The second cousin in the dance – Teju Cole’s Blindspot

Pairing writing with photographic images is a delicate act. It’s like putting clearly defined meanings up against a medium that speaks another language, and through the pairing suggesting what’s meant to be thought about an image.

The extremes range from a photo-journalistic approach and the gallery, which sees captions plus editorial or wall texts, least you miss the point of view or what an image is meant to be illustrating. At the other end of the scale  is the typical Mack photo book where you’re lucky to find the title and the photographer of the work. Any text is usually an oasis on the last page where a few acknowledgements, or line about when or where the work was done, may be offered. That’s when the photographs do the heavy lifting of conveying vision and meaning. Clues and interpretation come from online commentaries and reviews, but even with this information, meaning is conveyed visually – a kind of pre-language state of paying attention.

In between these extremes, there are essays at the front or back of books – to be ignored or read afterwards – notes to the photographs (think Alec Soth) or captions that pinpoint some critical element that shifts the frame around an image. At the recent William Eggleston Portraits show (see my recent post) I was struck the curator’s pleasure at persuading the photographer to name the subjects or tell the backstory to iconic images that had previously soared in their own mysteries. While the information was interesting, I was glad I’d first experienced the images in my imagination and could love them with my own narrative. In my project Bent, when I captioned the works with the names of trees and added notes at the back of the book about human manipulation of the tree landscape, something about our ruthless cultivation of natural resources popped into focus. The subtle presence of words felt necessary.

Teju Cole’s Blindspot is a true hybrid of text and photographs.(Cole credits the text and photograph pairings from John Szarkowski’s book on Atget as inspiration). Cole’s photographs from his much traveled existence are paired with short meditative texts. Although the pairing is titled with the name of the place, presumably where the image was made, the texts often don’t relate specifically to the image, and sometimes stage a tangential take off from an image detail. Cole is a master of poetic and philosophic thinking and the pieces are mini gem-like essays that seem at one with his latest book of essays Known and Strange Things. They also form a line back to Open City where his narrator Julius wanders the New York and gives us his insights into a broad range of subjects.

A sequence from Blindspot

Notably, the photographs are not whole views of any part of the world. Rather they’re extractions of sidewalk, construction and building details, featuring juxtaposition and careful composition, along with windows, screens and tarps, which seem to point to illusion, or the fractured nature of our perception. In their fragmentary state it’s easy to see the images as adjuncts to the accompanying thoughts, in the way a whole landscape or person might not be. In a recent interview on the Magic Hour , Cole says he wanted the photographs to be the quieter partner in the text/image pairing, and he’s achieved that.

While Blindspot is interesting reading, the photographs suffer in the dance between text and image. The texts come first on the left hand page, images on the right. In his Magic Hour interview Cole says he wanted to suggest there was more to the photograph than you’ll see by viewing. Even with tangential texts and little direct commentary on the image, I found it hard to respond to these quite cerebral images that were clearly second cousins to the main word-event, intent on taking you somewhere you were sure to miss if you’d been allowed your own thoughts.

The texts by themselves, however, are often quite wonderful – you can read them for their sequences, or as references to the blindspots in our reading of the world, or just dip in and out of the book, enjoying the morsels. What I couldn’t do was look at the photographs and enjoy them, their language having been set straight by words.

Listen to Teju Cole on The Magic Hour http://www.magichourpodcast.org/

 

Review of Old New World

Here’s a thoughtful review of Old World by Helen Watson White that appeared in New Zealand Books, Spring 2012.

(Thanks to NZ Books for permission to reproduce)

For more information and reviews about Old New World click here.