GOLDEN APPLE OF THE SUN

“Many artists have felt the appeal of the juxtaposition of photographs and texts, 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 Rive In the run-up to the November 3 election 2020 in the United States, Teju Cole began photographing his counter kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Working in the tradition of still lifes by Chardin, Cézanne and the Dutch masters, as well as contemporary photographers such as Laura Letinsky and Jan Groover, he has photographed every day for five weeks. Unlike those illustrious ancestors, Cole left his arrangements entirely to chance, "the bowls and the plates moving in their unpredictable constellations." What emerges is a surprising portrait, through time, of a kitchen counter in a house in a time of social, cultural and political upheaval. A Alongside the photographs is a long written essay, as vast in its concerns - hunger, fasting, mourning, slavery, intimacy, painting, poetry and the history of photography - that photographs are delimited in their own. The text and photographic sequences are interspersed with an anonymous 18th century handwritten cookbook by Cambridge. Golden Apple of the Sun is a luminous and human work, presented with the formal audacity and oblique intelligence we expect from Teju Cole.