When looking at the pieces of work on Teju Cole’s instagram, I didn’t really get a feeling for what he’s all about like I have with past photographers that we have talked about. It was mostly photographs about paintings that he most likely created, which isn’t my favorite type of photography. Even though I didn’t like the photographs that he had presented on his instagram, I still dived more into who Teju Cole is. This is when I found his exhibit at the Steven Kasher Gallery. Cole wrote this underneath the photo that I have posted above, “I rest at a concrete outcrop with a bunting of vintners’ blue nets, a blue the same color as the lake. It is as though something long awaited has come to fruition. A gust of wind sweeps in from across the lake. The curtain shifts, and suddenly everything can be seen. The scales fall from our eyes. The landscape opens. No longer are we alone: they are with us now, have been all along, all our living and all our dead.” The way he was able to write exactly what he was feeling and seeing during that time is very moving and it adds another layer to the meaning behind the photograph. The way the blue net is the same color as the lake and almost blends in as the win picks it up when he takes this photo is strikingly beautiful.
The way he wrote about this specific image made me look more into his writings which led me to the article “Dispatches From a Ruined Paradise” which he posted to his page “On Photography” in The New York Times. This is where I found that Cole is such a fantastic writer when it comes to explaining and showing off art from other photographers. In this article he is speaking about Robert Adams who is primarily a landscape photographer in the Midwest. This article opened me up to a new photographer in a genre of photography which I am fascinated with. Cole has opened my eyes to the words that can be written to enhance a photographer and their photographs.
