{"id":253,"date":"2007-12-19T05:23:05","date_gmt":"2007-12-19T05:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.foto8.com\/live\/?p=253"},"modified":"2007-12-19T05:23:05","modified_gmt":"2007-12-19T05:23:05","slug":"the-ongoing-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.foto8.com\/live\/the-ongoing-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ongoing Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"text\"> Geoff Dyer has been on the verge of writing about photography for ages. Despite the odd stylistic disagreement (I\u2019ve never felt comfortable with Dyer\u2019s assertion that he is an intellectual, for example. I\u2019m not saying he isn\u2019t, I\u2019m just questioning the merits of declaring his status so publicly), I\u2019m an admirer of his work.<br \/> <\/span><span class=\"titletext\"><span class=\"titletext\"><span class=\"text\"><br \/> <\/span><\/span><\/span><span class=\"text\">I\u2019ve enjoyed his idiosyncratic voyages towards understanding, whether he was writing about he battle of the Somme, or jazz, or Nietzsche, he usually found something original to say and would say it well. So when news broke that he was to be writing about a subject close to my heart, the portents were good.<br \/> <\/span><span class=\"titletext\"><span class=\"titletext\"><span class=\"text\"><br \/> <\/span><\/span><\/span><span class=\"text\">Until I started to read it. Dyer spends the first stretch (and I say stretch because there are no chapters, headings or any other signposting device via which us mere mortals could use to navigate such an unwieldy document) explaining his methodology. He is following the advice of Dorothea Lange, who once said that it was fine to work completely without a plan, so as not to limit oneself. As Dyer is aware, Lange was talking about the organising principles of photography, not writing. Lange may have had dozens of negatives from a days work, but she would only publish the good bits.<br \/> <\/span><span class=\"titletext\"><span class=\"titletext\"><span class=\"text\"><br \/> <\/span><\/span><\/span><span class=\"text\">It\u2019s not as though the book is no good; far from it. Dyer is incapable of writing anything other than a perfectly executed sentence. And he\u2019s passionate about photography. But the dilettante approach that has previously served him so well has hindered him here. His desire to avoid the dry, the fusty, the well-trodden path of a potted history of photography has resulted in the literary equivalent of fusion food &#8211; it\u2019s a nice enough idea but ultimately unsatisfying. His vague theming by subject \u2013 photographs of hats, of the blind, of people from behind \u2013 conjure up the impression of his thoughts rolling into each other like so many bowling balls across a perfectly manicured green, each one graceful and perfectly formed, but never quite hitting its target.<br \/> <\/span><span class=\"titletext\"><span class=\"titletext\"><span class=\"text\"><br \/> <\/span><\/span><\/span><span class=\"text\">The book deals almost exclusively with American photography, bar the odd Atget reference. His central preoccupation seems to be that photographers sometimes photograph each other and that photographers recreate each other\u2019s pictures until it becomes hard to tell them apart. We also learn, by way of gentle anecdote, quite a bit about the inner lives and loves of the American greats; Lange, Strand, Stieglitz, Evans et al. There is a sense of spending a weekend with an elderly gentleman who had known all the old photo-heroes, and is reminiscing over a bottle of vintage cognac. In the same way, I sensed a sadness emanating from this book, but maybe the photography\/death interface is precisely the site of our relentless fascination with the subject.<br \/> <\/span><span class=\"titletext\"><span class=\"titletext\"><span class=\"text\"><br \/> <\/span><\/span><\/span><span class=\"text\"> One final point; the title. The phrase \u2018the ongoing moment\u2019 with its obvious allusion to Cartier-Bresson\u2019s famous phrase is embedded in Dyer\u2019s series of thoughts about photographers recognising symbols in each other\u2019s pictures and thus making the same images across the decades. \u2018Does a coincidence have to be momentary?\u2019 asks Dyer. \u2018How long is the moment, the ongoing moment?\u2019 Puzzlingly for me, he appears to answer this question a little later on: \u2018In photography there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there\u2019s this moment and in between there is nothing.<\/span><span class=\"titletext\"><span class=\"titletext\"><span class=\"text\">\u2019<\/p>\n<p> <\/span><\/span><\/span><span class=\"text\">In one sweeping statement, Dyer artfully destroys his entire premise for the book.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong><br \/>Max Houghton <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=article&amp;id=210:the-ongoing-moment&amp;catid=19&amp;Itemid=77\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"review_photo\" src=\"http:\/\/www.foto8.com\/reviews\/V4N3\/resources\/OngoingMoment.jpg\" alt=\"The Ongoing Moment\" title=\"The Ongoing Moment\" align=\"left\" border=\"0\" height=\"177\" hspace=\"10\" vspace=\"0\" width=\"115\" \/><\/a> <span class=\"review_author\">Geoff Dyer<\/span><br \/><span class=\"review_additional\"> Published by Little, Brown<br \/> \u00a320<br \/> 320pp Hardback<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.5 - 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