Titled: Lugano
"She said to me: Europe is getting worse. I still don't understand why you want to move to Switzerland.
I said to her: I don't want to move to Switzerland. Quite the contrary. I like to visit Switzerland. When I'm not there, I long for it, but what I long for is the feeling of being an outsider there and, soon after, the feeling of leaving again so I can continue to long for it."
The sentiment expressed above is understandable. It may not be common. It may have an unknown motivation. I may not agree with it. But I can understand it, even with no help from the photo. Well, sorta understand it.
Unfortunately, many of the other commentaries are not even remotely understandable to me. They seem to be abstract, too abstract.
As a side note, I am still unsure if this should be called a graphic novel. Maybe not, since the photos often have no apparent bearing on the topic.
Bailed. dnf.
Teju Cole
This work has a straight-forward pattern. One page has several paragraphs of commentary. On the facing page is a photo. Sometimes there is a common element between the commentary and the photo, but not always, at least for me.
Nor is there a common theme from one commentary to the next. At least none I could detect.
Page 52. Titled: Lugano
"She said to me: Europe is getting worse. I still don't understand why you want to move to Switzerland.
I said to her: I don't want to move to Switzerland. Quite the contrary. I like to visit Switzerland. When I'm not there, I long for it, but what I long for is the feeling of being an outsider there and, soon after, the feeling of leaving again so I can continue to long for it."
The sentiment expressed above is understandable. It may not be common. It may have an unknown motivation. I may not agree with it. But I can understand it, even with no help from the photo. Well, sorta understand it.
Unfortunately, many of the other commentaries are not even remotely understandable to me. They seem to be abstract, too abstract.
As a side note, I am still unsure if this should be called a graphic novel. Maybe not, since the photos often have no apparent bearing on the topic.
Bailed. dnf.
January 5, 2018
Not chronological, not predictive, not what you were expecting, Blind Spot is faithful to the infidelities of sight. So much depends on what you perceive, on how you allow yourself to be worked upon by vision, periphery, obscured fields, chiaroscuro, the bewilderment of not seeing as you used/are used to. This is a book that you should let work upon you, in sight, in mind. It will be working on you long after you've shut your eyes.
July 6, 2022
Oh man, I was a little bit gutted with this offering from Teju Cole.
I found it a bit too metaphorical and pretentious in nature. The photographs were variable; some were amazing, some were terribly mediocre. Then each textual "description" had nothing to do with the photograph alongside it. It was more like a game of "guess what I'm talking about now"! Some passages just quoted the bible, Greek mythology or made references to random conversations!
Sadly, I was assuming the Blind Spot in the title was going to refer more to Coles's experience with sight problems but this was glossed over in the random description of a photograph.
Overall I was very disappointed. I'm going to gift my copy to a friend who is doing a degree in Arts.
I found it a bit too metaphorical and pretentious in nature. The photographs were variable; some were amazing, some were terribly mediocre. Then each textual "description" had nothing to do with the photograph alongside it. It was more like a game of "guess what I'm talking about now"! Some passages just quoted the bible, Greek mythology or made references to random conversations!
Sadly, I was assuming the Blind Spot in the title was going to refer more to Coles's experience with sight problems but this was glossed over in the random description of a photograph.
Overall I was very disappointed. I'm going to gift my copy to a friend who is doing a degree in Arts.
January 15, 2020
I bought it for the photos. I ended up liking it for the lyric essays going with them, or do the photos go with the essays? Rather?
The photos are often bland (but not touristy as the author seems to imply. Tourists don't look at things like this.) They are mostly well-composed, unusual and sometimes compelling.
"Lagos" on page 5 is exceptionally impressive. I also like especially "Brazaville" on page 23 resp. 323, "Zuerich" on page 70/71 and "Rivaz" on page 321. Mr. Cole seems to have a thing for curtains and drapings :). (Page numbers refer to the electronic version of the book).
The texts are calm, observational and at the same time all over the place AND standing on firm ground over which Cole treads calmly and lightly with profound thoughts coming to his mind.
This is the second book I read from Teju Cole and I have the feeling that Mr. Cole is influencing me in a very light and agreeable manner. That never happened with any author before. And it's not that I wouldn't read...
Just as I know some of the nearby of places in the photos, quite many really, so his writings seem familiar. Yet both, the words and images depart from what I sometimes know from glimpsing at it to what and whom he looked at, thought about.
"Blind Spot" is an Eye & Mind-Opening experience.
The photos are often bland (but not touristy as the author seems to imply. Tourists don't look at things like this.) They are mostly well-composed, unusual and sometimes compelling.
"Lagos" on page 5 is exceptionally impressive. I also like especially "Brazaville" on page 23 resp. 323, "Zuerich" on page 70/71 and "Rivaz" on page 321. Mr. Cole seems to have a thing for curtains and drapings :). (Page numbers refer to the electronic version of the book).
The texts are calm, observational and at the same time all over the place AND standing on firm ground over which Cole treads calmly and lightly with profound thoughts coming to his mind.
This is the second book I read from Teju Cole and I have the feeling that Mr. Cole is influencing me in a very light and agreeable manner. That never happened with any author before. And it's not that I wouldn't read...
Just as I know some of the nearby of places in the photos, quite many really, so his writings seem familiar. Yet both, the words and images depart from what I sometimes know from glimpsing at it to what and whom he looked at, thought about.
"Blind Spot" is an Eye & Mind-Opening experience.
April 18, 2018
Cole has a good eye, but I didn’t connect with most of the writing. I’m all for the idea of an abstract relationship between text and image, but the collisions here rarely worked. The text was only occasionally interesting, and, at times, pretentious. The text feels primary here, but the photos are the stronger of the two mediums. I can imagine a tighter edit of the photos in a larger format with a severe reduction in text being a much better book.
July 16, 2017
A catalog of facile photography ... the blind spot here is the utter contempt to propose anything directly to the reader/viewer.
December 29, 2020
"Something needs doing around the house, so M’s mother calls their handyman, M tells me. He isn’t there, the phone is answered by someone else. It’s the handyman’s brother. He’s away, the brother says, but I can do the work. Away to where? He’s in Syria, he’s become a fighter. The brother comes and does the work. Something else needs doing a month later. M’s mother calls the handyman’s brother. The handyman himself answers. You’re back? I’m back. And your brother, where is he? He’s in Syria, fighting. I’ll come over and do the work myself."
-'Beirut'
-'Beirut'
Read
October 22, 2017Photos on one side, text on the other. Teju Cole travels around the world, takes pictures and muses about them.
Sometimes I really liked this book, but I also felt like it had weaker parts. I felt like it should have been cut by a third and then it would have been amazing.
I was surprised by how much of the book was related to Christianity, so you might want to know that going in (I don't mind, I just didn't expect it).
Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library
Sometimes I really liked this book, but I also felt like it had weaker parts. I felt like it should have been cut by a third and then it would have been amazing.
I was surprised by how much of the book was related to Christianity, so you might want to know that going in (I don't mind, I just didn't expect it).
Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library
November 30, 2019
I am left wordless by this book filled with words and images. It is part of a long tradition of books by those who travel the world and who try to find their home in it. The combination of mostly person-less photographs and meditative prose makes for a beautifully alienating experience.
August 21, 2020
I tried to read Blind Spot as slow as possible as if I was travelling along with Teju Cole. One thing you learn while on a journey is not to rush, otherwise you will get this nagging sensation that you left too much in a place where your retina meets the optic nerve.
July 3, 2017
Truly stunning and inspiring. Pale imitation as they are, I need to get back to recording words and images.
March 3, 2018
This is an interesting and unique book, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts....
January 1, 2021
An adult picture book that reminds you that you'll never be, like, that smrt. Ever.
October 21, 2022
“To look is to see only a fraction of what one is looking at. Even in the most vigilant eye, there is a blind spot. What is it missing?”
May 17, 2021
interesanti , ja atvērumā neskaties uz bildi teksts noķer sajūtu, vietu, laiku. ja neskaties tekstu, tad bilde noķer stāstu - vispār iespaidīgi
October 1, 2017
I read this in one rainy day ... blown away by the power of text and image, and the way Cole explores both humanity and the ‘blind spots’ of our world ... thx to Tellio for recommending this one (now I may need to splurge and buy, instead of library version)
October 23, 2018
Cole has combined photography and text to assemble his Blind Spot. Each photograph is entitled according to the geographical location in which it was taken, and is accompanied by a textual excerpt - writing which sometimes relates obviously to the location or adjacent photo, or sometimes appears more ambiguous and seemingly unconnected. The layout, size and shape of the photographs on the pages vary throughout, with some images overlapping onto the neighbouring page and demanding a somewhat fragmented interpretation.
As the headings divide the images and writing by the places to which they belong, the work exudes a sense of composite amalgamation as opposed to cohesion between the pages. A whisper of narrative, however, intermittently presents itself as subtle references and repetitions traverse the partitioning titles to suggest the ‘continuity of places’ (324) - the representation of which Cole announces in his postscript to have been his ultimate goal.
Read more here: http://jade-jasmine.blogspot.com/2018...
As the headings divide the images and writing by the places to which they belong, the work exudes a sense of composite amalgamation as opposed to cohesion between the pages. A whisper of narrative, however, intermittently presents itself as subtle references and repetitions traverse the partitioning titles to suggest the ‘continuity of places’ (324) - the representation of which Cole announces in his postscript to have been his ultimate goal.
Read more here: http://jade-jasmine.blogspot.com/2018...
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