Pharmakon — Teju Cole. Published by MACK.
In Pharmakon, writer and photographer Teju Cole surrounds his dozen dark fables with a spare landscape of minimalistic photographs in a muted palette, including stones, cracks, and a foreboding pool of an unidentified liquid. As we make our way deeper into Pharmakon, we feel lost in a wasteland of images that follow each disquieting tale of men and women facing desperate environmental and political situations. Pharmakon—which means both cure and poison—hints at the many cultural and ethical issues of witnessing or trying to convey the suffering of others, where sometimes art, in particular photography, instead of shining a light on the pain of others, may numb us to it. This subtle and thoughtful book suggests that perhaps we need new hybrid forms to help keep our eyes open—as well as our hearts—in this increasingly unsettling world of ours. Pharmakon tasks us to read closely both words and images, which are not only in dialogue with each other, but taken together, they create “a music of pauses and entanglements that learned itself as it flowed forward,” to quote Cole.
Rebecca Norris Webb’s new book is A Difficulty Is a Light, her first hybrid poetry book that’s punctuated by 15 of her photographs, with an accompanying exhibition at the Alessia Paladini Gallery, Milan. She’s currently working on Badlands, an ongoing project in the Dakotas. When not traveling, Norris Webb shares her time between Park Slope, Brooklyn and Wellfleet, Cape Cod.