Teju Cole: On Opacity

       I was suspicious, and then made weary, and then put off by the hard sell laid on the “new” New York Times Magazine:

. . . new typefaces, new page designs, a heavier paper stock, new ideas about the relationship between print and digital media, and, animating it all, a new spirit of inquiry that is both subversive and sincere …

and so on and so forth.   And then I was brought back and invigorated and won over by the writing.  

Specifically, by Teju Cole’s writing in what will be a monthly “On Photography” feature.  It’s not a feature or a column; it’s an essay – or what Wilfrid Sheed called an “essay in disguise.”  Essaying about the photographer Roy DeCarava, Cole brings in the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant’s understanding of the word “opacity”:

Glissant defined it as a right to not have to be understood on others’ terms, a right to be misunderstood if need be. The argument was rooted in linguistic considerations: It was a stance against certain expectations of transparency embedded in the French language. Glissant sought to defend the opacity, obscurity and inscrutability of Caribbean blacks and other marginalized peoples. External pressures insisted on everything being illuminated, simplified and explained. Glissant’s response: No. And this gentle refusal, this suggestion that there is another way, a deeper way, holds true for DeCarava, too.

That’s more than an argument about marginalized peoples.  It’s an argument about art; or – to get to the point of the “new” Times Magazine– it is an articulation of the quality of the freedom-in-obscurity that is found in most real writing and that is continually at risk of being left out or ground out of the writing that is published in magazines.  It’s what Cole a little later in the essay calls “a case for how indirect images guarantee our sense of the human.”  

It hardly matters whether the Times Magazine is new; what matters is that it keeps on publishing writing like that essay – writing that risks indirection and confidently maintains a certain opacity.

The photograph, “Five Men, 1964,” by Roy DeCarava, is described in the essay.  

• 26 February 2015
• #media commentary#the new york times magazine#on photography
• 1