Heiress publishes Carl Terver’s photobook Glory to the Sky. (Go to the end of this page to purchase a copy.)
Glory to the Sky contains 35 original photographs accompanied by micro, personal essays and photography writing.
Since his first photography writing “The Lessons of Hue Editing” published in 2021 in Afapinen, Carl Terver continues to expand his vision of writing about images. In this photobook, which he claims was a discovery even to him, he examines our ways of seeing, celebrates the beauty of the accidental and coincident, and discusses man’s propensity for wastefulness. This kind of writing follows the tradition of writers like Emmanuel Iduma and Teju Cole, in investigating life through photography. A pleasure to read and a masterful hand at work, Terver is one of Nigeria’s postmodernist writers today engaged in critical thought.
Praise for Glory to the Sky
Terver’s prose is tender and searing. Pressed by his devotee gaze, the immediate natural world reveals its many secrets. Glory to the Sky carries great potential; it is the work of a consummate artist.
—Emmanuel Esomnofu
“Glory to the Sky is a liminal extratext as much as it is its own text. It narrates our contrasting distance to the abundance that surrounds us, which is always near, yet perpetually remote. In his reflection on an image that “has a there and not-there feel at the same time,” Carl Terver captures the affective tension between presence and absence, perception and illusion. His photographs and prose meditate on how our mediating ambitions, whether through awareness or technology, shape what we see and how we see it. (Co)incidentally, Terver guides us through the contours of seeing, being seen, and not being seen at all, revealing how these gestures are inseparable from everything else: our faith and fears, our longings and meditations, our quiet awe and reverence for life. Glory to the Sky is a metaphysical inquiry into how the act of looking sanctifies the ordinary.”
—Tolulope Oke
Carl Terver’s Glory to the Sky is a book of transits, a memento, a hands-down startlement. Yet the primary grounding is mostly movement: one is bound by the special apparatuses of prose and hurled forcefully, if violently, toward realism’s boundaries rendered in plain, undoctored photographs. Do we really know what an image is until we de-image it in words? Terver knows, and he wants us to know, perhaps in the rawest and slightly ministerial way, about the sheer expanse of that de-imaging, whether it’s about ecological destruction, a roadside plaza of shops still under construction, or just old, rusty manholes. While these are simple camera shots, language makes them richer, leaving each page pulsating with moral solvency and history. This book is your opportunity to witness a crack in this dusky bohemian era where care and empathy for the world are slowly, sometimes unnoticeably, becoming extinct.
—Njoku Nonso, poet, winner New Writers Poetry Competition 2024
Carl Terver is the author of For Girl at Rubicon (2020), a poetry chapbook which has remained an underground classic among Nigerian poetry readers. He was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2024, and his writing includes fiction, poetry, and essays/criticisms on film, music, literature, and photography. Glory to the Sky is his first photobook. He is the author of #Nontransparentthings, an ongoing photography project in celebration of a better quality of slowness, blandness, or pauses. His other writings on photography include “An Affordance,” “Four Photographs,” and “The Lessons of Hue Editing.”
