Blind Spot, Written by Teju Cole: A Book Review
By: Allyson Alford, Megan Giese, & Weronika Koleda
An Introduction to Blind Spot
What exactly is Blind Spot?
Blind Spot is not a typical book, it is very interesting to say the least. It comes across as more of a photographic memoir and multimedia novel. Throughout the book, the author shares his experience of traveling through the pictures that he took. You also notice multiple locations duplicated in the memoir. He shows his different experiences through the photos and the meaning behind each one.
On each page he presents a photo that he took and then explains it with imagery and different ways to view said photo. Some locations are presented twice and illustrate a couple of images taken a few minutes apart from each other. Therefore, he shows how a picture can change its meaning in a short amount of time. The genre can be represented as a bind of multiple different kinds of photographic novels. A multimedia aspect can be seen, as well as a memoir or narrative. His whole novel shows different stems from these kinds of genres.
What is intriguing about this book is how there are so many different meanings in the photo that you do not initially realize. The audience may look at a picture and notice one thing, but the symbolism could be a whole different meaning. One of the themes in the novel connects directly to the title. The book is called Blind Spot because there is so much more behind a picture that we do not initially see. We look at photos blindly and see one thing without understanding the true meaning behind it. For example, Cole references Berlin often, and he incorporates different photos from his trips. However, initially, looking at these photos does not give readers an insight of where he is, what he is doing, or what the photo means. So, the audience looks into the image blindly, assuming a certain meaning that may make sense, but then turns into something much more.
The book serves as a travel documentary novel, as it shows the author’s experience through the places that he’s been . He develops this multimedia diary to share his experiences with the audience. Throughout his travels, it is clear that Cole strategically planned the stories he wished to share in the book. While the book had taken years to develop, as Cole encountered these experiences, it was eventually published in 2016. Overall, this book was engaging and took on a whole different aspect and challenge of writing with photos that are admirable.
Technology vs. Photography
In 2016, the technology was not much different than it is today.
In the past, photography was treated differently, until technology skyrocketed. According to a 2015 article from Time, photography entered a change when more advanced technology stepped in:
“The moment of photography’s “puberty” was around the time when the technology moved from analog to digital although it wasn’t until the arrival of the Internet-enabled smartphone that we really noticed a different behavior.”
With the development of cell phone cameras, it became so much easier to take a photo. All you have to do is open your cell phone and snap a photo. What is different about this is now, rather than taking a memorable photograph, individuals can take photos like they don’t even mean anything. It is about the editing and Snapchat, so it doesn’t have the same meaning that a more traditional photo would have. It seems to be more for the benefit of Instagram likes or a phone background. In our current era, photography’s meaning and context changed with the new era of Snapchat and other social medias. “Photography” began to include a greater variety of contexts, such as editing and making yourself look good, rather than focusing on the meaning of a photo.
This book brings the benefit of photography back with the way the author wrote about the different photos that he took. The book counters the evolving technological changes, making it’s photos more meaningful, rather than focusing on what everyone else was doing with photos at this time. Cole had multiple approaches and goals when it came to his story. He wanted to stand up to the new generation of apps and cameras on an iPhone and bring back photography. This also represents the title in a way because, as said above, it challenges the reader’s perspective; however, it is also a representation of our society and how taking photos is a blind activity these days. As Cole readers can learn from Cole, there is so much more behind a photo than one initially realizes.
Who is Teju Cole?
Cole is a photography critic for the New York Time sand was a professor at Harvard.
He has written many books about photography in his time and has won more than a few awards for all of his books, including the New York City Book Award for Fiction for one of his other books, Open City.
Open City showcases the story of a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist following the events of 9/11. This book was an emotional novel between friends, and Blind Spot is an emotional novel between Cole and his audience. Both of the works send messages that are initially hard to spot, but have a lot of meaning. Cole has contributed significantly to the world of fiction and multimedia while maintaining a successful career.
Teju Cole is a distinguished author who sent many messages through his audience to represent change and the meaning of photography. He is admired for his writing and his photography in almost every book that he has written. He is definitely an author to watch and to admire because of his strong photos and writing throughout his career.
Blind Spot: An Analysis
Themes of Photo & Text
POSTSCRIPT: A MAP OF THE WORLD
“To look is only a fraction of what one is looking at. Even in the most vigilant eye, there is a blind spot. What is missing?” (325).
When we look, we are always seeing only a portion of the full picture. As Teju Cole travels the world and documents his whereabouts, his photographs portray this portion of the whole.
Wandering through places such as the Swiss landscape, Italian cities, and communities of Lebanon, the reader does not see the recognizable landmarks distinctly found in each area. Rather, Cole photographs what we overlook most, the minute and fragile details of life. At first glance, the reader may see nothing in the photo, a street corner or sidewalk that could have been taken anywhere if the city location was not titled neatly above the text. This first glance, this first impression with no context, illustrates the blind spot of the reader. It is not until additional context and ideas are exposed that the reader is challenged to adapt a new perspective, for we cannot always see without our default one.
In what looks like a quiet park in Berlin, Cole touches on the theme of human sight. When describing the two men in the photo and their failure to notice their “echo”, Cole says, “There are thousands of such echos and agreements every minute. Almost all go unseen, and almost none are recorded, unless photography intervenes” (36). What is normally unseen is captured into the light within the photograph, as the camera allows the readers to notice the presence that the man had missed. It is at this moment where the photograph feels as if it belongs to a greater whole, a bigger picture.
When we realize our susceptibility to blindness and ignorance, the insignificant becomes the significant, and the missing pieces do not feel so lost anymore.
What we see ultimately conveys a certain sense of truth, just as our memories possess a personal connection to our own truth. However, Cole challenges us, through his combination of sight through photos and memory through text, what we consider truth to be. What we see and what we remember illustrates only a fraction of the whole, therefore truth follows the same path. According to Cole, the truth we seek and the reality around us often contributes to the idea of the human blind spot, this fraction of the whole. It is the reader’s duty to become aware of the truth they are looking at, and then ask themselves how that fits the bigger picture.
Human Connection Through Photography
MANTUA
…a little girl extends her arm to gently hold on to the fingers of her brother who, with his other hand, holds their father’s hand: a length, a loop, a line.” (68).
The camera is Teju Cole’s mode of deepening his experience from place to place and forming the foundation of the ideas he generates regarding each documented photograph. Cole designed each spread to provide the text and photo each a page dedicated to themselves. In this way, the reader appreciates and studies the photograph as its own artform, and treats the text as its own body of work.
Although each medium can stand on its own, the two ultimately work together within a complementary relationship. A complementary relationship functions when some ideas are explained through text and some are illustrated through photos; therefore, the two mediums depict on idea more completely than they would on their own. Cole uses this complementary relationship in order to more fully explore the truth weaved into his work. Both text and photos are equally significant within each spread, yet their partnership strives to establish a whole image rather than focusing on a fraction. If it were not for the equal relationship between text and photos, the ideas of truth and sight that Cole illustrates would not depict a complete understanding within the reader.
Essentially, the two mediums are independent, yet they balance together harmoniously across every clean page, as this spread from Ubud illustrates:
Furthermore, a ribbon looped around a column in Mantua is illustrated in one of Cole’s photographs on page 68, the eye paying attention to the color, curves, and lines. The reader then reads the text, and the image becomes a story of human connection. Just as the photo is immediately connected to the text, every page illustrates such human connection in one way or another. Every corner, dispersed across cities far and wide, is put together by the human experience.
Though Cole zooms in on the details of human life, it is what lies between the moments the shutter captures, that connects us across the world. It is the photographs Cole takes that string together the moments happening in between each photo. His text fills in the gaps between these snapshots, offering insights into the truth of our world, his life memories, and lessons all readers can learn from.
As Cole begins “to remember the shortage of bridges between [him] and [his neighbors]” (310), he illustrates the shortages of bridges between his experiences and the reader’s. We are all living between each moment a photo may capture. The life that occurs in between is where we share the human experience. The photographs illustrate that we are not living this life alone.
Darkness Into Light
BRAZZAVILLE
“But all of a sudden, with slightly altered settings, I could now see his face, his eyes. Darkness is not empty. It is information at rest” (322).
Cole encourages us to bring into the light what hides in the darkness. His connections between his photos and texts are not always apparent, and often require deeper reflection in order to bring true meaning to light. It is often by the second or third time reading over the text that the pieces begin to be put together and connections are made.
Referring back to Cole’s themes of truth and sight, the reader encounters how truth is not always seen in plain sight. It often lingers in the darkness, or just out of our peripheral vision. Cole’s memories and messages ultimately begin to coax the truth out of the shadows. He strives to shine a light in the darkness and to look around every dark corner. Cole provides the reader with tools to do the same, his photos and text acting as the path to the light at the end of the tunnel.
In a more literal sense, Cole’s photos of the boy in the water in Brazzaville illustrate bringing darkness into the light. On page 22, Cole includes a photo of a young boy from Brazzaville clutching a railing by the water. He illustrates a vision of the boy carrying a cross, yet he suddenly “lowers his head, his eyes disappear” (22). Here, the reader can seemingly connect the shadowed face of the boy, his eyes unable to be seen, to the theme of the blind spot. Readers can only see a fraction of the snapshot, as the face of the boy is missing in the shadows. The audience must now question what is still missing in the darkness.
However, Cole brings what hides in the darkeness into the light at the end of his book. On page 322, Cole includes the same photo of the boy, yet his face is now illuminated. “Darkness is not empty” (322), Teju Cole asserts. The shadows in which the boy’s face was initially hiding covered that information from the light, yet it does not mean that the information did not exist at all. If we are not able to see the whole truth, it does not mean that it does not exist. Sometimes, as Cole teaches us, it will take us until the end of the book to bring truth into light.
We only see a fraction of what we are looking at, and we often do not see the whole picture at first glance. What seemed to be in darkness is brought into the light, and the vision becomes clearer.
Putting it All Together
The Process
Blind Spot, published by Penguin Random House in 2016, is a reflection of Cole’s travels and lifelong work that allow us to see carefully selected, thoughtful views of the world around us.
Several of the original photos used in Blind spot came from Cole’s original work. As Cole gained popularity, he had the ability to travel the world taking photos while teaching and attending distinguished literary events.
While Cole provides a guiding text to accompany the photos, there is much room for interpretation and thought, as it urges readers to look into that “blind spot”. The “blind spot” can take on numerous definitions, as it taps into deeper social, political, and economic themes that one may regularly miss, as they are caught up in the outside world. Cole provides authentic photographs, allowing one to have an uninterrupted glimpse into the surroundings. Throughout the text and accompanying images, Cole looks at themes of history, along with the development of various environments and humans’ impacts on the natural world. Cole consistently looks beyond the lens of what we see in popular culture, giving a realistic look into various cultural dynamics in our world.
A passage to certainly look at is that titled Beirut, in which Cole the changing environments and culture of the city of Beirut, Lebanon. Through the passage, he provides insight into the reality of inequality towards Ethiopian women who have come illegally to earn an income for their families. In this passage, Cole also goes into detail about the imagery of the city, describing the various political posters hung on walls, as well as the strong smell of (most likely) pollution in the air, along with the lack of power in the barbershop he approaches. Once there, he goes on to describe an encounter with “M”, the owner, in which he acknowledges M’s cultural identity in a place that is foreign.
Cole travelled to over 70 various locations in the world to find beauty in what the common viewer may have missed, depicting different landscapes and surroundings from various cultures.
Reviews
As Ro Kwon states, reviewing Blind Spot, for The Guardian, Cole’s work urges one to reflect on the mind behind the camera that is giving special attention to the most simplistic elements. He, too, believes that the text and photos urges readers to go back and look at elements of the photo that were not noticeable before, blind spots that were brought to attention through the text. Kwon also notes the boundaries Cole pushes in regards to the “visible, material world,” stating that it is a “God-shadowed book”, which is “most powerful when it draws upon the apostate’s longing”.
Overall, the book was received well by critics, whom were intrigued by the thought-provoking photos and short, but meaningful text. As Dwight Garner of the New York Times states:
“The places [Teju Cole] can go, you feel, are just about limitless.”
What the Reader can Take Away
Something that aspiring writers and photographers can take away from the text is the ways in which Cole uses the combination of images and text to his literary advantage. The descriptive language that Cole uses in regards to each photo allows the reader to see another level of depth, something that was not quite visible through the naked eye when looking at the photograph initially. Cole proves that the text doesn’t always have to be a direct, forward depiction of what one is viewing. Through strategic literary choices, Cole enables readers to look further, potentially looking back at that photo, seeing portions of a story that they could not infer before.
Also, writers can see the effectiveness of clean organization in his work, taking note that simplicity is sometimes key. There is no fancy organization to the text and photos, but that is entirely what makes the novel so special.The photo is placed on a simple white page, with a minimalistic title and font on the left side. When one turns the page, it is the same pattern repeated over and over, with the text and photos speaking for themselves. Fancy production was not needed in this case, as the content truly carries its own through the novel.
One does not always need to be extremely verbose or elaborate to tell a complex story. Rather, as Cole proves, simple works of art have the ability to speak for themselves, sometimes proving to be more interesting with less context. When taking inspiration from Cole’s work, one can clearly see that artistry is sometimes at its best when little editing is involved. The lack of editing and clear text creates a sense of authenticity. With no distractions, one is able to look at the photo in its entirety, with greater clarity.
Overall, Cole finds the beauty in the most simple moments in our world, allowing us to see more, to fill that gap in the blind spot.
OMAHA
“Each photo, when seen, when brought out of the small, dark room, is a fulfillment of prophecy” (58).
