Dyer's Photography
Here is the ending of Geoff Dyer's introduction to The Ongoing Moment:
Dorothea Lange said that "the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera." I might not be a photographer but I now see the kind of photographs I might have taken if I were one.
What are we to make of this amateur's production? It is clearly an exponent of what Barry Gewen called "the belletrist option" of art criticism, which
allowed for the exercise of personal style, the careful inspection and precise expression of one's own reactions, and it found adherents among poet-critics like John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, and individualistic, iconoclastic intellects like Susan Sontag.
In The Ongoing Moment, Mr Dyer writes about photography, for the most part American photography as practiced by a handful of masters. It is not a book for beginners; it assumes not only some knowledge of the history of American photography - the famous photographers and what sort of pictures they have taken - but also access to the many photographs that Mr Dyer talks about but does not reproduce. It is certainly not a picture book; the black-and-white reproductions are quite small and just as matte as the text. There are section breaks, but no chapters - no formal organization of any kind. I was reminded of the French phrase, de fil en aiguille, which is best translated, "from one thing to another." The "things" are photographic subjects, the subjects that have caught Mr Dyer's eye. Sometimes these subjects are real objects, such as hands or barbershops. Sometimes they're much more conceptual, such as seeing the world in black-and-white but photographing it in color, or variations on that theme. Sometimes it is the relationship between the photographer and his subject, a matter that's illustrated by nude photographs taken by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston. Always playing somewhere in the background is some idea or other of "America."
Photography presents three unique aesthetic challenges - challenges that don't arise in other, older art forms. First...
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