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Blind Spot
From the award-winning author of Open City, an innovative photographic project that explores how we see the world – with a foreword by Siri Hustvedt
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The shadow of a tree in upstate New York. A hotel room in Switzerland. A young stranger in the Congo. In Blind Spot, readers will follow Teju Cole’s inimitable artistic vision into the visual realm, as he continues to refine the voice and intellectual obsessions that earned him such acclaim for Open City. In more than 150 pairs of images and surprising, lyrical text, Cole explores his complex relationship to the visual world through his two great passions: writing and photography. Blind Spot is a testament to the art of seeing by one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature.
With few exceptions, the photos here memorialise such items, ostensibly common things made radiant by the quality of Cole’s looking ... A master … In this new, luminous book, Cole shows himself to be really one of the best at seeing.
Taken alongside his fiction and his essays, which range from the reflective to the polemical, as well as the photography column he writes for the New York Times, Blind Spot further enhances Cole’s already burnished reputation. He is a writer for our times, prodigious, wide-ranging and supremely confident in his reach…. If there is a personal touchstone for this kind of cross-fertilisation, it is surely the late John Berger...
A novelist’s meditation on photography makes unexpected connections ... This book gives you a chance to glimpse things that might have slipped your attention otherwise.
Teju Cole’s photography and writing join together to form what really is a book of poetry—gorgeously cloth-bound and the kind of book you want to keep on display long after you’ve done the reading.
Novelist and New York Times critic Teju Cole is that rare combination of a writer and equally adept photographer. This roadtrip diary pairs everyday scenes that Cole has collected with his impressions of these places, their history and their artistic and literary associations. He has a delightful eye for reflections that merge deliriously and duplicitously with their surroundings. This travelogue avoids any whiff of tourism and demands a curious audience.
An existential door-stopper of a travel diary. A thing that's aesthetically pleasing enough to boost your coffee-table game and also make you feel smarter and better travelled than you actually are... A beautiful treatise on what travelling should be
Teju Cole is the author of Every Day Is for the Thief, Open City, and Known and Strange Things. His honours include the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the New York City Book Award, and the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction. His photography has been widely exhibited, and he is the Photography Critic of The New York Times Magazine.
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