Teju Cole: Blind Spot

Teju Cole: Blind Spot presents photographs paired with texts, each giving the other context. Cole’s photographs and writings are culled from his ceaseless travels around the world. The images and thoughts conjured in distant parts of the world in one work might literally be placed next to another that take the viewer home. This resistance to geographic continuity allows the viewer to compare how a location in Africa might be similar to a small town in Ohio. 

The short text that is interlinked with each photograph touches on subjects as varied as faith, Cole’s eye surgery and the tenuous nature of seeing, and the embodied histories of place. Each bit of prose is as considered as the image to which it is paired, a 1:1 ratio that makes Blind Spot a literary as much as a photographic project.

Cole seems to travel solely by air and on foot. This provides a range in scope from simultaneously very wide, in terms of countries visited, to very small, in terms of the details of local settings. These are the photographs of someone who transverses the world primarily to arrive in a place where he might get lost walking its streets. In this respect, Blind Spot is rhizomatically linked to the “decisive moment” and street photography.

Blind Spot is, in a regard, a corrective to our sense of disparity in reaction to the vastness of the world, while still reckoning with the commonality that is its potential for quiet wonder.

Curator: Michael Goodson