Teju Cole’s recent book, Black Paper (University of Chicago Press, 2021) proposes ways in which to think critically about ‘blackness and its connotations’. These include photography and shadow as a kind of blackness; how black literally ‘transports meaning’ in writing; the darkness of grief; the origins of paint pigments; and darkness in painting and music to name a few.
Although Cole never openly cites the Apostle Paul (Corinthians 1, 13:12) whose writings coined the idea to see ‘through a glass darkly’ as a way of obscurely perceiving the world which ultimately ‘At the end of Time’, is clarified, it runs almost as a sub-text of sadness.
Against this apparent pessimism, Cole considers the contradictions of cultural association and meaning. In a section on the ‘shadow work’ of South African photographer Santu Mofokeng, he muses on how Mofokeng ‘makes strange’ images of passengers on a train by incorporating formal devices such as loss of mid-tones, partial focus and lack of composition. Yet it is these elements, Cole argues that are the key to the power of Mofokeng’s work in the expression of a ‘gossamer world’ – insubstantial and elusive – that he both identifies with and yet is excluded from.
Glass or its metaphors, as both photographic subject and technical means implies the fragility of perception and reception and the relationship between presence and absence. In ‘Shattered Glass’ Cole points out that ‘glass is everywhere in photography.’ Early photography was based on glass plate negatives coated with a photosensitive emulsion and the mechanics of the camera are glass: lenses, mirrors, viewfinders etc. Yet, by its nature photography is always at one remove from ‘reality’ despite its technical promise to record, a contradiction that Diane Arbus recognised – ‘a picture is about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know’; ‘I really love what you can’t see in a photograph;’ ‘The thing that is important to know is that you never know.’ (Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, Jonathan Cape, 2016).
Cole complies a short ‘canon’ of photographers who explore the photography / glass relationship and its inherent contradictions. The idea of a world seen through glass is ‘broken’ is literally represented by ‘broken glass’. In Andrė Kertėsz’, Broken Plate, Paris (negative 1929, print 1970s), for example, the image of an apparent bullet hole turns out to be made not by the photographer photographing a scene through a broken window but by the glass plate of the negative which was damaged before the image was printed decades after the photograph was taken.
Whether this image set a form of trope is unknown (Brett Weston’s images of broken glass for example date from 1930s) and Cole cites other artists and photographers drawn to it such as Gordon Matta-Clark, Brassai, Ilse Bing, Aaron Siskind and Paolo Pellegrin. The history of photography is full of photographers who have explored the relationships between photography and glass. For example in the 2021 exhibition The New Woman Behind the Camera, Metropolitan Museum, New York, it is clear that the relationship between photography and reflective surfaces was being explored historically by Olga Mate, Berenice Abbot, Annemarie Heinrich, Rė Soupault, to name a just a few random examples.
A glass window and transparency which when it breaks – what? Shatters the illusion of reality represented? Highlights the fragility of life? Illustrates the limitations of photography and the vulnerability of the present moment? Or the tension of contradictions between the seen and the known?
In The Ongoing Moment (Canongate, 2012) Geoff Dyer compiles a similar taxonomy of the fascination of the unseen to the photographer. From Lewis Hine’s A Blind Beggar in Italian Market District (1911) to Paul Strand’s Blind Woman, New York (1916), to Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, Dyer reflects on the blind subject ‘as a corollary of the longed-for invisibility of the photographer’; but also on the relationship between seeing and not seeing including our own as viewers. In one example, he cites Winogrand’s New York, 1968, in which the passer-by behind the blind beggar holding out a can into which a woman is dropping coins, looks disapprovingly at the photographer (and at us as voyeurs).
‘Stand-ins’ for glass and its riff and counter-riff on visibility and invisibility in photography include: water, lakes, wet streets, fog, windows (which refer to themselves through being either rain-soaked or steamed-up), puddles and their many takes on and possibilities for reflections and distortions. This is evident in the thousands of daily Instagram posts by people who have claimed these as techniques and tropes but rarely go further than being just that – empty stylisations which have sadly ceased to have any meaning.
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