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A review by jwsg
The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer
2.0
I once attended an event where Dyer read excerpts from his latest book, Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush. Dyer was entertaining in a self-depracating way and his writing, based on the excerpts he read, lyrical. I'd never read Dyer before but at that moment, I wanted to. A successful reading, in other words.
Reading The Ongoing Moment, in many ways, reminded me of being in my Visual Arts (Photography) class in college. There were times when I felt like I was learning to look at the world in a whole different way, to appreciate patterns, forms, details that I had previously not noticed. There were other times when I felt that perhaps we were trying to read too much into what was a fairly straightforward, regular image. Take, for instance, this excerpt:
"Take [Dorothea] Lange's photo of a sheriff [rocking on a chair]....Thus it comes about that the sheriff is preoccupied less by fine points of the law than by a fine point of balance. It's a seat of teh pants job from which all suspense has been removed - except that expressed by the chair's precariousness. There are crimes and felonies to be investigated but, from the sheriff's point of view, the only law that counts is gravity."
Or Dyer's meditations on Andre Kertesz's images of solitary walkers:
" In John Boorman's film 'The Emerald Forest', one of the Amazonian Indians takes a psychotropic drug that releases his bird or animal spirti. While he lies zonked out in his hut his puma- or condor-self soars and speeds off into the jungle and sky of the spirit world. I often find myself thinking of Kertesz in terms similar to - if far less spectacular than - this. From behind his camera the photographer watches his surrogate walk out into the material world....There is nothing sinister about this figure...No, this mean is just a stroller, like a clerk without the day job, someone whose main aim is to kill time, of which there is always too much on his hands. He is one of those men who like to look at construction sites, the gaping holes in the earth which will form the foundations of a skyscraper or a multi-storey car park. This is the nearest he gets to the great outdoors, the sublime. His coat is sufficiently cosy for the city to become an interior, a living room through which he shuffles."
Are we trying to imbue deeper meaning into some of these images when, in fact, it's just an image, not an allegory,not a symbol for something more complex?
The best bit for me was when Dyer steered clear of (what I felt was) overreading and overanalysing images and wrote about the photographers who created the images, their lives and influences, their philosophy on photography - photographers like Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz. Dyer gives an especially detailed treatment of Stieglitz's life and trajectory as a photographer - his relationship with artist Georgia O'Keefe, his friendship with Paul Strand, his use of Strand's wife Rebecca, as a muse.
Unfortunately, these bits were relatively few and far between. Dyer does have some lovely turns of phrase but the subject, and how he approached it, didn't appeal to me.
Reading The Ongoing Moment, in many ways, reminded me of being in my Visual Arts (Photography) class in college. There were times when I felt like I was learning to look at the world in a whole different way, to appreciate patterns, forms, details that I had previously not noticed. There were other times when I felt that perhaps we were trying to read too much into what was a fairly straightforward, regular image. Take, for instance, this excerpt:
"Take [Dorothea] Lange's photo of a sheriff [rocking on a chair]....Thus it comes about that the sheriff is preoccupied less by fine points of the law than by a fine point of balance. It's a seat of teh pants job from which all suspense has been removed - except that expressed by the chair's precariousness. There are crimes and felonies to be investigated but, from the sheriff's point of view, the only law that counts is gravity."
Or Dyer's meditations on Andre Kertesz's images of solitary walkers:
" In John Boorman's film 'The Emerald Forest', one of the Amazonian Indians takes a psychotropic drug that releases his bird or animal spirti. While he lies zonked out in his hut his puma- or condor-self soars and speeds off into the jungle and sky of the spirit world. I often find myself thinking of Kertesz in terms similar to - if far less spectacular than - this. From behind his camera the photographer watches his surrogate walk out into the material world....There is nothing sinister about this figure...No, this mean is just a stroller, like a clerk without the day job, someone whose main aim is to kill time, of which there is always too much on his hands. He is one of those men who like to look at construction sites, the gaping holes in the earth which will form the foundations of a skyscraper or a multi-storey car park. This is the nearest he gets to the great outdoors, the sublime. His coat is sufficiently cosy for the city to become an interior, a living room through which he shuffles."
Are we trying to imbue deeper meaning into some of these images when, in fact, it's just an image, not an allegory,not a symbol for something more complex?
The best bit for me was when Dyer steered clear of (what I felt was) overreading and overanalysing images and wrote about the photographers who created the images, their lives and influences, their philosophy on photography - photographers like Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz. Dyer gives an especially detailed treatment of Stieglitz's life and trajectory as a photographer - his relationship with artist Georgia O'Keefe, his friendship with Paul Strand, his use of Strand's wife Rebecca, as a muse.
Unfortunately, these bits were relatively few and far between. Dyer does have some lovely turns of phrase but the subject, and how he approached it, didn't appeal to me.