GOLDEN APPLE OF THE SUN

136pp., b/w & colour illus., hardback, MACK, (London), 2021

ISBN: 9781913620219


In the period leading up to the 2020 elections in the United States, Teju Cole photographed his kitchen counter every day for five weeks. The collection of photographs also includes an essay and pages from an anonymous handwritten eighteenth century cookbook from Cambridge.

"While the essay is dense, historical, and full of personal reflection, the images themselves are simple and stark … [Cole] alludes to the still-life genre as a kind of autobiography, forcing us to consider what is at the edges of our own stories" Art Agenda

"Many artists have felt the lure of juxtaposing photographs and text, but few have succeeded as well as Teju Cole. He approaches this problem with an understanding of the limitations and glories of each medium." Stephen Shore, American photographer

Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975 and raised in Nigeria. He is the author of the novels Open City and Tremor, the novella Every Day Is for the Thief, the collection of essays Known and Strange Things, the photobook Blind Spot, and Human Archipelago, the text-image collaboration with Fazal Sheikh. He has won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the New York City Book Award, and the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction. His photography has been widely exhibited, and he was the Photography Critic of The New York Times Magazine. He is Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.