In the five weeks before the United States election of 3 November 2020, Teju Cole photographed the kitchen counter in his Cambridge, Massachusetts home, each day, leaving the arrangements to chance. The resulting book, Golden Apple of the Sun, published by MACK in 2021, is a still-life sequence whose apparent quiet is set against social and political upheaval.

The project treats still life as a working method rather than a genre exercise. Cole’s counter is not a stage-managed tableau; bowls and plates move in unpredictable constellations. Chardin, Cézanne, the Dutch masters, and contemporary photographers such as Laura Letinsky and Jan Groover are cited as references, but daily repetition and the refusal to compose produce something else: a portrait across time of one surface and one household.

Alongside the photographs is a long essay whose concerns range widely—hunger, fasting, mourning, slavery, intimacy, painting, poetry, and the history of photography. An anonymous handwritten eighteenth-century cookbook from Cambridge is interspersed among the text and pictures. These three registers—image sequence, essay, historical manuscript—do not resolve into a single argument. Their friction is the point.

For collectors, the book’s significance lies less in any single image than in its structure: how domestic repetition, political time, and archival material are held together across 136 pages. The debossed hardback, 19.3 x 25.3 cm, is modest in format but formally bold, and it extends Cole’s practice of moving between photography and writing. It is a considered addition to a shelf attentive to the photobook as a constructed object and to work that tests the distance between private ritual and public crisis.