Blind Spot

Product Description 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. Review 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. ― The Guardian 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... ― Observer 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. ― The Financial Times 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. -- Claire Howorth ― Time 'Books of the Year' 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. -- Isabel Stevens ― Royal Academy of Arts Magazine 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 ― Shortlist Blind Spot is of interest for precisely the same reason that you might read [Cole's] essays, his novels, or follow his Instagram page: because you care about the perspective of strikingly original and intelligent people, and why they might find something significant enough to photograph. ― TANK Magazine Explores the existentialism of travel. There is a lyrical continuity to the photographs - whose subjects range from the car parks of Brooklyn to the sprawl of Sao Paulo - bound in part to Cole's recurring dreams of isolation and longing. His visual style, which spurns spectacular landscapes in favour of the ordinary, shabby and human, is grounded in the introspections of those dreams ― New Statesman It is often by drawing our attention to things that are hidden that Cole enables us to see the world a little more clearly than before ― Scotland on Sunday For the culture-junkie partner: Look at a world through a writer's eyes with author Teju Cole's photography collection. ― ELLE Gift Guide '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.' -- Claire Howorth ― TIME Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of the Year Book Description 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 From the Back Cover