Zona A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room

Geoff Dyer has been writing about looking at photographs throughout his celebrated career, and See/Saw gathers the best of his lively criticism from the last decade. Taking in photographers from the nineteenth century to the present day-including Eugene Atget, Vivian Maier, Roy DeCarava, and Alex Webb-Dyer offers a series of moving, prescient, surprising, and intimate readings of images. This tour de force of visual scrutiny and stylistic flair is at once erudite and inviting, sparkling with wit. Dyer shows how a photograph can simultaneously record and invent the world, and in doing so he demonstrates why he is regarded as one of the most engaging critics of our day. Book jacket.

Great photographs change the way we see the world. The Ongoing Moment changes the way we look at both.

With characteristic perversity and trademark originality, The Ongoing Moment is Dyer’s unique and idiosyncratic history of photography. Seeking to identify their signature styles Dyer looks at the ways canonical figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston have photographed the same scenes and objects (benches, hats, hands, roads).

In doing so Dyer constructs a narrative in which those photographers, many of whom never met in their lives, constantly come into contact with each other. It is the most ambitious example to date of a form of writing that Dyer has made his own: the non-fiction work of art.