 |
Pharmakon. By Teju Cole.
 |
Photographs by Teju Cole
MACK, London, UK, 2024. 200 pp., 8½x11".
With its startling bold cover of cryptic and elongated black letters printed on a dark blue cover, Pharmakon, Teju Cole’s most recent photobook, reveals its full title only upon unfolding the cover’s flap. It’s in that gesture that we are brought into dialogue with Cole’s strategy of withholding, giving nothing away quickly or easily, even baffling the effort to identify.
Regarding his choice of title, Cole said, “Something about being in Greece brought back to mind that ancient double-sided concept (poison and cure) which opened up my thinking about the wide-ranging photos and helped give language to a previously unnamed intuition.”
Pharmakon opens with a disarmingly conventional photo: a landscape through the car window, rearview mirror in the frame. This simple black-and-white image sets up a presumption of travel, perhaps an investigation into place or geography, but the enigmatic, often abstract, color images that follow could be anywhere, and indeed are from many disparate locations: Europe, India, Chile, Canada, the UK and US.
Provided with no captioning, we are dropped into the realm of indeterminacy. Assuming all visual matter is associative, it’s still the authority residing in individual experience that makes meaning unique, and Cole is asking each reader to form their own understandings of his images, stories and juxtapositions.
 |
“One of the pleasures of putting a book out into the world is that each person who gives it time will come up with their own particular forms of emphasis. . . a joy to the person who's made the book because it’s out there in the world living its own life.”
A master of how words and images interact, Cole employs twelve short stories to connect to human experience, albeit anonymously. Interspersed among the photos, his stories evoke an undertone of unease, peril, or even dread. They complicate our experience with the photographs inserting a hum of danger. Meanings expand. Privy to anxious exchanges, we are brought in as silent witnesses. However, Cole is neither naming nor explaining; again, nothing is truly revealed.
 |
With one exception, the stories are extremely condensed, most at only half a page. That brevity and the surrounding white space sets them on visual par with the photos, maintaining a smooth aesthetic continuum.
Wide fore-edge margins press the vertical pairs of photos in close relationship, and a similarly unusual but disciplined use of white space energizes the synergy of the book’s components. The high production values one expects from Mack: dreamy printing, sewn binding for lay-flat viewing, substantial paper weight, and a subtle tactility all contribute to the dichotomous beauty and mysteries held within this deeply considered and intriguing book.
 |
Pharmakon abounds with mystery. Resolutely indeterminate photos, mute landscapes, undecipherable graffiti, and the motif of travel to unnamed places all create a context in which even the most straightforward pictures are infused with ambiguity.
In Cole’s universe, these are less acts of obfuscation than attempts to provoke questioning. What are we really seeing? How do we create meaning? How is a typical carte de visite image redefined by being placed between impenetrable pictures? Without signs, how are we to know where we are? Does it matter?
 |
From multiple readings, one gains a strong sense of the author. Quietly but forcefully he emerges: photographer, writer, the artist of beauty, gravitas, telling stories which stir the dark murmur resonating through the photographs.
Pharmakon cannot be considered separately from the happenings in the real world: war and dislocations, the crisis of mass migration; when asked about that subtextual context, Cole said “…I think that reading suggests itself. But I'm also hoping that many years from now, there will be something resonant about the book … so that people quite remote from us can come to the work and find that it speaks to them.” No doubt it will.
Purchase Book
Read More Book Reviews
 |
 |
 |
