Black Paper

Teju Cole

2 ideas

1. Following Caravaggio's flight across the Mediterranean

   After killing Ranuccio Tomassoni in Rome in 1606, Caravaggio fled south to Naples, Malta and Sicily, and his late paintings from that exile grow darker and more crowded with shadow. Cole retraces that route and finds the same sea now crossed by migrants and refugees, many of whom drown. He reads the fugitive painter's darkening canvases beside the present-day crossings, so that an art-historical itinerary becomes a way to look at contemporary displacement.

2. Photographing other countries carries an ethical debt

   A picture of someone else's country is never neutral documentation. It reflects the photographer's position, access and power, and it tends to reproduce the viewer's existing expectations of that place. Responsible looking means registering what the frame excludes and refusing images that turn people into symbols of poverty, catastrophe or the exotic.

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