I am just past halfway through Geoff Dyer’s new book on photography, The Ongoing Moment. I love the fact that there are no chapters. No sub-headings, no titles of any kind. Just white space and the occasional quotation to mark the movement of sections. Topics unfold associatively. Dyer looks at how various photographers handled landscape, stairs, men in overcoats, hats, fences and cityscape. I was about to say "photographers from the classic period" and had to catch myself because this is exactly what Dyer avoids—deciding how to characterize historical periods or bothering to define genres and types. Nor is he concerned to give us a coherent narrative, although along the way he does give lots of narrative and good gossip and telling anecdote and detail. Mainly he reads—sees—the photos with great attention and with a mind both alert and a little off-kilter in the best out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye way.
I am enjoying the book so much I could just spit! I read it, savor it, slowly, each word, each phrase at a time. Well, each paragraph. Sometimes of course I doze, as with all books. But I have been following Dyer for some years now and like his work. I’ve come to think of him as the worthiest British writer to fill the gap left by the death of Bruce Chatwin. Dyer writes about travel, often, and travel suffuses his understanding of everything.
Yesterday I created a mood of doubt, though, and wondered if Dyer was really as good as I think he is or if I was just engaging in another bout of enjoying the enthusiasm of enthusiasm. Maybe Dyer wasn’t that good. I was overreacting to what is just an ordinary book. So I looked up some reader’s comments on Amazon. Not very many. Official reviewers give the book high praise but I was looking for that sour note sounded by an ordinary reader that has enough truth in it to give real pause. Nothing. Later in the day I looked up the book on Amazon.UK. Few readers comments and no negatives.
Then I blew up the photo of the cover to see if it is the same as the cover used here. It is not. Similar idea but different landscape. At the bottom is also a quotation that does not appear on the US edition: "Quite possibly the best living writer in Britain." Daily Telegraph Ha! So my taste is not entirely of my own imagining. "Best living writer"—I’m not sure I would go that far, the reviewer for the Telegraph must have been Dyer’s book agent or one of his buddies, but at least the comment is in print for all to agree and disagree with! Someone went out on a limb for it.
Relieved and reassured with near-papal authority, I went back to reading the book and thoroughyly enjoying it. No, enjoying it with perhaps "inordinate" pleasure. Almost illegal for a book to be this good.
Look—I’ll open to a page at the back at random and allow my eye to take in one sentence and copy it out here and even out of all context you will see for yourself just how genius Dyer is, or at least how good one of his sentences is. Ok, ready?
And yet, through the doorways there are always glimpses of other doorways, of other photographs, of infinite possibilities. (219)
Hmm. Pretty ordinary sentence, isn’t it? Oh well. But there—I forgot to mention that in the opening pages Dyer suggests that one advantage of how he has organized the book–or not–is that one can pick it up and read different sections without moving through the whole book from front to back. I like that. It chimes and rhymes completely with Kenneth Burke’s cogitations on the relations between linear thought and sentence structure and chordal or atemporal musical meanings.
And it further goes with, underlines, Dyer’s structuring idea, that the photograph is the art form of the ongoing moment. Now I’m also hoping that having done a book on jazz and a book on photography, he will next do a book on painting. That does not seem likely. Nor really does a book on movies–but who knows? Architecture? I would welcome that more than a book on film. And as a compulsive world traveler, I would think that Dyer has more of a storehouse of notions and observations about buildings and cities than about movies.
