Geoff Dyer - See/Saw: Looking at Photographs

Also by Geoff Dyer

Broadsword Calling Danny Boy: On Where Eagles Dare

The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand

White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

Another Great Day at Sea:
Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush

Zona

Working the Room: Essays and Reviews 19992010

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

The Ongoing Moment

Yoga for People Who Cant Be Bothered to Do It

Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews and Misadventures 198499

Paris Trance

Out of Sheer Rage

The Missing of the Somme

The Search

But Beautiful

The Colour of Memory

Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger

First published in Great Britain and Canada in 2021 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

Distributed in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2021 by Canongate Books

Copyright Geoff Dyer, 2021

Please see p. 317 for details of pieces previously published.

Please see p. 331 for permission credits.

The right of Geoff Dyer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 83885 209 2
eISBN 978 1 83885 210 8

Design by Rafaela Romaya

Typeset in Clarika Pro and Minion by Sharon McTeir

FOR REBECCA

Reality as a thing seen by the mind...

Wallace Stevens, An Ordinary Evening in New Haven

CONTENTS

PART ONE
ENCOUNTERS

PART TWO
EXPOSURES

PART THREE
WRITERS

INTRODUCTION

He loiters in the neighborhood of a problem.
After a while a solution strolls by.

Harold Rosenberg, Discovering the Present

Writing about photography looking at photographs in order to write about them has been an important and pleasurable sideline for the past couple of decades. I say sideline, but theres not really been any main line, or at least the main line is made up of a multitude of sidelines. Photography, though, has continued to engage my critical enthusiasm to such a degree that it has become my main sideline. I only became aware of this retrospectively as I sorted through files for this book, surprised by the amount of stuff there was to rummage through.

Naturally, I have no method. I just look, and think about what Im looking at, and then try to articulate what Ive seen and thought which encourages me to see things I hadnt previously noticed, to have thoughts I hadnt had before the writing began.

No-method claims like this often mean being unconscious as to how the alleged lack can itself constitute a method, with its own traditions and ideological underpinnings. I did English at university and my way of writing about photography might be an extension of the practical criticism I learned at school en route to Oxford: reading a poem or a piece of prose and then examining the way rhymes and word choices etc. work to create certain effects. Getting the hang of this was probably the primary skill necessary for passing exams. (Harking back to school and university in this way may seem a bit puerile, but writing,

Sit would be more accurate than stand, since although I look at photographs on the walls of galleries and online my preferred way of looking at them is in books, at home, with my feet up on the sofa, and I doubt this will change any time in the future. The writing that results from looking is not always or not only about the photographs. In the pieces on Fred Sigman and Thomas Ruff, for example, the pictures serve as pretexts or occasions for more general discussions of Las Vegas motels and pornography respectively.

Garry Winogrand was always insisting that a photograph has no narrative ability. In a single image, he said, its impossible to tell whether a man is taking his hat off or putting it on. Stephen Shore, meanwhile, has spoken admiringly of the descriptive power of a large-format camera. The combination of narrative inability and abundantly stalled description renders photography far more amenable or susceptible than music in which great rhythmic propulsion can be generated with no descriptive support to the inherent narrative potential of words. (Occasions when we can hear something as tangible as fate knocking at the door in a piece of music are rare indeed.) So photography, for me, might be as much an incentive a series of incentive schemes for descriptive narrative as it is an area of critical expertise.

Overall, photography might be easier to write about than music, but some photographs are, of course, harder to fathom than others. When writing about difficult pictures or music or poetry its important not to forget, deny or disguise ones initial (or enduring) confusion or perplexity. Criticism offers an opportunity not to explain away ones reactions but to articulate, record and preserve them in the hope that doing so might express a truth inherent in the work.

This book includes a lot but by no means all of the shorter things Ive written about photography since the publication of the essay hampers Working the Room (UK, 2010) and Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (US, 2011). A regrettable omission is the piece I contributed to An-My Ls Events Ashore (2014), but since this took the form of little notes to twenty-one photographs, it was not feasible to reproduce it here. Maybe in ten or fifteen years from now the contents of this book will be combined with some of the pieces on photography from those earlier collections of essays, including the still earlier Anglo-English Attitudes (1999) and stuff that Ill have written (strange tense) since this one in a kind of pre-senility, deathbed or yikes! posthumous edition.

Over the years Ive written enough columns on various topics, in various papers, to be convinced of two things. First, a quarterly column comes around monthly, a monthly column weekly and a weekly column daily. Second, and partly as a result of that first point, Im not a columnist. The quality of what Ive written in columns has tended to decline precipitously from the first couple of instalments, after which Ive succumbed to a quickening sense of dread as the deadlines hurtle towards me with terrifying frequency. The one exception was the Exposure column for The New Republic, which involved picking a photo from the news and writing about it. I loved doing that from first to last, but in have included only ten from the two dozen or so pieces that I contributed. Another gig that worked out nicely was taking over the On Photography column for the