Blind Spot Book

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 Best Non-Fiction Books of 2017 So Far

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.

Published on: 2017-06-13

Released on: 2017-06-13

Original language: English

Dimensions: 9.10" h x 1.30" w x 6.50" l,

Binding: Hardcover

352 pages

Review 

“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)

“Dazzling . . . cerebral yet intimate . . . Spanning six continents and several years, the elegant hardcover combines personal essay, history, biography, journalism, and photography into a seamless package, capturing human dignity and grace through careful, clear-eyed reverence.” - Vice

 

“In luminous prose . . . Teju 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

“An eye-opening exploration of the world, time, and how the two connect.” - Nylon

“Stunning . . . [Blind Spot] feels like the fulfillment of an intellectual project that has defined most of Teju Cole’s career.” - Slate

 

“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 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

“Cole is the real ambidextrous deal, and this new book of photographs and prose fragments confirms that he’s an accomplished practitioner in both fields also, an artful thinker about how they fit together and come apart. . . . It’s a work at once of profundity and lightness a world shuttered, wound on, begun again.” - 4Columns

“Once you get a taste of [Cole’s] writing, you can quickly (and hungrily) burn through what’s available. Thankfully, Blind Spot will indulge the senses by combining both of Cole’s loves in this . . . full-color collection of Cole’s photos, accompanied by his prose. ‘The places [Teju Cole] can go, you feel, are just about limitless,’ The New York Times has said. Here, in the vein of Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, and Susan Sontag, he proves it.” - The Week

About the Author 

Teju Cole is the photography critic for The New York Times Magazine. His work has been exhibited in India, Iceland, and the United States, and was the subject of a solo exhibition in Italy in 2016. He is the author of the essay collection, Known and Strange Things, as well as the novels Every Day Is for the Thief and Open City, the latter of which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the New York City Book Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His photography column at The New York Times Magazine was a finalist for a 2016 National Magazine Award, and he is the winner of the 2016 Focus Award for excellence in photographic writing.