The point here is not the exotic but its opposite: mysteries of the ordinary, attained in patiently awaited, brief flashes. In other words, this is a book about human culture ... The images are populated with human life, but for the most part that life is implicit: with a notable, climactic exception, there are few faces. These choices are deeply purposeful. The abstaining, in texts and photographs, is ardent ... This questioning, tentative habit of mind, with its allegiance to particulars, suspending judgment while hoping for the brief, limited miracle of insight, drives Cole’s enterprise.
Blind Spot features the same quality of Cole’s luminous prose, but if his earlier works, including his PEN/Hemingway-winning debut novel Open City, favored longer sentences flavored with Proustian digression, the writing here is tighter, more condensed. Like the images, the writing here is often dramatically cropped, offering fragments in lieu of extended arguments and reveries ... Blind Spot uses the interplay of visual information and textual information, creating connective threads that span the individual locations, multiplying their resonances ... Teju Cole has succeeded in shredding experience into tiny fragments, all of which add up to much more than the sum of their parts.
Reading any one of his books is like stumbling upon the exposed tip of a massive underground landmass, one that he’s spent the better part of a decade mapping but the entirety of which he has yet to image ... This book eschews argument in favor of a tender enfolding. In this sense, it’s a culmination of a style and a set of ideas he’s been honing since his novel Open City ... The effect is like realizing that what you thought were stray notes cohere into song when you listen across a long enough interval. These repetitions teach us how to think along with Cole by calling our attention to details that might seem easy to ignore ... The effect is a delirious sense of second sight. Cole brings the unseen realm of poetry into vision, exposing a reality that’s not beneath the surface so much as caught in its interstices.
...calmly incantatory and unsettlingly alert ... In Blind Spot, Cole creates a space in which to notice himself noticing—he’s the third echo in the series, and invites us to stand in as the next—and the result is something richer and more ambiguous than we might have anticipated. Instead of being explained away, 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—one that’s often unconsoled but never merely disenchanted ... In its very structure, Blind Spot argues intimately for the capacity of each thing to illuminate, and find itself, in another. And still there are limits Cole remains alert to: grounding experiences that cannot be shared, gulfs he knows knowledge cannot cross. In the end, his close looking and thinking open out on the basic enigma of being.
These photographs in the lavishly produced Blind Spot feel far removed from the blurry pictures that feature in books by WG Sebald, a constant influence on the work of Teju Cole. The accompanying texts are another matter. Each pair — a short piece and a photo — is dedicated to a particular place, and the links that [Cole] discovers between them can be as unexpected as those found in Sebald’s writings … This volume confirms that photography as a genre doesn’t serve as a simple illustration to literature … There are few people in Cole’s works, and even fewer faces. His own persona, however, is prominent. Occasionally he recounts his dreams, in one of which he has lunch with Diana (presumably the Princess of Wales) and fails to take a selfie with her. His confessions can smack of oversharing … Whatever all this personal stuff might signify, the book gives you a chance to glimpse things that might have slipped your attention otherwise.
I was initially drawn to Blind Spot less for its 150-plus photos from dozens of countries than for its text, the short paragraph or two – at times, just a couple of sentences – accompanying each image … The words, though, aren’t quite descriptions of the pictures; they’re not straightforward commentaries. Instead, Cole’s squib-sized texts are more like meditations, often lacking a direct relation to the photos. In the space between each image and its paired text, much is implied ...Early in Blind Spot, Cole positions a photo of hotel curtains next to a moving consideration of Albrecht Dürer’s drapery studies...So prompted, the reader of Blind Spot becomes more alert to drapery in subsequent shots. The tarps, cloths and sheets shine with analogical possibilities. As in a novel, Cole’s images gradually form patterns, leitmotifs.
On each crisp left-hand page is a paragraph or two of Cole’s hypnotic prose, headlined by one of 73 places: Venice, Mexico City, Paris, London, Omaha, Bombay, but also hard-to-find spots like Brienzersee, Switzerland. Opposite each essay is a photograph … Blind Spot name-drops Hitchcock, Gucci handbags, Black Lives Matter, the book of Genesis, the painter J.M.W. Turner, Schubert, the Iliad, Juliette Binoche, and Vijay Iyer, juxtaposing specifics against images of a birdcage, scissors, a parking garage, folding chairs, a mountain range and a baggage carousel … With his deep and varied talents, and his thoughtfulness, Cole transforms a simple travelogue format into something haunting and existential.
Teju Cole’s latest project is one of contradictions: between form and content; word and image; seen and unseen; known and unknown … The book is diachronic, requiring temporal progression — the turning of pages — each spread containing a single image and single text. Though Cole includes locations, he’s removed all dates, preventing the effect of a travel log and allowing the ebb and flow of motifs to create connections … Cole’s juxtapositions of form and content — words and pictures — make us freshly see the genres, places, and everyday occurrences we thought we knew.
...[an] engagingly meandering, genre-bending collection ... Cole is a master of the quiet, often nonsensical workings of the mind. Here, images take center stage: one per every two pages, with short accompanying text, like the notes at a gallery show ... A strange, cerebral, and very beautiful journey.
...an eclectically brilliant distillation of what photography can do, and why it remains an important art form ... Cole’s often brief commentaries function less like little helping-hand guides and more like an expertly executed and insightful narrative. These bite-size prose pieces are intricately structured, hauntingly written and add up to much more than the sum of their parts ... Cole has crafted a beautifully wrought and finely blended mixture of visual and narrative art. It is a chimera of thought and craft, of intellect and emotion, of the political and the personal, the historical and the contemporary.
