Terrific discussion between Cole and Anwen Crawford, who I previously knew only as a music writer (albeit a conspicuously good one). I haven't read Blind Spot cover to cover, but have dipped into its text-photo pairings so had some context. Some ideas from the discussion that struck me:
- Photography as halfway between writing and performance art
- Photography as inherently subjective and embodied, because it always presupposes a perspective from which the photo was taken and a person who took it - this also means that there is an inherent sympathy in the photographic relationship
- Photography very good at conveying a simple message which is why it dominates advertising; the question is how to also activate its depths
- Montage as an idea from cinema, e.g. Tarkovsky, putting two things that are not obviously related side by side, generating a psychological charge
- "Places retain traces of the things that happened in them" - the central conceit of this work and all of Cole's
- Five big themes running through Blind Spot: flight, blindness, walking, the Bible, the Illiad
- Plus another two: tourism, terrorism
- Angels as go-betweens, intermediaries, messengers; and so all who are stragglers, in intermediate zones, are in a sense angels
- When you have a camera, you go around the world looking for what's yours [this applies just as much to writing of course!]
- "What would it be like to be free in writing this?" [the question Cole asks himself, to guide his writing and photography; I'm not sure I've fully grasped what it means, but it feels possibly profound]
