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What the eye paints over (on Teju Cole’s Blind Spot) · Soft Ratios Research

• 0:09
  Figure: Soft Ratios Research.
• 0:12
  Ground: The voices are synthetic [pause] no act, just the thinking.
• 0:19
  Figure: Hoyd Breton, a designer at Soft Ratios Studio, teaching himself in the open [pause] which works better with a reply. [pause] If this is interesting, write a review with your thoughts.
• 0:31
  Ground: One subject at a time, twice a week [pause] Tuesday and Thursday. [pause] Today, Teju Cole's Blind Spot.
• 0:39
  Ground: You open the book and there's a photograph on the right-hand page. A parked car. A wall with a tarp thrown over something. A view with something in the way of it. And on the left, a place name — Tivoli, Lagos, Zürich — and a few lines of prose. Your hand's already treating those lines as a caption. The little label under the museum picture. The thing that tells you what you're looking at.
• 1:06
  Figure: And it won't do the job. The photograph might be curtains in a hotel room in Nuremberg. The text beside it goes to Dürer, to the fall of drapery in Renaissance painting, to the shadow of the rallies and the trials that city holds. It's set next to the image. It never lands on top of it.
• 1:25
  Ground: So the words are unreliable.
• 1:28
  Figure: The words decline the assignment. Cole is exact about this. He doesn't call them captions — he calls them voice-overs. He borrowed the word from Chris Marker, from Sans Soleil, where a narrator speaks over footage and the two lines run alongside each other and never quite meet. He wanted the prose to detonate — his word — next to the picture. Not sitting on it.
• 1:50
  Ground: There are more than a hundred and fifty of these pairings. All color, all shot on film, across something like twenty-odd countries and three years of travel. Random House put it out in 2017, with a foreword by Siri Hustvedt. And in the postscript Cole calls it the fourth in a quartet about the limits of vision.
• 2:12
  Figure: Which is the tell. Everyone reaches for it as a photobook with unusually literate captions. It's the opposite arrangement. The caption is the one thing it refuses to be.
• 2:22
  Ground: And the limits of vision isn't a phrase he picked off a shelf. It happened to his eye.
• 2:29
  Figure: In 2011, he temporarily lost sight in one eye. Contemporary coverage reported a diagnosis of papillophlebitis, a condition involving venous congestion at the optic disc. Its precise mechanism is not settled; one proposed account is that inflammation near the optic disc compresses retinal venous outflow, producing swelling and hemorrhage. It tends to affect younger, otherwise healthy adults and often improves over weeks or months, though up to about thirty percent of cases can develop ischemic complications with significant vision loss.
• 3:01
  Ground: And he came out of it seeing differently.
• 3:04
  Figure: He's said it plainly — after the eye trouble, the looking changed. Slower. More patient. The ordinary turned glorious. He'd been the photography critic at the New York Times Magazine; he knew every argument about the image cold. The illness handed him the ordinary as a subject.
• 3:23
  Ground: Here's the part that turns it from a biography note into the shape of the whole book. Every eye already has a blind spot. Not from illness — by design. The optic disc, where the nerve punches through the retina, has no photoreceptors. There's a hole in everyone's sight, and the brain quietly paints over it. Hustvedt puts it right in the foreword: the camera's eye is not the human eye. The camera keeps everything inside its frame. We don't. We have poor peripheral vision, and a gap our ordinary seeing was built never to notice. [pause] So the premise is that to look is to miss. Always. The vigilant eye still has the hole in it. [pause] And the question the book keeps asking, page after page, quietly, is what's missing. What's off the edge of the frame. What the calm surface of a street is standing in front of. The blind spot becomes physiological and moral at the same time.
• 4:34
  Figure: That's the ethics folded into the optics. It's a real move, not a pun.
• 4:40
  Ground: But I want to know how the pairing actually works. What's the machinery when a picture and a paragraph face each other and mean something together?
• 4:49
  Figure: The cleanest words for it are Barthes, from an essay in 1964 called the Rhetoric of the Image. He says a text next to a picture can do one of two things. The first he calls anchorage. The caption fixes the meaning — it steers you, remote-controls you, toward a meaning chosen in advance. That's the press caption, the advertisement. It privileges one reading of a picture that has many possible meanings.
• 5:16
  Ground: And the second?
• 5:18
  Figure: Relay. Rarer. The words and the image are complementary — the words carry meaning the picture can't hold, the picture holds what the words can't say, and the whole thing only completes at the level of the story. Comics work this way. Film works this way. Neither half is the master of the other.
• 5:36
  Ground: And Cole lives in the second one.
• 5:39
  Figure: Deliberately, and then past it. Relay still assumes the two are building one thing together. Cole wants a third thing — his phrase — that neither the picture nor the prose contains on its own. Poetry, he says, happens at the angle where they meet.
• 5:55
  Ground: The third thing. That phrase makes me nervous. It's the kind of thing that sounds gorgeous and can't be checked.
• 6:03
  Figure: It's older than him, at least. Wright Morris — an American who coined the term photo-text in the 1940s, set his spare, unpeopled photographs of Nebraska barns and chairs next to prose that never described them — Morris said almost exactly the same thing. Two mediums, two views, and only when they're refocused in the mind's eye does the third view appear.
• 6:28
  Ground: And what happened to Morris?
• 6:30
  Figure: Booksellers couldn't file him. His own publisher talked him out of the form. He abandoned it.
• 6:36
  Ground: That's the whole problem in one story. The third thing is real enough to make a book and slippery enough to have no shelf. Which is exactly the charge people bring against Cole — that the third thing is a way of never being accountable for either half.
• 6:52
  Figure: Before the charge, though — the structure. Because it isn't held together the way a story is.
• 6:58
  Ground: No. There's no plot. You could read it in almost any order. What holds it is that things come back. Tarps. Ropes. Walls. Curtains. Doorways with something blocking the way through. The color blue, over and over. You stop reading it as separate places and start feeling one continuous surface — Cole calls it the singing line that connects them all.
• 7:23
  Figure: There's a good example of the priming. Claire Lehmann, in BOMB, noticed he'd threaded shots of mountains through a hundred-odd pages, so that by the time you reach a photograph of plumped-up hotel pillows, you read them as an alpine range.
• 7:37
  Ground: The pillows become mountains because of everything you already walked past. That's recurrence doing the job a plot usually does. It's musical — a theme comes back changed, and you feel the change in your body before you can name it. And it means the book doesn't lean on a conventional narrative arc. You can enter it in almost any order, and it coheres anyway.
• 8:03
  Figure: Rick Moody compared the architecture to Calvino's Invisible Cities — a book you can enter anywhere. Which is a genuinely different claim about how a book can hold. Not sequence. Accumulation.
• 8:16
  Ground: And he didn't invent the form.
• 8:18
  Figure: No — it has a long family tree, and the interesting part is where he snaps off from each branch. Start with Breton, Nadja, 1928 — a Paris story with forty-odd photographs of streets and façades dropped in, meant to kill off description, to prove the marvelous was real. There the photographs are evidence. Then Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941 — thirty-one uncaptioned photographs sealed in their own section at the front, declared coequal and mutually independent from the text. They separated word and image on principle. [pause] Then Sebald, who buried grainy black-and-white photographs — mostly found, borrowed — inside melancholy fiction, so the pictures seem to prove the story true while quietly making you doubt it. And Cole loves Sebald; he wrote an essay called W.G. Sebald's Poetry of the Disregarded. But watch how he turns from him. Sebald's images are mostly found or borrowed; Cole's are his own. Sebald's are small, grainy, swallowed by the type; Cole's are color, generous, given the whole facing page. Sebald wrote fiction that used photographs to unsettle the truth; Cole writes nonfiction lyric that isn't playing the doubt game at all. [pause] Brian Dillon caught the difference in one line — Sebald's prose is a doleful meander; Cole's texts are tight, riddling, more like Renaissance emblems. A title, an image, a few lines, arranged to be solved. And then there's Berger, who died in January of 2017, the same year the book came out. Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr wrote Another Way of Telling, arguing that a photograph is ambiguous and needs words or lived context to fix which of its meanings you take. Cole took that whole conviction — word and image as equals — and collapsed the two people into one. Cole relayed Berger's explanation for not taking photographs: taking a picture, Berger said, foreclosed the writing. Cole simply refused the choice.
• 10:39
  Ground: So here's where I want to plant the real question. Everyone agrees the book does something new at the seam between picture and word. But strip the seam. Take one of these photographs off the page, hang it alone on a wall. Does it survive? Or is the picture only interesting because the paragraph next to it is?
• 11:01
  Figure: That's the sharpest thing said against it, and serious people said it. Lehmann pointed out that the great street photographers turned banality into a kind of symbol, and Cole's muted compositions, she said, often don't compel as standalone pictures. Slate went harder: the photographs are stages on which Cole performs his erudition.
• 11:21
  Ground: That's brutal, and it might be right. The prose is dazzling — Dürer to Dickinson to Black Lives Matter, all in a page. And a dazzling paragraph next to a merely competent photograph will always make the photograph look like a servant. So what's the honest verdict — is the picture carrying anything, or is it just decoration for the text?
• 11:45
  Figure: Partly the charge lands. Dillon heard Cole's own masters — Eggleston, the New Topographics people, Saul Leiter — pressing at the edges of pictures that stay politely in their debt. The images are often in thrall to better photographers. I won't defend them as revolutionary photographs.
• 12:03
  Ground: Then it's a writer's book with pictures in it.
• 12:06
  Figure: Except Cole answered the objection himself — with another book. In 2020 he did Fernweh, with MACK. Switzerland. Almost no words at all — just photographs and diptychs, carrying the meaning alone. He took the words away on purpose, as if to say, watch, I can. [pause] Then in 2021, Golden Apple of the Sun — still lifes of his kitchen counter in the five weeks before the 2020 election, and this time he separated the two again: photographs clean on their own pages, the essay collected at the back. Across three books he tests the same question three ways. Paired. Wordless. Split apart.
• 12:54
  Ground: That's the strongest answer, and it still doesn't fully close it. Fernweh proving the pictures can stand alone somewhere else doesn't prove they stand alone inside Blind Spot. It might just prove he's two artists who don't always need each other.
• 13:08
  Figure: Fair. The split survives. What Fernweh really shows is that the weakness isn't the photographer — it's that in Blind Spot he chose to let the prose lead, and that choice has a cost.
• 13:20
  Ground: There's a harder version of the complaint, though, and it's not about the pictures. It's about the thinking. Lehmann's real charge was that the politics dissolve into mild humanist commonplaces. She set him against Victor Burgin, whose photo-text book Some Cities carries explicitly leftist writing, and said Cole too often lands on something gentle and general where you wanted something with teeth. Sunlight on Brooklyn flowers, a line about America killing black children, and you're left to close the gap yourself — which can read as witness, or can read as the gap doing the moral work so the author doesn't have to.
• 14:03
  Figure: I'd hold the line there, and with a later critical reading. Benjamin Williams's 2023 article is titled His Eyes Disappear: Reframing the Racial Imagination Through Anti-Portraiture in Teju Cole's Blind Spot. Cole almost never shows a face straight on; one image leaves a boy in Brazzaville with his eyes in shadow. Williams's title gives the method a name: anti-portraiture. Read that way, refusing easy facial legibility pushes against photography's long use in racial sorting and classification. Quiet, but not a commonplace.
• 14:39
  Ground: So the mildness is a method. The turning-away is the position.
• 14:43
  Figure: That's the reading. Another scholar, Gehlawat, calls it an aesthetic of inwardness — reticence, discretion, set against a world of facial recognition and endless scrolling. Whether you buy it comes down to whether you think restraint can be a strong statement or is only ever a soft one.
• 15:01
  Ground: And that's a real split, not one that resolves. I can hold both at once. The turning-away is principled, and it can shade into the merely tasteful, and Blind Spot lives right on that line. [pause] And it didn't only exist as a book.
• 15:17
  Figure: That's true — it's really a project with several bodies. It hung as an exhibition at a New York gallery the same summer, 2017, the pairings in two-panel frames, text on one side, image on the other, in an order different from the book. [pause] And it became a live performance — Cole speaking the texts over projected photographs while the pianist Vijay Iyer and a small ensemble improvised a score underneath. That summer, at National Sawdust in Brooklyn. Then it toured.
• 15:47
  Ground: So the voice-over became an actual voice, over actual images, with music sitting in the third position.
• 15:54
  Figure: Which is the cleanest proof of what the form was after. On the page the third thing is a figure of speech. On a stage, with Iyer's piano living in the gap between the word and the picture, it's literally audible. That's Marker's voice-over gone all the way back to being a voice.
• 16:12
  Ground: There's one more place the book gets undercut, though, and it's physical. The object itself.
• 16:18
  Figure: The designer Craig Mod took apart the Faber & Faber edition. He found the trim too jagged, too small, too heavy; the paper too thick and too glossy; the typography, he said, two revisions from finished; and the printing sub-par — low-resolution duotone. Claire Lehmann made the related object-level critique more gently: the book sits between a museum catalog, a trade hardcover, and an artist's book, and its small trim diminishes the images and their subtleties.
• 16:49
  Ground: Which, for a book asking you to look slowly at surfaces, is a serious cost. You're told to attend to the substratum of the ordinary, and the reproduction makes its subtleties harder to see.
• 17:02
  Figure: And here's the second-order fact. When Cole went to MACK for Fernweh and Golden Apple, both books were printed and bound in Italy. Mod says Fernweh's image resolution is roughly double that of the Faber & Faber edition of Blind Spot — the difference, in his words, night and day. He also praises the tighter binding, better paper, better inks, and the work of designer Morgan Crowcroft-Brown.
• 17:27
  Ground: So the ideas were ready in 2017 and the object wasn't.
• 17:33
  Figure: MACK is worth a beat here. Michael Mack started it in London in 2010, after serving as Steidl's managing director and creating the SteidlMack imprint. Its list includes photographers such as Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, and Deana Lawson. When Cole moved his photobooks there, he moved into a house built to make the object as considered as the pictures. A trade publisher knows how to make a hardcover. MACK specializes in the photobook.
• 17:58
  Ground: Not a small distinction. It's the whole difference between a book that argues for slow looking and a book that lets you do it.
• 18:06
  Figure: Step back, though — because the object failing is almost the book's own point turned against it. Cole builds a whole work around what you can't quite see, and then the printing hands you one more thing you can't quite see.
• 18:20
  Ground: There's something almost right about that. The blind spot leaks out of the metaphor and into the paper stock.
• 18:28
  Figure: And what survives all of it — I think it does survive — isn't the pictures as pictures. It's the mechanism. The pairing. The decision to let a photograph of a wall and a paragraph about a border myth sit close and refuse to explain each other, so that you're the one who has to close the distance.
• 18:46
  Ground: And that's the part that changes how you carry the ordinary afterward. You start noticing the tarp over the thing. The curtain in front of the view. The moment where your own eye slid past something and your mind smoothed it over so you'd never know it happened. [pause] Because that's the quiet trick the book pulls. It isn't really about Lagos or Zürich or Nuremberg. It's about the hole in the middle of your own looking — the one that's always been there, that you were built with, that you'll never catch in the act. Cole had to lose part of his sight to notice it. The rest of us get to notice it secondhand, in a book, at postcard size.
• 19:31
  Figure: To see is to choose. And every choice leaves a shadow you don't get to see.
• 19:36
  Ground: The camera keeps everything in the frame. We don't — our seeing is selective, with poor peripheral vision and a blind spot of its own. And what we drop doesn't feel like a loss — it feels like the whole world, unbroken, complete.
• 19:53
  Figure: That's the trick the eye runs on us. Wholeness where there's a gap.
• 19:58
  Ground: So the book leaves you with a strange gift. It won't tell you what's in your blind spot — it can't, that's the definition. It just convinces you there is one, and sends you back out looking anyway.
• 20:12
  Ground: What would it change, to walk around knowing that the clearest, most complete picture you have of anything is the one with a hole you'll never find in the middle of it?