In his new collections of essays, “Known and Strange Things” (the title is from a poem by Seamus Heaney), the writer and photographer Teju Cole covers lots of ground, metaphorically and otherwise. Roughly a third of the pieces are essays on literature written for The New Yorker and other magazines, while another third deal with international travel and politics. But the remainder — and the heart of the book — is a set of remarkably probing essays on photography, most written as a New York Times Magazine critic in his regular column, “On Photography.”
The photography essays are all the more valuable because of their relative rarity in the world of arts criticism. In a transitioning media landscape in which there remains a large and lively cohort of writers about movies, television, music, theater, architecture and other topics, Cole is one of only a very few lavishing his focused attention on that most approachable (and perhaps therefore most overlooked) art form, photography.
Printers Row recently caught up with Cole, 41, for a phone interview from his home in Brooklyn. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.
Q: How did you select the essays for the book? What was your guiding principle?
A: Once I had written three or four essays about photography for The New York Times, the question began to creep into the back of my mind: Was I writing something that might be collected in a book of photography essays? That was the original idea. But as I got deeper into the “On Photography” essays, I realized that not only did I have the core for a book, but that that book didn’t necessarily need to be just a photography book. I had also written a number of book reviews and considerations of literature, and I realized that some of my most interesting work was not about photography. Very quickly I realized that my work fell into three fairly — not neat, because they always were bleeding into each other — but strong categories. The first was my engagement with visual arts, including photography. The second was my engagement with literature. And the third was travel, in the specific sense of going to places to find out about what’s going on there, especially in terms of politics. And the moment I had these three divisions, I felt it could make sense as a book.
Q: My sense is that there’s a lot of writing on literature and politics, but photography hasn’t received the same level of critical attention, especially for a general audience.
A: I don’t think there’s a lot of it. It’s quite interesting, actually. I get feedback from readers about my essays on other topics, but it’s usually from people who are interested in that particular subject. With my photography essays, they seem to feel there’s a public engagement there that they don’t see enough of. So that has been a particular pleasure for me, to write about a subject that to many readers feels necessary, but they hadn’t realized the necessity of it until they started reading the column.
Q: I’ve often wondered whether the shortage of writing about photography is a factor in the form being seen as not as serious a medium for art as, say, painting. These days, so many people do photography with their cell-phone cameras, and it’s become such a democratic activity that maybe people look at photography and say, “I can do that.”
A: I’m not so sure. When there’s an (Richard) Avedon show at the museum, the lines are around the block. So people do still understand that there’s expertise, there’s craft there that’s not necessarily for everybody. They know that an Avedon portrait is not the same thing as what they can just shoot with their cell phone. It’s not that photography is too low in the sense of its accessibility; it actually still has a place in the world of high art. But there’s not enough writing that conveys what is going on inside that to a general audience. There are experts around to tell us what to think about the Monet show. The same thing might be true if Jonathan Franzen has a new novel out, or Toni Morrison. But the kind of thinking and writing that says, “Look at this art form. What does it do to us when we encounter it? What role does this kind of art play in society? What connections does it have to the history of the form?” — that kind of writing, which places the work in its cultural context, is hard to come by for photography. So I do have the sense of participating in something a little bit unusual, and I’m very fortunate to have the platform to do it.
Q: You’ve said you didn’t really come at these essays from the point of view of an expert, but rather, more than anything, from the point of view of a practitioner — somebody who’s out in the field doing it.
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A: That’s right. I put in a lot of stuff about the cameras and lenses I was using—stuff I thought my editor would cut out, but she didn’t. She understood that what I wanted to say was, a picture does not just arrive. It actually has to be made, under a particular set of circumstances. So yes, I do set out to write from the point of view of a nonexpert. But there’s a sly move going on there, because I am kind of an expert on photography. It’s hard to study something persistently for a decade, as I have, and not gain some sort of expertise. However, I don’t want my phrasing of things being like an expert speaking to other experts. I want the work to have a kind of open-mindedness, an open-heartedness, that will draw in people who don’t necessarily know the subject. But I also want it to be precise. I want it to be factual. The trick is to be an expert, but not to wear the expert hat so low that the vision becomes obscured by it.
Q: In one essay, you talk about a photographer who specialized in photographing African-Americans and had to deal with the limitations of camera film in the 1950s.
A: Right. Roy DeCarava, one of the notable photographers of the 20th century — an artist with the soul of a poet — like any other photographer had to deal with the limitations of film in terms of photographing African-Americans. He had to make adjustments. It was perfectly possible to make those adjustments in a way in which the photo would get “corrected” for black skin. But instead, what he chose to do was to photograph black people dark, as full of shadows. I argue that he appreciated the darkness of the dark skin, and for him, his photographs were well-exposed dark — not by making it inky black, but having all those modulations down there in that darker range. I think there was actually a political statement there — that it was actually OK to shoot dark. Finding the form that suits the subject is what the artist always has to do.
Q: We see descendants of DeCarava, I’m thinking, in the dark skin of African-Americans in the work of the visual artists Kara Walker and Kerry James Marshall.
A: Absolutely so. In earlier drafts of this essay, I talked about their work. I had to cut it for reasons of space, but actually Kerry James Marshall read the essay when it came out. He wrote to me and said, “You get exactly what I’m trying to do in all of my painting. You understood it perfectly.”
Q: A lot of people have said you seem to have a great affinity for the writer W.G. Sebald. Why is that? What’s the connection?
A: He’s somebody whose work I like very much. But there are two essays in the book in which I feel I dispatch my duty to him. So let me skip that question, because it’s one I’ve had to answer very many times. To have my name mentioned next to his — it’s flattering, but also a deeply incomplete picture of what I’m trying to accomplish in my work.
Q: Sounds like you have some mixed feelings about it.
A: Not mixed feelings. It’s interesting that the largest group of essays in the book are about photography, and there’s nothing in those essays that would make you say, “Oh, that’s Sebald.” Not at all. But people still ask me about him. At the same time, no one has ever asked me about the influence of Susan Sontag on my work. And my column is called “On Photography,” the same title as her book on the subject.
Q: OK, I’ll bite. What is it about Sontag that you feel you have absorbed?
A: Well, she’s one of the most important writers that we have on photography. But she is also an example in terms of the idea of bringing range, a very wide range of concerns to bear on artistic and political subjects. But what I like particularly about her writing on photography — on everything, but on photography in particular — is that she is not a dilettante. She is a learned nonexpert who is thinking a great deal about the arguments she’s making. That’s why she remains so valuable today. And the form of the very parsed explications that she’s doing — my work aspires to that. But of course there are several other writers I could say that same thing about. As I say in the book, I’m very unembarrassed about influence.
Q: To return to the issue of photography seeming so accessible today, I’m thinking maybe that’s a good thing, in some ways. Maybe it helps people be more interested than they’d be otherwise.
A: Yeah. It’s both high and it’s low. Obviously, I think photography is a wonderful subject to write about, just because of how much is in it, how much it can do, how it can generate thinking, and how it can be a lens, or a window, or …
Q: Or a portal.
A: Or a portal, yes. A door that you pass through, and then suddenly you’re seeing a whole new landscape.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based writer and photographer whose work appears in the Washington Post, USA Today, Poets & Writers Magazine and other publications. Follow him on Twitter @KevinNance1.
Known and Strange Things
By Teju Cole, Random House, 416 pages, $17