I became a fan of Teju Cole’s work after reading his 2011 novel Open City, which many compared to the writing of W. G. Sebald. Cole’s “side hustle” is as a monthly columnist for The New York Times Magazine, writing on photography. His latest book is Fernweh (MACK Books), a large-format photobook that presents a selection of his photographs, “the result of a half dozen trips to Switzerland between 2014 and 2018.” The title is a German word, “an antonym of heimweh (homesickness). A longing to be far away.” What a perfect word for these COVID-19 times, when images of distant lands serve as substitutes for the inaccessible originals. Turning the pages of Fernweh, the images float on generous white backgrounds as if emerging from clouds. In one image we see a restaurant’s interior, with a glimpse of Lake Geneva partially visible through gauze curtains and reflections in glass; another frames an almost-abstract scattering of blue and white cardboard cartons; another shows wind-blown sheets, hung to dry, with a distant mountain barely noticeable in the background. Some of the photographs are faced with fragments of text arranged like lines of poetry, excerpts from an 1872 Baedeker guide to Switzerland: “in no country / is the weather / more capricious”; “the utmost / order and / decorum / are preserved”; “when Pontius Pilate / was banished from Galilee / he fled hither.” In a brief afterword Cole points out that Switzerland “is one of the key places where nineteenth-century travel photography was developed,” and that as a result, “few places are as close to their perfected image as Switzerland is.” Cole’s photographs offer an alternative to those too-perfect images, and a welcome counter-balance to the clichéd travel narratives often found in glossy magazines.
