Teju Cole Exhibits Photos With Prose
Julian Lucas writes: ‘“The first story in the world is about safe passage,†Teju Cole writes in “Blind Spot,†an exhibition of thirty-two photographs and paired prose reflections at Steven Kasher Gallery, in New York. Conceived after he suffered an attack of papillophlebitis, or “big blind spot syndrome,†in 2011, “Blind Spot†and its companion volume of the same title complete what Cole calls “a quartet about the limits of vision.†It combines the omnivorous erudition of his 2016
collection Known and Strange Things—which includes criticism on Saul Leiter’s early color photographs of New York City, the conflict photojournalism of Sergei Ilnitsky and Glenna Gordon, and Roy DeCarava’s pioneering work on photographing black skin—with the associative structure of Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and Open City (2011), peripatetic novels set, respectively, in Lagos and New York. The show is a record of Cole’s extensive travels between 2011 and 2017, but it is more about the paths of others than his own itinerary.’
