Teju Cole on photographing Switzerland, instead of adding to the “endless books about Mexico”

INT: You spoke about how you wanted your writing to pack an emotional and psychological punch but also be simple. How does your photographic style match that?

TC: The dialogue between the two practices is much clearer to me now and I’m very happy about that. I feel, now, that my writing and my photography are being made by the same guy. I think I really arrived at that desired tone earlier with my writing. I’d describe it as a sort of polished, somewhat withdrawn, rather cool surface, but with emotion charging underneath. Finding my voice as a photographer, frankly, I think took longer. One of the things that helped me was really deepening my practice as a photography critic, because then I really took myself to school for photography. Every month I had to write an essay in The New York Times Magazine about photography for a large general audience. For each of those essays, I had to go to the library and sit down and read the relevant books, do a close read of other photographers’ work, and find out what it was I wanted to say in a way that could be interesting to experts as well as to people who’d never heard of this person before. That was a significant part of my education in photography, to be interested in everything, and then through that to assert for myself what the thing was I wanted to do. As an artist, you cannot do everything. In fact, if you try to do everything, it means you end up not having a voice.

INT: Who were the biggest influences on the work we see in Fernweh?

TC: I think what happened was that in 2014, arriving in Switzerland, I first started to feel this unity between subject, terrain, and my own inclinations, or rather the kind of work I wanted to do. So, even if I admire photographers like, say, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paolo Pellegrin, or Alex Webb, that ultimately was not the kind of work that I found I wanted to do – that work where you set up a complex visual field and then wait for somebody to enter the field, just so, and capture them so that everything seems to balance in this magical decisive moment. That was not the work I wanted to do in Switzerland. What I wanted to do was to point my camera at an apparently ordinary or banal scene and find the ways in which, by moving two feet to the left or three feet to the right or by stepping back five feet, something else starts to resolve in the organisation of the picture plane.

So, at that moment I started thinking a lot more about people like [Eugène] Atget and the idea that a space can emanate a charge based on the quietness of your vision as a photographer. And then, of course, all my contemporary influences, all the people who managed to photograph the contemporary, the everyday, to organise, specifically in colour, the ordinary and yet give it some kind of charge. Photographers like [William] Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Guido Guidi. Then I started to discover people like Joachim Brohm, who was subsequently a huge influence on me, because he is one of the masters of composition. And through all this, coming to the point where I’m absorbing all of these influences, taking them all in, and realising that this is a direction I want to move in. Then, when it came to the actual sequencing of Fernweh, I was much influenced by my study of Dayanita Singh’s Museum of Chance and Rinko Kawauchi’s Illuminance, specifically their ability to make you intuit a story, a world, out of disparate fragments.

INT: Let’s talk about Switzerland, then. What was so fascinating about the country? Why did it become your subject for so many years?

TC: I was invited to Switzerland in mid-2014 to take up a literary residency. What was attractive was that Switzerland comes with all these associations that people think they know. They think it’s clean and efficient and boring. So the contrarian side of me was quite excited, because it’s not a place I would have picked randomly by myself. It was like fate picked it for me, to challenge me to find out what is interesting there. And when I arrived in Switzerland in June 2014, it was so beautiful, so clean and clear and crisp, that the challenge was on. My first trip was to Interlaken. The ease of the train journey there, the incredible blueness of the lake, and the vertiginousness of those mountains – I immediately fell in love with that terrain.

Meanwhile, I was starting to think about how you make sense of something that has already been, in a way, discursively concluded, already from the 19th Century. Switzerland means the place that your grandparents went for their honeymoon, Queen Victoria went there. What on earth do I have in common with Queen Victoria? In terms of what we find beautiful, I could not imagine somebody more opposite to me. But then the question became: why outsource that kind of pleasure to somebody else’s conclusion? Why not experience it for yourself and see if there’s anything there for you? My attraction for going off the beaten path told me that sometimes what’s off the beaten path is the path that was previously very well-trod and has now faded from being the centre of attention. Right now, among young American photographers, there are endless books about Mexico, about India. Oh, wow, yet another young American photographer making a photo book about Brazil. Sure. Nobody is going to Switzerland to make a book about it.