Geoff Dyer - The Ongoing Moment

Acclaim for Geoff Dyers

The Ongoing Moment

What we regard as canonical is a matter of connecting cultural dots, and Dyer makes connections, after choosing the dots. This wide-eyed Englishman helps us see America, as well as its ghosts.

Los Angeles Times

Quirky and inspiring.

Joyce Carol Oates, The Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year

[Dyer] helps us get oriented, charmed and entertained. It is a remarkable achievement, especially when you consider that Mr. Dyer does not even own a camera.

The Dallas Morning News

Geoff Dyer discovered that interesting new pictures come (mostly) from interesting earlier pictures, and with wit and imagination he has followed the trail that leads from one barbershop photograph to the next, from park bench to park bench.

John Szarkowski, Director Emeritus of the Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Geoff Dyer, English letters own Renaissance man carries out a sneaky sideways raid on the scholars and experts territory, creating something unexpected and rather beautiful in the process.

New Statesman

There is very little fine writing on photography. Geoff Dyers The Ongoing Moment adds superbly to that tiny canon: clever, provocative, witty and shrewdly on the nail.

William Boyd, The Scotsman

[The Ongoing Moment] flashes back, fast-forwards and kaleidoscopes seamlessly through the last century of American photography. One of the most graceful ruminations on photography ever written. From beginning to end Dyers tour de force is as inspirational as it is accessible.

The Sunday Telegraph (London)

This book on photography is really (sneakily) about ambition, mortality and American life. Dyers most satisfying book to date.

Independent on Sunday (London), Books of the Year

Exhilarating and wonderful. [Dyer] has given his reader not only a revelatory, looping road though the history of photography but also the sense of having entered into the collective consciousness of the photographers themselves.

Rachel Cohen, author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854--1967

Dyers subtle, understated, unforgettable masterpiece on the best known, least understood art form in the world deserves to join [Susan Sontags On Photography] on our bookshelves.

Scotland on Sunday

Geoff Dyer
The Ongoing Moment

Geoff Dyer is the author of three novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; a collection of essays, Anglo-English Attitudes; and four genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga for People Who Cant Be Bothered to Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and, most recently, The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography). He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and coeditor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. In 2003, he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006, he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in London.

Also by Geoff Dyer

Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger

The Colour of Memory

But Beautiful

The Search

The Missing of the Somme

Out of Sheer Rage

Paris Trance

Anglo-English Attitudes

Yoga for People Who Cant Be Bothered to Do It

For Rebecca

the only thing in which I have been actually thorough
has been in being thoroughly unprepared.

Alfred Stieglitz

The capacity of photographs to evoke rather than tell, to suggest rather
than explain, makes them alluring material for the historian or
anthropologist or art historian who would pluck a single picture from a
large collection and use it to narrate his or her own stories. But such
stories may or may not have anything to do with the original narrative
context of the photograph, the intent of its creator, or the ways in
which it was used by its original audience.

Martha Sandweiss

I am not the first researcher to draw inspiration from a certain Chinese encyclopaedia described by Borges. According to this arcane work animals are divided into: (a) those that belong to the Emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camels-hair brush; (l) et cetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at distance resemble flies.

While the survey of photography undertaken in these pages can claim neither this degree of rigour nor eccentricity, it takes heart from earlier, well-intended attempts to marshal the infinite variety of photographic possibilities into some kind of haphazard order. Walker Evans said it was a pet subject of his how writers like James Joyce and Henry James were unconscious photographers. In the case of Walt Whitman there was nothing unconscious about it. In these Leaves [of Grass] every thing is literally photographed, he insisted. Nothing is poeticized. Keen to emulate the Priests of the Sun, Whitman created poems that, at times, read like extended captions in a huge, constantly evolving catalogue of photographs:

See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce,

See, the many-cylinderd steam-printing-press see, the electric telegraph stretching across the continent, []

See, the strong and quick locomotive as it departs, panting, blowing the steam-whistle,