Download or read book Blind Spot written by Teju Cole and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative synthesis of words and images, the award-winning author of Open City and photography critic for The New York Times Magazine combines two of his great passions. One of Time’s Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of the Year • One of Smithsonian.com’s Ten Best Photography Books of the Year When it comes to Teju Cole, the unexpected is not unfamiliar: He’s an acclaimed novelist, an influential essayist, and an internationally exhibited photographer. In Blind Spot, readers follow Cole’s inimitable artistic vision into the visual realm as he continues to refine the voice, eye, and intellectual obsessions that earned him such acclaim for Open City. Here, journey through more than 150 of Cole’s full-color original photos, each accompanied by his lyrical and evocative prose, forming a multimedia diary of years of near-constant travel: from a park in Berlin to a mountain range in Switzerland, a church exterior in Lagos to a parking lot in Brooklyn; landscapes and interiors, beautiful or quotidian, that inspire Cole’s memories, fantasies, and introspections. Ships in Capri remind him of the work of writers from Homer to Edna O’Brien; a hotel room in Wannsee brings back a disturbing dream about a friend’s death; a home in Tivoli evokes a transformative period of semi-blindness, after which “the photography changed. . . . The looking changed.” As exquisitely wrought as the work of Anne Carson or Chris Marker, Blind Spot is a testament to the art of seeing by one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature. Praise for Blind Spot “Common things [are] made radiant by the quality of Cole’s looking. . . . In this new, luminous book, Cole shows himself to be really one of the best at seeing.”—The Guardian “This lyrical essay in photographs paired with texts explores the mysteries of the ordinary.”—The New York Times Books Review (Editors’ Choice) “Stunning . . . feels like the fulfillment of an intellectual project that has defined most of [Cole’s] career.”—Slate “Dazzling . . . cerebral yet intimate . . . combines personal essay, history, biography, journalism, and photography into a seamless package, capturing human dignity and grace through careful, clear-eyed reverence.”—Vice “An eclectically brilliant distillation of what photography can do, and why it remains an important art form.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Download or read book Teju Cole Fernweh written by Teju Cole and published by Mack. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The picturesque vistas and apparent stability of Switzerland have made it an elusive subject for contemporary photography. Over a five-year period (2014-2019), Cole found a distinctly new way to look at a country that has been the quintessence of tourist experience for almost two centuries. Fernweh muses on the German word for a longing to be elsewhere. Cole's meditative and scrupulously composed work, made with colour film, is evocative of the hidden history of the Alpine nation as well as of its highly curated terrain. Returning to Switzerland year after year, Cole shares the patience and mild palette of luminaries of contemporary European photography - but the constructivist tension in these images is all his own. With photographs shot in every corner of the country - from Vaud to Graubünden to Lugano - Fernweh creates a vision of Switzerland that, though largely devoid of human presence, is rich in human traces; none more so than Cole's own distinct way of seeing. --

Download or read book Ladli written by Fazal Sheikh and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In India it costs a poor family 50 rupees to hire a midwife to oversee the birth of a child. For an additional 10 rupees, the parents are assured that the birth of a girl will be met with an act of infanticide by the midwife. The alternative for many is an institution like the Delhi orphanage, in which Fazal Sheikh's work on the predicament of the girl-child in India begins--and 99 percent of that orphanage's population are girls. Girl Child follows on the heels of Sheik's 2005 Moksha, which documented the plight of the Indian widow, and for which, in combination with this companion volume, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson granted Sheikh its 2005 HCB Award. Sheikh's previous books include A Sense of Common Ground, The Victor Weeps, A Camel for the Son and Ramadan Moon. He was born in New York in 1965, and studied at Princeton University; he has received Fulbright and NEA fellowships, and presented his work at the Tate Modern, London, the International Center of Photography in New York and the United Nations. Sheikh is represented by Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York City

Download or read book Known and Strange Things written by Teju Cole and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A blazingly intelligent first book of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Time • The Guardian • Harper's Bazaar • San Francisco Chronicle • The Atlantic • Financial Times • Kirkus Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and PEN/Jean Stein Book Award With this collection of more than fifty pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today’s most powerful and original voices. On page after page, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram. Cole brings us new considerations of James Baldwin in the age of Black Lives Matter; the African American photographer Roy DeCarava, who, forced to shoot with film calibrated exclusively for white skin tones, found his way to a startling and true depiction of black subjects; and (in an essay that inspired both praise and pushback when it first appeared) the White Savior Industrial Complex, the system by which African nations are sentimentally aided by an America “developed on pillage.” Persuasive and provocative, erudite yet accessible, Known and Strange Things is an opportunity to live within Teju Cole’s wide-ranging enthusiasms, curiosities, and passions, and a chance to see the world in surprising and affecting new frames. Praise for Known and Strange Things “On every level of engagement and critique, Known and Strange Things is an essential and scintillating journey.”—Claudia Rankine, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) “A heady mix of wit, nostalgia, pathos, and a genuine desire to untangle the world, or at the least, to bask in its unending riddles.”—The Atlantic “Brilliant . . . [Known and Strange Things] reveals Cole’s extraordinary talent and his capacious mind.”—Time “[Known and Strange Things] showcases the magnificent breadth of subjects [Cole] is able to plumb with . . . passion and eloquence.”—Harper’s Bazaar “[Cole is] one of the most vibrant voices in contemporary writing.”—LA Times “Cole has fulfilled the dazzling promise of his novels Every Day Is for the Thief and Open City. He ranges over his interests with voracious keenness, laser-sharp prose, an open heart and a clear eye.”—The Guardian “Remarkably probing essays . . . Cole is one of only a very few lavishing his focused attention on that most approachable (and perhaps therefore most overlooked) art form, photography.”—Chicago Tribune “There’s almost no subject Cole can’t come at from a startling angle. . . . His [is a] prickly, eclectic, roaming mind.”—The Boston Globe “[Cole] brings a subtle, layered perspective to all he encounters.”—Vanity Fair “In page after page, Cole upholds the sterling virtue of good writing combined with emotional and intellectual engagement.”—The New Statesman “[Known and Strange Things possesses] a passion for justice, a deep sympathy for the poor and the powerless around the world, and a fiery moral outrage.”—Poets and Writers

Download or read book The Conflict Shoreline written by Eyal Weizman and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The village of al-'Araqib has been destroyed and rebuilt more than 70 times in the ongoing "Battle over the Negev"--the Israeli state campaign to uproot the Palestinian Bedouins from the northern threshold of the desert. Unlike other frontiers fought over during the Palestine conflict, this one is not demarcated by fences and walls but by shifting climatic conditions. The threshold of the desert advances and recedes in response to colonization, cultivation, displacement, urbanization and, most recently, climate change. In his response to Sheikh's Desert Bloom series, Israeli intellectual and architect Eyal Weizman's essay incorporates historical aerial photographs, contemporary remote sensing data, state plans, court testimonies and 19th-century travelers' accounts, exploring the Negev's threshold as a "shoreline" along which climate change and political conflict are entangled.

Download or read book The Circle written by Fazal Sheikh and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The portrait is fundamental to Fazal Sheikh's photography: his subjects face the camera without gestures or dramatization, but also without fear. As viewers, we can look into their faces and simultaneously recognize our kinship with them, as human beings, but also understand the significant difference of personal experience. This is not a naive exercise in attempting to "read the soul;" at its best it is a search for common ground, an understanding of what it is to experience life and survive it." "This book uses a series of photographs of women, taken in India over the past five years, to trace the passage of life from birth to death. In his two previous books, Moksha, and Ladli, Sheikh has addressed the social and political implications of the ways in which women are subordinated and mistreated in India, recording many stories of isolation and extreme abuse. He has recognized the way Indian women use their religion to rationalize the tragedies in their lives, and the insidious way traditional beliefs encourage consolation, rather than revolt." "In The Circle, Sheikh concentrates on the power of the individual gaze, its ability to engage our empathy and our curiosity. The series of direct portraits reflects an intimacy between photographer and subject that does not form part of our collective notion of India and its women. In inviting the viewer to study these faces, Fazal Sheikh hopes to reflect their dignity, their endurance, and often, despite everything, a prevailing sense of calm."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Continent in Dust written by Jerry C. Zee and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apparatus A : nightwind -- Introduction : earthly interphases -- Apparatus B : the wind tunnel -- Machine sky -- Apparatus C : a sheet of loose sand -- Groundwork -- Apparatus D : five thousand years -- Holding patterns -- Particulate exposures -- Apparatus E : wildfires -- City of chambers -- Apparatus F : a sinocene -- Downwinds -- Apparatus G : monsters.

Download or read book Fazal Sheikh and Teju Cole Human Archipelago written by Fazal Sheikh and published by Steidl. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sheikh and Cole's acclaimed text-image vision of a compassionate global community, now redesigned with a new cover For the past 25 years Fazal Sheikh (born 1965) has highlighted the plight of displaced people and refugees around the world. He has photographed people driven from their homes by war as well as those upended by the redrawing of national borders and the reassertion of racial and ethnic divisions. Sheikh has also made sublime photographs of landscapes altered by political and environmental crises. In recent years, the shift to the political right in the US has been replicated across Europe, the Middle East, Central and East Africa and Southeast Asia, as authoritarian governments and xenophobia have increased. As an act of refusal of these political trends, Sheikh sought out the celebrated novelist and critic Teju Cole (born 1975) for a collaboration that would reinforce their commitment to the ideal of a compassionate global community as well as the importance of individual courage. The resulting book, now reprinted with a new cover, represents the two authors' distinct visions, their shared values and mutual spirit of cooperation. With Cole's words and Sheikh's photos we are confronted with fundamental and newly necessary questions of co-existence: Who is my neighbor? Who is kin to me? Who is a stranger? What does it mean to be human?

Download or read book Fazal Sheikh Ether written by Fazal Sheikh and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pictures in Ether, Sheikh's first book in colour, were made as a way to honour the experience of death and to try to comprehend its significance. Benares (Varanasi) is one of India's sacred cities, where many Hindus come to die in the belief that they will find salvation. As he walked its streets by night, Sheikh observed sleeping figures, shrouded in blankets, lost to an oblivion that seemed, in that holy city, to offer a simulacrum of death. In watching these ambiguous figures, which hover in the imagination between a dream state, sleep and death, Sheikh recalled his own experience with his dying father and their passage together through his father's final days. He remembered it as an invaluable period of emotional connection with the body and soul of the person he knew and loved, a connection that reached back to his paternal ancestors, who had travelled south from northern India a century before. To lose oneself in sleep is to abandon the senses and leave the way open to a dream state in which mind and body separate. Just as, in death, the soul leaves the physical body behind and takes to the air, becoming ether.

Download or read book Ramadan Moon written by Fazal Sheikh and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ramadan Moon" is a timeless and poetic evocation of one woman's plight: It draws together passages from the Koran about the holy month of Ramadan with Seynab, the protagonist, and her memories of Mogadishu before the war, the story of her flight to the Netherlands in search of asylum and the history of the Dutch treatment of Somali asylum seekers.

Download or read book Black Paper written by Teju Cole and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-10-27 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After Caravaggio -- Elegies. Room 406; Mama's shroud; Four elegies; two elegies; A letter ot John Berger; A quartet for Edward Said -- Shadows. Gossamer world : on Santu Mofokeng; An incantation for Marie Cosindas; Pictures in the aftermath; Shattered glass; What does it mean to look at this?; A crime scene at the border; Shadow cabinet : on Kerry James Marshall; Nighted color : on Lorna Simpson; The blackness of the panther; Restoring the darkness -- Coming to our senses. Experience; Epiphany; Ethics -- In a dark time. A time for refusal; Resist, refuse; Through the door; Passages north; On carrying and being carried -- Epilogue. Black paper.

Download or read book A Camel for the Son written by Fazal Sheikh and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Portraits taken in the 1990s of Somali refugees in camps in Kenya. This book was the first in a series of projects intended to further awareness of international human rights issues.

Download or read book The Transformation of This World Depends Upon You written by Wendy Ewald and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Transformation of This World Depends on You focuses on two related stories: the missionary vision of Amherst College in its early days and the legacy of that vision in the present. Founded in Massachusetts in 1820, Amherst's original charter was "to educate pious indigent young men of promising talents and hopeful piety ... with a sole view to the Christian ministry." For more than a century, young Amherst graduates travelled-many with their wives and families-to far-flung destinations including China, Persia, India, the Middle East, Indonesia and Hawaii, on a mission to convert the "heathen" races to Protestant Christianity. This book compares their ambitions, fueled by religious zeal, with the approaches and policies of local charitable organizations working in Amherst and its surrounding area today. In the first part of the book, historian Martha Saxton and photographer Wendy Ewald tell the stories of nine of these early missionaries, based on their research in the Amherst archives, employing photographs, etchings and documents that illustrate their difficult lives. In the second part, photographer Fazal Sheikh worked beyond the college with members of the Amherst and surrounding communities, many of whom had experienced economic and social hardship. Sheikh listened to the stories of immigration and struggle they were eager to tell, made portraits of each of his ten subjects and collected their family photographs. Thomas Keenan, Director of the Human Rights Project at Bard College, provides the book's introduction, in which he examines the work and attitudes of the early Amherst missionaries in the light of current human rights discourse and practice.

Download or read book Portraits written by Cynthia Freeman and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 929 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York’s Lower East Side to San Francisco, four generations of an immigrant family in America come to life in this New York Times–bestselling saga. In an act of great courage and will, Esther Sandsonitsky leaves her abusive new husband and tiny village on the border between Poland and Germany for the more welcoming shores of the United States. When she makes her way through the throng at Ellis Island, the world is on the threshold of a new century. But Esther is on her own quest: to capture a piece of the American dream for her children, including Jacob, the son she was forced to leave behind. Portraits tells an indelible story of the struggles and sacrifices of a family—and a people—searching for a place to belong.

Download or read book Waking Lions written by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE JEWISH QUARTERLY WINGATE PRIZE 10 WOMEN TO WATCH IN 2017--BookPage A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 After one night's deadly mistake, a man will go to any lengths to save his family and his reputation. Neurosurgeon Eitan Green has the perfect life--married to a beautiful police officer and father of two young boys. Then, speeding along a deserted moonlit road after an exhausting hospital shift, he hits someone. Seeing that the man, an African migrant, is beyond help, he flees the scene. When the victim's widow knocks at Eitan's door the next day, holding his wallet and divulging that she knows what happened, Eitan discovers that her price for silence is not money. It is something else entirely, something that will shatter Eitan's safe existence and take him into a world of secrets and lies he could never have anticipated. WAKING LIONS is a gripping, suspenseful, and morally devastating drama of guilt and survival, shame and desire from a remarkable young author on the rise.

Download or read book Every Day is for the Thief written by Teju Cole and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2014-04-03 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young man decides to visit Nigeria after years of absence. Ahead lies the difficult journey back to the family house and all its memories; meetings with childhood friends and above all, facing up to the paradox of Nigeria, whose present is as burdened by the past as it is facing a new future. Along the way, our narrator encounters life in Lagos. He is captivated by a woman reading on a danfo; attempts to check his email are frustrated by Yahoo boys; he is charmingly duped buying fuel. He admires the grace of an aunty, bereaved by armed robbers and is inspired by the new malls and cultural venues. The question is: should he stay or should he leave? But before the story can even begin, he has to queue for his visa.. Every Day is for the Thiefis a striking portrait of Nigeria in change. Through a series of cinematic portraits of everyday life in Lagos, Teju Cole provides a fresh approach to the returnee experience.- See more at: http://www.cassavarepublic.biz/products/every-day-is-for-the-thief#sthash.qe7r4oNv.dpuf

Download or read book Cosmopolitanisms written by Kwame Anthony Appiah and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-07-18 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to belong in the world. "Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a “kosmo-polites,” or citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism displays two impulses—on the one hand, a detachment from one’s place of origin, while on the other, an assertion of membership in some larger, more compelling collective. Cosmopolitanisms works from the premise that there is more than one kind of cosmopolitanism, a plurality that insists cosmopolitanism can no longer stand as a single ideal against which all smaller loyalties and forms of belonging are judged. Rather, cosmopolitanism can be defined as one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping. Featuring essays by major thinkers, including Homi Bhabha, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Thomas Bender, Leela Gandhi, Ato Quayson, and David Hollinger, among others, this collection asks what these plural cosmopolitanisms have in common, and how the cosmopolitanisms of the underprivileged might serve the ethical values and political causes that matter to their members. In addition to exploring the philosophy of Kant and the space of the city, this volume focuses on global justice, which asks what cosmopolitanism is good for, and on the global south, which has often been assumed to be an object of cosmopolitan scrutiny, not itself a source or origin of cosmopolitanism. This book gives a new meaning to belonging and its ground-breaking arguments call for deep and necessary discussion and discourse.