Geoff Dyer "The Ongoing Moment"

[Struan Gray]

Anyone read this? I'd be interested in photographers' opinions.

[tim atherton]

reading the review it sounded very much like he takes the same approach to looking at photographs that John Berger takes to looking at art in general (and some photography) a sort of idiosyncratic noticing of small but significant details and impressions and make you look at some of these things again.

Then I read Dyer has also writing a critical study of Berger, so that would make sense...

Sounds interesting though

[Struan Gray]

a sort of idiosyncratic noticing of small but significant details and impressions and make you look at some of these things again.

That could describe many of my favourite photographs.

I'm so mean, I'll probably wait for the paperback.

[jtf]

Charles Darwent Unhelpfully for anyone looking to him for tips on how to write about photography, Cartier-Bresson's line on it was short and dense: "Il n'y a que coincidences," purred the master; there are only coincidences. Whichever -ism you choose to approach it by, there's no getting away from the fact that photography is a chaotic art,

Forget Charles Darwent; he appears to consider writing as a chaotic art.

[tim atherton]

A review by my friend Geoffrey James in the Globe and Mail (not sure if you have to do the registration thing...)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20051231/BKDYER31/TPEntertainment/Books

or

http://tinyurl.com/cxc56

got a coy a couple of weeks ago and I'm part way through - good read so far

[Frank Lahorgue]

I've kept another interesting review of Dyer's book written by Michael Roth, President of the California College of the Arts. It offers another take on Dyer's work that I wouldn't begin to summarize. I will be pleased to send it as an MSWord attachment to any of you who wishes to read it.

[John_4185]

Dyer strikes me as rather like Susan Sontag without balls.

Naw, that's just something I think he would appreciate reading.

[Paddy Quinn]

photographers are certainly the most insecure of all the creative types

[Struan Gray]

Frank, yes I'd like to read the review.

Thanks for rejuvenating the thread Tim, you saved me the effort of looking for it :-)

I read the book over Christmas, and was disappointed. It is a pleasant enough read, but eventually the lad-rag flippancy wears thin enough to see that there is not going to be any real substance.

Most annoying for me, is Dyer's habit of endlessly describing photographs. Not in a "this is what I see in this image" sort of way, but in a plonking "there's a man on the left and his right arm is raised" sort of way. At first, I thought he was building a set of observations from which to draw some sort of conclusion or synthesis, but that never comes, or at least only comes in the simplest of forms.

Dyer spends a lot of time collecting sets of physical items or genre types that crop up in photography over and over again. He uses them to advance a half-hearted argument about how photographers borrow from each other, and how the photography world has developed its own set of persistent themes. What he doeesn't comment on - at all - is how the same themes are widely prevelent in the wider art world, and indeed how they reflect the concerns of the society in which the photographers are working just as much as the personal obsessions of the photographer themselves. He also straightforwardly ignores the fact that the persistence of his themes is largely an artefact of his narrow historical and photographic focus.

His favourite 'thing' is a hat. He talks at length about how hats appear in various photographs, and about how various photographers use them to convey character and situation. He gives this as evidence of a particular photographic obsession with hats. He ignores the vast array of primary and secondary source material in literature, theatre, painting, sculpture and the rest of the arts which addresses precisely the same concern: your choice of hat, and how you wear it.

I did enjoy a lot of the biographical material, and it was a pleasure to read a book on the modernist photographers by someone who had plainly checked his facts and sources. The easy style and flippant asides made for a gentle read in a yuletide house full of puking kids. In the end though, The Ongoing Moment is a book written by someone who has read a lot about photography, and is reporting on his reading. I learnt a lot about some photographers, and about some specific photographs; but not much about photography.

[tim atherton]

Ha - I only just picked this up again.

I love the references to Steiglitz's "odd" requests for the women he was seducing with his camera - mainly O'Keefe and Strands wife - the latter being even further seduced once Strand was away on an errand .

And then the quote from Eddie Weston's letter to the board of the Museum of Modern Art, in defence of pubic hair (of which he professes a love of all types and colours...) - gotta love these guys. We seem so repressed these days by comparison :-)