The Ongoing Moment

"Yes, Geoff Dyer is a devotee of John Berger , who is another person who I could definitely have included. I chose mostly to bring together books that I’m currently engaged with, in trying to write about visual experience myself for the notebook I keep online. One of the things that’s really striking about Geoff’s book — and all of these books — is that “ways of seeing,” in Berger’s phrase, are so idiosyncratic. Different individuals see so particularly and part of the joy of reading a book like this is getting to encounter his way of seeing. He sees things in these photographs that I would never have noticed, and his way of assembling them allows you to have a new vision of these images. Part of what I love in the book is that it’s beautifully structured, it’s built around certain ideas or content that recurs through different photographs. So there’s a long loop on the hat, there’s another one on benches, there’s ones on bodies. As you read through them, you have this sense of the way photographers themselves feel images in their mind. They see an earlier photographer’s picture of a hat, and then that becomes part of their own understanding, so that when they photograph hats they’re always alluding to the earlier images. This is maybe a property peculiar to photography — the incredible liquidity with which this referentiality happens — and Geoff, who also loves jazz, has a very fine eye and ear for this kind of cross-referencing that the artists themselves are doing. I think that really helps you to see photography in a different way and to experience these pictures as the photographers experienced them. You feel as if you’re entering into the way that photographers themselves are working and thinking. You can’t know that. But the images are very striking in their resemblances, you feel their connectedness. It doesn’t have to be a conscious reference, or an acknowledged one, in order for it to be valuable for a viewer. That’s a thing about visual work in general, that’s like writing. In writing, you’re always learning from other writers, you’re always redoing things that other writers have done. So are painters and photographers. Even if it’s far back in the mind of the practitioner, it can still be very interesting for a viewer to see. We assume in painting that painters are conscious of the whole history of art and that they will have seen many of the great works of art and will have thought about them. The same is true in photography. I know that photographers are avid consumers of photographs, but I just hadn’t thought about it in quite the way that Geoff does. Yes, it’s a very brilliant and unusual way of entering this material. People tend to isolate photographers and write monographs about one at a time. If they’re writing about groups of photographers, they tend to write about them like a group that all existed together at the same chronological moment, and not to trace these kinds of lineages that descend over time and loop around. He is doing really well. I think he has wonderful taste both in literature and in pictures, so that’s very nice, that he liked your brother’s work."