Blind Spot
Staff Reviews
Remember when you would have to sit through someone’s slide show of their vacation? Imagine it with a world class photographer and essayist. You’ll learn something and shake your head at the gorgeous, quiet photos.
Description
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.
One of Time’s Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of the Year • One of Smithsonian’s Ten Best Photography Books of the Year
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 and interiors, 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.
Praise for Blind Spot
“Common things [are] made radiant by the quality of Cole’s looking. . . . In this new, luminous book, Cole shows himself to be really one of the best at seeing.”—The Guardian
“This lyrical essay in photographs paired with texts explores the mysteries of the ordinary.”—The New York Times Books Review (Editors’ Choice)
“Stunning . . . feels like the fulfillment of an intellectual project that has defined most of [Cole’s] career.”—Slate
“Dazzling . . . cerebral yet intimate . . . combines personal essay, history, biography, journalism, and photography into a seamless package, capturing human dignity and grace through careful, clear-eyed reverence.”—Vice
“An eclectically brilliant distillation of what photography can do, and why it remains an important art form.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Praise for Blind Spot
“Common things [are] made radiant by the quality of [Teju] Cole’s looking. . . . In this new, luminous book, Cole shows himself to be really one of the best at seeing.”—The Guardian
“This lyrical essay in photographs paired with texts explores the mysteries of the ordinary. Cole’s questioning, tentative habit of mind, suspending judgement while hoping for the brief miracle of insight, is a form of what used to be called humanism.”—The New York Times Books Review (Editors’ Choice)
“Stunning . . . [Blind Spot] feels like the fulfillment of an intellectual project that has defined most of [Cole’s] career.”—Slate
“Dazzling . . . cerebral yet intimate . . . combines personal essay, history, biography, journalism, and photography into a seamless package, capturing human dignity and grace through careful, clear-eyed reverence.”—Vice
“An eclectically brilliant distillation of what photography can do, and why it remains an important art form . . . Cole has crafted a beautifully wrought and finely blended mixture of visual and narrative art.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“[In] luminous prose . . . Cole has succeeded in shredding experience into tiny fragments, all of which add up to much more than the sum of their parts.”—Los Angeles Times
“The book, quite frankly, needs to be seen for itself. Like all great works, it defies paraphrase—it cannot be brought under the dominion of a single interpretation.”—The Forward
“Blind Spot is assuredly the work of an auteur, a singular talent.”—The Sydney Morning Herald
“An eye-opening exploration of the world, time, and how the two connect.”—Nylon
“Reminiscent of Julio Cortázar’s Blow-Up . . . Cole expertly punctures placidity to expose concealed violence.”—The New York Review of Books
“Cole enables us to see the world a little more clearly than before.”—The Scotsman
“Cole transforms a simple travelogue format into something haunting and existential.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“A poetic reflection on the confines of vision and knowledge.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Blind Spot is many things at once: both memoir and map of the world, both essay on photography and elegy for the lost arts of looking and seeing . . . [with texts] as succinct and enigmatic as shards from an archaeological site.”—The Village Voice
“Calmly incantatory and unsettlingly alert . . . the resonance of the more than 150 photographs Cole has taken and collected here is deepened for being met with such sustained and lyrical textual scrutiny, with the free forays of his capacious mind.”—The Millions
“I’ll . . . read anything by Teju Cole, whose sharp eye when writing about photography, I find, sharpens my eye for everything else, too.”—Louise Kennedy, WBUR
