Teju Cole, photography critic of the New York Times Magazine, and one of the most consistently interesting of contemporary writers, is an heir of sorts to James Baldwin, W. G. Sebald and John Berger. Cole’s most recent book, Blind Spot (Random House), a generous hardcover printed on glossy stock, presents Cole’s photographs on recto pages, with brief, allusive essays on the facing verso page. The book’s title refers to an incident in 211, when Cole awoke to find himself blind in one eye, the blindness caused by papillophlebitis, or perforations to his retina. “The photography changed after that. The looking changed.” Cole’s essays do not speak directly to the photographs they accompany, but, over time, themes and preoccupations gradually emerge, the principal among them being the medium of photography itself. In the text accompanying a photograph taken in São Paolo, Brazil, Cole describes a moment in which he “lost faith”: “The world was now a series of interleaved apparitions. The thing was an image that could also bear an image. If one of the benefits of irreligion was an acceptance of others, that benefit was strangely echoed in the visual plane, which granted the things seen within the photographic rectangle a radical equality.” Blind Spot includes a map, and an index that locates the photographs: cities from Ypsilanti to Seminyak to Lagos to New York (Vancouver, the only Canadian location, is represented by a pair of photographs). As Cole puts it in a postscript: “This book stands on its own. But it can also be seen as the fourth in a quartet of books about the limit of vision.”