Mark Power Blog

Writer Geoff Dyer is an inquisitive Englishman who is not only  known for his  fiction but also for his opinions on many other things that catch his  fancy. A polymath, in other words.

 

 

 

Geoff Dyer photographer unknown

 

So aside from some provocative novels, the most recent which I recently read with pleasure “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi”, Dyer has also opined on yoga, T.E.  Lawrence, John Berger,  jazz,  and now photography with “The Ongoing Moment”.  I say “now” but it’s only now for me; the book actually came out in 2005.

I thought I’d do a book review in the form of an interview with Self, a literary form I encountered a while ago  in that fine film of Irish life and music, “The Commitments” although privately I have done many interviews with Self  before and after seeing that  tribute to the great Wilson Pickett.

Wilson Pickett photographer unknown

 

Self:  What, we’re going to Motown? What happened to Geoff Dyer’s book?

MLP:  Not Motown, Memphis. But you’re right, the great Pickett deserves his own post so back to Geoff Dyer.

Self: So what do you like about this book?

MLP:  It’s a fascinating mix of  original and provocative observations on the medium mixed with biographies and occasional bits of gossip which detonate amidst the exposition. For example,  just when you’re about to be swamped with theory comes the revelation that Walker Evans had a big cock.

Self:  Yes, suddenly the eyes fly open. I hope you didn’t mean to suggest the exposition is in any way boring.

MLP: Quite the opposite, like Susan Sontag’s seminal “On Photography” which has not aged at all, Dyer intends to provoke, to pose interesting questions rather than predictable answers.
One thesis he follows through much of the book is to link images of like subjects by diverse artists.  You see “the same ‘battered fedora’ in imagery  ranging from Dorothea Lang to Garry Winogrand. There’s a collective fascination with windows and open doors, with signs, with unmade beds, a subject which prompts Dyer to note an unmade bed with its faint imprint of a body, is like a portrait.

Self:  I’ve noticed an extraordinary number of artists who photographed people in pools of water, two well known examples being  Edward Weston and André Kertész.

 

 

André Kertész  Swimmer, 1917

Edward Weston, Nude Floating, 1939

 

MLP: And then there’s the number of artists who have photographed blind people, beginning with Strand of course, but including many other artists from Lewis Hine to  Weegee, to Evans, to  Avedon. Dyer even includes Ed Clark’s famous picture of the accordionist playing at FDR’s funeral – he could see  but he was blinded by his tears.

 

 

Ed Clark, FDR’s Funeral 1945

 

Self: Not to mention the fact that many of these blind subjects were also playing accordions. Dyer doesn’t speculate on the meaning of those coincidences but he does floats the  theory is that photographers are drawn to photographing the blind because of their primal terror of going blind themselves.

MLP: Sounds reasonable to me. I’ve never photographed a blind person but the fear is there. Arbus said she liked photographing blind people because “they can’t fake their expression”.

Self: Or you could say blind people all have pretty much the same expression.

MLP: When we were much younger and looking at a lot of photography for the first time we noticed many artists had an affinity for the same subjects. It didn’t appear to be a stylistic affinity, rather an intuitive response to certain archetypal images –women in pools, for example – look at the pre-Raphaelites – which actually seemed to have little to do with individual vision. We began imagine it was the cameras themselves discovering these images, cameras directed by a collective subconscious eye rather than by individual artists.

Self: Dyer reports that Bill Brandt, the great English photographer, had the same thought: “Instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing” which reminds me that another English artist, David Hockney  said “the camera only sees what you see.”

 

 

Bill Brandt by Michael Birt

 

MLP: While those two are arguing, I recall Edvard Munch once said: “I do not paint what I see – but what I saw.” He introduces time into the debate.

Self: That may be true of painting but it seems like every photograph is an image of present time no matter when it was made…

MLP: I would argue a photograph acquires a veneer of the past as it ages, when we look at a Robert Frank picture we’re seeing a scene as he experienced it in the present tense but for us it is in the past tense, that’s what special about a photograph, unlike a memory, it can seem real in both temporal dimensions at once…what we don’t see is what has happened between those two time-states; as Dyer says: “photography is the negation of chronology”.

Self: That’s the pathos of every image; it is forever trapped in the present tense, its future unknowable and we’re there, the godlike viewers, knowing both its future and its past.

MLP: Despite its casual tone, Dyer’s writing has large ambitions.  Jorge Luis Borges        ( speaking of blind people) , photographed by many, and quoted by even more, felt despair, Dyer noted,  because his medium, words, could never describe the simultaneity of everything occurring at once in a given moment in our universe  – the  ur-realiy of our visible universe – because words ( and photographs) are successive, not simultaneous.  But Dyer persists: “ To reconcile the simultaneous and the successive; that is one of the ambitions of these pages”  he writes. Of course, he doesn’t succeed  -  no more than our own individual experience of the world succeeds -  but it’s the effort that impresses as much as success.

Jorge Luis Borges’ grave. The motto reads: “And who did not fear”.

Photographer unknown

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Self: Another strength of this odd book is its biographical stream-of-consciousness: There’s a mention of Strand and Stieglitz eyeing each others’ wives (with their cameras, of course) and somehow Lewis Hine and Edward Hopper lead us into an account  the feuding between Kertész  and Brassai and then suddenly we’re back again with Georgia O’Keefe  giving Dyer a chance to spend two pages  bemoaning  the lack of detail in Stieglitz’ famous  picture of O’Keefe’s crotch!

MLP: The mixture of biography and gossip brings these famous photographers to life better than any history could –  we learn these icons are much like ourselves with their ambitions, their petty dislikes, their schemes, their triumphs and failures. It takes the skill of a novelist like Dyer to bring these artists and their times to life. I’ve been reading about people like Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston and Kertész  all my life but they only really came to life for me with this book.

Self: Does it bother you that Dyer’s thoughts on photographers and photography don’t go much beyond the 60s?

MLP: Well, he does go on for several pages discussing the implications of color photography, even asking if an orange can really be an orange in black-and-white since presumably its essence  is its orangeness.

But the fact that he pauses more or less at the end of the black-and-white era hopefully means we might see a sequel.

 

an orange which might not be an orange

 

Self: Are you reading this, Mr. Dyer? Get cracking!