Quote by Teju Cole: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.”

Taking a photograph isn't neutral — it's an act of claiming, framing, and controlling how something is seen. The photographer decides what is included, what is left out, and what meaning is made. This matters especially when the subject has no say in how they are represented or shared.

Cole published Blind Spot in 2017, a book combining photographs with lyrical prose meditations on seeing and knowing. Photography's politics — who gets to look, who gets photographed, and on whose terms — was a live debate as social media made image-making a daily act for billions of people.

Nigerian-American writer and photographer whose debut novel Open City won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 2012. His work fuses memoir, criticism, and fiction to examine race, movement, and identity in the postcolonial world.