"His Eyes Disappear": (Re)framing the Racial Imagination through Anti-Portraiture in Teju Cole's Blind Spot

Abstract

"His Eyes Disappear":(Re)framing the Racial Imagination through Anti-Portraiture in Teju Cole's Blind Spot Benjamin Williams (bio) TEJU COLE uses film photographs and oblique prose divagations to take us on a voyage across the globe with a peripatetic philosopher in his 2017 photobook, Blind Spot. With COLE snapping photos, processing the film, and composing corresponding texts, we travel from the United States to Lagos (where COLE grew up), next to a lake in Switzerland; then, in a "flickering series of scenes," we are transported from the sites of a Balinese massacre in Ubud, Indonesia, to New Zealand, and from there to makeshift memorials for migrants scoring the earth near the Arizona border, and back again to Africa.1 The travel photographs paired with lyrical prose make us consider how exposure within the photographic and textual frame creates epistemic and ontological disjunctions, or what COLE calls "blind spots." Rather than an "attempt at comprehensiveness and totality," COLE'S collection maintains "faith in the fragment and the montage," which can "evoke the truth about a situation."2 We are asked to look more toward an intermingling visual constellation [End Page 93] of the photobook as a whole and to discover a through-line connecting disparate places and people. COLE creates an aesthetic assemblage or montage of photography, testimony, poetry, and ethnography to illuminate a kind of missing truth about the connections between historical displacement, attenuated pasts, mobility, and racial representation. While Cole's fiction and its relationship to photography and racialization have been widely discussed, his own photographic practices, as exemplified in Blind Spot, the "fourth in a quartet of books about the limits of vision," have received only limited critical attention.3 Most criticism, like Robert Pinsky's, examines Cole's terse and oblique commentary in the photobook to argue that Cole reveals "mysteries of the ordinary," which are "attained in patiently awaited, brief flashes."4 Similarly, Colin Dickey illuminates how Cole's fragmentary images are used to explore the "absences that define documentation and nonfiction," as exemplified through the slow and deliberate practices of film development that Cole uses.5 More recently, Monika Gehlawat argues that Cole uses intermedial aesthetic practices to "foster an atmosphere of thoughtful discretion," reticence, and inwardness for both photographed subjects and the audience.6 Yet, these accounts are limited in their engagement with questions concerning the historical and transnational trajectory of photography that has been calibrated in accordance with hierarchical conceptions of race. Alexandra Kingston-Reese, however, provides an incisive corrective as she reflects not only on intermediality but also on the racialized politics of vision and aesthetics of blackness in Cole's photobook. Kingston-Reese finds that through the emphasis on aurality, visuality, and digital presence, the volume creates slant rhymes and "networked contemporary artistic practices" to foster "empathetic forms," illuminate "perceptual weaknesses," and afford "new modes of reading."7 I follow Kingston-Reese's attendance to Cole's ethically insightful and "ethnically observant" intermedial aesthetics, but I turn my attention to the coeval processes of photographic portraiture and race-making exhibited in the work.8 More specifically, I examine Cole's aesthetic process, which reveals how portraiture's methods are co-constitutive of a reductive imaginary of race that we face, or fail to face, in the photograph.9 As I argue, Blind Spot explores ethically fraught issues within the sensorially confused space of the photo collection by [End Page 94] playing with exposure, light, and composition to confront what Paul Gilroy calls "epidermal thinking."10 To challenge such framing ontologies of race, Cole practices anti-portraiture, which allows the audience to (re)search, (re)envision, and (re)frame the racial imagination that uses photographic documents, especially those emphasizing physiognomy and bodies, as a locus for classification and racial categorization. By (re)framing an alternative way of seeing according to the limitations of vision, Cole's compendium of photographs and text engages with our ethical obligation as he activates cultural memory and uses film photographs to move us to forget the familiar and instead see unfamiliar faces and places on their own terms, where darkness signifies wisdom or potentiality. Cole's process of anti-portraiture thus responds to the...