On May 19, 2020 we discussed selections from Teju Cole's 2016 book Known and Strange Things. Cole is an author and a photographer; he was the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine from 2015 until 2019, and now is a professor of creative writing at Harvard.
Some generative highlights from our conversation included image ubiquity, judgement and quality, womb-to-tomb digital (e.g. Instagram), blackness, conventions, and regionalism.
Doug Rickard, from “A New American Picture,” 2011. Cole discusses this project in the chapter “Google’s Macchia.”
Among many of Cole’s succinct insights, the following seemed to hit on what’s at stake in photography’s third century, the age of surfeit.
“The problem is not that images are being altered—it’s that they’re all being altered in the same way .... the photographic function, which should properly be the domain of the eye and the mind, is being outsourced to the camera and to an algorithm.”