The Ongoing Moment

Great photographs change the way we see the world; The Ongoing Moment changes the way we look at both. Focusing on the ways in which canonical figures like Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston have photographed the same things—barber shops, benches, hands, roads, signs–award-winning writer Geoff Dyer seeks to identify their signature styles. In doing so, he constructs a narrative in which these photographers–many of whom never met–constantly encounter one another. The result is a kaleidoscopic work of extraordinary originality and insight.

Great photographs change the way we see the world; The Ongoing Moment changes the way we look at both. Focusing on the ways in which canonical figures like Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston have photographed the same things—barber shops, benches, hands, roads, signs–award-winning writer Geoff Dyer seeks to identify their signature styles. In doing so, he constructs a narrative in which these photographers–many of whom never met–constantly encounter one another. The result is a kaleidoscopic work of extraordinary originality and insight.

The New York Times - Richard B. Woodward

Dyer's book seems intended to let some air into what has become an overtheorized activity dominated by academics who have turned the idiosyncratic musings of amateurs like Benjamin and Barthes into Holy Writ. By treating the history of photography as a set of personal takes on a vast repertoire of subjects, "continually expanding and evolving rather than fixed," he has struck a blow for artists, nonacademic critics and anyone who prefers loose ends. All of us can take heart from his loopy guidebook.

Geoff Dyer is the author of Ways of Telling, critical study of John Berger; The Missing of the Somme, about World War I; and the novels Paris Trance, Out of Sheer Rage, The Color of Memory and The Search.