The notoriously versatile Geoff Dyer has probably written more often about photography than any other subject. It threads through almost everything he writes, and three of his books are devoted to it — The Ongoing Moment (2005), The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (2018), and now See/Saw: Looking at Photographs (2021). But unlike photography’s most famous theorists (such as Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, and John Berger) or its great reflective-practitioners (such as Diane Arbus, Luigi Ghirri, and John Szarkowski), Dyer propounds no theories about the nature or distinctiveness of the medium, ventures no claims about the political significance of pictures, and offers no programme for the future of the art. He is always an observer, never a participant. He comes across, above all, as just a guy who likes looking at pictures.
“I became interested in photography not by taking or looking at photographs,” he writes, “but by reading about them.” Specifically, by reading Sontag, Barthes, and Berger. This trio “approached photography not with the authority of curators or historians of the medium but as essayists, writers.” This is more true of Dyer himself than of these critics, who were philosophers as well as writers. Their centrality in the critical tradition is founded on the concepts they devised and the arguments they constructed, which continue to be useful to think with or to think against. You don’t get very far thinking critically with or against Geoff Dyer.
Approaching photography “as a writer” seems to mean something other than critical thinking to him, something about storytelling. “[P]hotography, for me,” he writes, “might be as much an incentive — a series of incentive schemes — for descriptive narrative as it is an area of critical expertise.” But he is keenly aware that the photograph’s invitation to the viewer to make up stories about it is balanced by its stillness. In a photograph “it’s impossible to tell whether a man is taking his hat off or putting it on.” Photographs do not suggest stories to us, we suggest stories to photographs — and they keep a straight face, refusing to comment. At the heart of Dyer’s fascination with photographs exists this friction between his desire to make up stories about them and their unresponsive stillness.
This has never been clearer than in his latest collection. See/Saw collects a decade’s worth of piecemeal photography writing published originally in many different venues. The essays are arranged chronologically, by order of their subject, so they form a patchy history from the 19th-century flâneur-with-a-camera Eugène Atget to the young documentary photographer Chloe Dewe Matthews.
Dyer’s typical procedure when discussing an individual photograph is, first, to isolate some narratively suggestive element of the picture; second, to build some kind of story around that element; and third, to undercut or question his own storytelling in a way that allows him to comment on the distinctive qualities of the photographer. Take, for example, the photograph he discusses in the essay, “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg” — it concerns a photo of black protesters in apartheid South Africa in 1956 carrying signs reading “We Stand By Our Leaders.”
They are protesting the imprisonment of leaders of the Congress Alliance (the political coalition of Nelson Mandela, among others) and — this is the element Dyer zeroes in on — in their midst awkwardly stands a shorter, pudgy white boy in shorts. Who is he? Dyer digs into the biography of the artist to work out that the boy is probably Eli Weinberg’s son, Mark, tagging along as his dad took pictures of the protest. From this tidbit, contemplating the photograph, Dyer spins out a whole story about how Mark is the one person in the picture “likely still to be around to answer the questions raised by his presence, sixty years on, in our remote-ish future,” and he compares the boy to people caught in other famous pictures — like Hazel Bryan, whose snarling face was frozen for eternity by Will Counts in Little Rock, Arkansas, as she watched the tiny black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, enter school at the start of desegregation. Dyer tells us how, in the aftermath of that photo, the adult Hazel Bryan sought out Elizabeth Eckford to apologize and asked the photographer to take their picture again as friends. Having raised the expectation that Mark, the boy in Eli Weinberg’s picture, will likewise have some aftermath to shed narrative light on the picture in which he appears, Dyer then concludes his piece by deflating his entire storytelling balloon:
“I kept wondering how [Mark] came to regard this picture later in life […] [But] this was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he had died in 1965 at the age of twenty-four — so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.”
Just like this, across periods and styles, Dyer’s most characteristic observations always seem to concern how a given photographer frustrates the viewer’s storytelling impulse. William Eggleston’s photographs resist storytelling by seeming to show discontinuous fragments of inaccessible stories: “There are guns around and we all know, courtesy of Chekhov, what happens when we see a gun on the wall in the first act. Except there are no second acts here.” Luigi Ghirri’s photographs resist storytelling by always framing another picture within them: “W]ithin a given picture, there is no story. The possibility of narrative only emerges when the photographs are viewed in sequence.” Thomas Struth’s photographs resist storytelling with their receding vistas: “[E]ven when we are permitted to gaze, unimpeded, toward some kind of vanishing point, the scenes evoke not a vista of years but, as it were, a present of unusually extended duration. As a consequence there is no narrative potential in these pictures.” Dayanita Singh’s photographs resist storytelling by putting the narrative elements offstage: “The red [light in a picture] is presumably from a car’s tail- or brake-lights, but that’s the full extent of the story. It does not make us curious about what the car is doing there, though it does suggest that the way to understand this picture is by reversing into it, as it were, by the opposite of storytelling; that our curiosity will not be satisfied in narrative terms.”
[Dayanita Singh, Dream Villa (44) (red tree), ca. 2006-2008]
This way of distilling an artist’s personal style from their manner of approaching a common goal has long served as Dyer’s basic method (despite his claim that “I have no method”). He’s very good at it. In a previous book, The Ongoing Moment, he taught his readers to recognize the work of canonical artists like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Edward Weston by comparing how differently they took pictures of the same objects — hands and hats, benches and barbershops.
To understand what’s unique about Dyer’s photography writing, it’s useful to compare him to John Berger, the closest analog to his own model of the three writers who initiated him into the subject. Dyer’s first book was a study of Berger; he has edited and introduced books by him; the last essay in See/Saw is about him, and the last picture in the book shows Dyer sitting with an elderly Berger shortly before his death. On the surface of their work, the two writers appear similar. Like Dyer, Berger viewed himself as a storyteller. Like Dyer, Berger mixed together genres — fiction and nonfiction, criticism and memoir. But the -pleasing and self-deprecating eccentricity in Dyer’s work was, in Berger’s work, a mission-driven rejection of ordinary modes of discourse that frequently made him enemies. He claimed that the most important question to ask a work of art is: “Does this work help men to know and claim their social rights?” — and when he thought the answer was, “no,” he didn’t mind saying so. By contrast, Dyer avoids political judgments. Ten years ago, in an interview with The Rumpus, he addressed this:
“It’s surprised me that I’ve ended up being such an apolitical writer when so many of the writers I love ― Berger, Camus, Orwell, Raymond Williams, Perry Anderson ― are or were deeply political engaged, or are/were actual political commentators. By comparison I’m navel-gazing and solipsistic to the point of idiocy. It’s one of the interesting things about writing: one is not entirely in control of the kind of stuff one ends up writing.”
Reading See/Saw, I realized that Dyer not only avoids the political judgments one might expect from someone modeling himself after John Berger, but he almost avoids judgment altogether. For instance, in the following characteristic sentence about the photographer Vivian Maier’s posthumous fame, we can see him negotiate the leap from observation to reflection by noting and discarding a possible moral-political judgment and turning instead to something — for lack of a better word — more existential: “While [Maier’s invisibility during her life] seems unfortunate, perhaps even cruel — a symptom or side effect of the fact that she never married or had children, and apparently no close friends — it also says something about the unknowable potential of all human beings.” This is characteristic because he would always rather move in this direction: toward the generalized rumination on human potential and failure, on time, on death, on memory, and above all on unknowability, rather than by offering judgments about the value of the photograph before him. Wherever the writing of his mentors would turn to specific aesthetic, moral, or political theses, Dyer lyricizes. Early in See/Saw, he makes an observation about the portrait photographs of August Sander that, it seems to me, perfectly encapsulates the movement repeated by virtually all his own texts: “the identifiable evidence of the social gives way to the infinite recesses of the existential, the blank mysteries of the ontological.”
It is remarkable that in the whole of See/Saw, the only sharply negative aesthetic judgment I could find was not about a photograph at all, but about the prose style of Michael Fried. In a hilarious and convincing exhibition of aesthetic bloodspot, Dyer castigates Fried at essay-length for that curse of academic prose, too much sign-posting. The inclusion of this essay in a collection otherwise about looking at photographs is the telling detail, the odd-piece out, that reveals how fundamentally judgment-adverse Geoff Dyer’s photography writing really is. He’s not scared of sharp judgments in general, he just refuses to venture them on the subject of photographs.
This same curious deflection at the point of judgment characterizes his style in other ways, too. For instance, quotation. He quotes mainly single sentences and sets them in his paragraphs like jewels to be admired, rather than as grit around which to form the pearl of a thought. Throughout the book I noticed pertinent one-liners from Walter Benjamin and Marguerite Yourcenar, Mary McCarthy and Robert Musil, Emil Cioran and Maggie Nelson, Don DeLillo and Jane Jacobs, Alberto Moravia and Rebecca West — a testament to wide reading and a good eye for the striking sentence. But, once again, the contrast with John Berger is revealing: one of the key texts in which Berger worked out his thoughts about photography was “The Uses of Photography” (published in the book, About Looking). The essay is a response to Susan Sontag’s On Photography. It consists of paragraph-long quotations from her book, followed by Berger’s commentary and reflections. An ungainly form — perhaps even ugly — it nevertheless testifies to Berger’s concern with getting straight to the heart of things and grappling with the ideas of his interlocutors. Usually he took the shortest route to thinking and expressing what interested him, a directness that often led him to transgress conventions of form and genre — in this case, writing an essay composed half of the words of its subject. It is difficult to imagine Dyer perpetrating a text like “The Uses of Photography,” or indeed engaging so closely with the ideas of any other writer — for all his vaunted uncategorizability, we may predict with confidence that everything he writes will feature the same elegant but superficial amalgamation of anecdote and humor, historical context and autobiographical self-deprecation, poetic description and ornamental quotation.
In the end, the large and growing body of Dyer’s photography writing is not really photography criticism, though its appearance and often-stated influences might lead you to think otherwise. It is, instead, photography appreciation, like the music appreciation classes in which grade school students learn to tell an oboe from a flute, Bach from Tchaikovsky. Dyer writes essays about style and his essays are constrained by style. While See/Saw is good writing about serious looking, you’ll have to look elsewhere for more expansive thinking about photography.
[Published by Graywolf Press on May 4, 2021, 336 pages, $24.00 paperback]