What motivates a writer to write about photographs? Is it a sense that the image allows a new intimacy with the world: with bodies, objects and landscapes? Or the reassurance that all the unruly reality has been laminated - flattened to a single plane one can safely start to describe?
Take Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother”, her famous 1936 photograph of Florence Thompson, a 32-year-old mother of seven and destitute Californian pea-picker. How to describe it? On the one hand, it is a masterful arrangement of shapes: the woman’s nobly wracked face framed by the turned heads of two of her children, their tattered clothes taking up the lower half of the composition like the drapery in a Renaissance Madonna. But it is also wrenchingly real, a record of actual, suffering bodies in a verifiable place and time: thin, dirty, prematurely aged. A photograph, no matter how aesthetically perfect, is evidence of a bruising physicality. To write about it - and this is where the task departs from other sorts of art writing - you have to move beyond form and technique to face the hard reality of its content.
Despite the wealth of technical terms for photographic procedures, photographic writing has typically focused on the subject of photos rather than their style, form and aesthetics. Unlike writing about other art forms, much photo criticism is more about the content of the pictures than how they were produced.
In The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer makes a virtue of this, linking photograph to photograph through the recurrence of familiar motifs; style and chronology are secondary. The book is an eccentrically arranged reflection on photography, written not as the history of an art, but as a history of things photographed.
In a recent article on his interest in photography, Dyer quoted approvingly an aphorism by the mordant Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran: “We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own.” The citation is slightly misleading - Dyer has been writing with style and authority about photography for years. But it provides one compelling answer to the questions above: writing about photographs is an excuse to write about all manner of matter; to write about real life.
How else to explain the obsession with photography among certain writers? It is there in Proust: his narrator’s grandmother starts to resemble a photograph of herself as she nears the end of her life. It is everywhere in Virginia Woolf, though often obliquely: in frozen moments framed by windows, blurred visions among the flowerbeds. Vladimir Nabokov, in Speak, Memory, announces: “I am going to show a few slides,” and imagines his earliest memories as photographs never taken. And then there are authors such as John Berger and W.G. Sebald, whose books contain enigmatic photographs, never quite matching the text (thus avoiding, says Berger, the tautology of mere illustration).
But Dyer is after a more immediate meeting of word and image. As he points out, photographers have sometimes pictured themselves as writers. Robert Frank’s journeys across America in the 1950s have a visual affinity with the prose snapshots of the Beat generation; W. Eugene Smith, taking pictures of industrial Pittsburgh in the same decade, thought his project akin to a contemporary Ulysses. James Joyce seems to have inspired many, among them Walker Evans, who aimed to capture “the city atmosphere, the street smell, the hateful stuff”, as well as sex, advertising and “a lot else” besides. Dyer models his take on photography after Evans’s chaotic inventory - he sets out not to write a strict history of the medium but to compose “the poetry of comprehensive contingency”. In the spirit of the essay form, he is led by intuition: “In the full knowledge that there are other, more sensible ways to organise a book, I take my cue from these highly contingent, provisional, often abandoned attempts.” And in case we suspect him of expertise he tells us that he doesn’t even own a camera.
Dyer has long been a genre tourist, catching connections between fiction, criticism, memoir and cultural history. If you were to ask him what he has been writing about for the past decade and a half, he might well reply “stuff”. There is certainly a lot of stuff in The Ongoing Moment. Hats are one example. “As soon as I realised I was drawn to hats the idea of the hat became an organising principle or node.” And so we see hats down on their luck in mid-1930s pictures by Lange; downcast hats - “the story of the Depression can be told quite simply through photographs of men’s hats” - or hopeful hats; hats at the end of the era of the hat (in a 1950s photo by Garry Winogrand).
Photography, Dyer contends, is less a medium with discernible historical styles and instances of original genius than a set of recurring images over time. The argument relies mostly on Dyer’s uncanny powers of description and sometimes merciless wit. At the end of a section on photographic representations of the blind - in particular blind beggars and musicians in the work of Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, Evans and Winogrand - he considers a photograph by Richard Avedon of the venerable critic Harold Bloom, who happens to have his eyes closed. “The impression is of a man,” writes Dyer, “so swaddled in self-regard that he can read books - and possibly even write about them as well - with his eyes shut.”
Such quips aside, Dyer’s serious answer to the question of why one writes about photography is that it allows him to reflect with great precision on the physical world. He sees the way an American sheriff’s real job is actually “to fill out his gun belt”, that an unmade bed is itself a kind of photograph of an absent person. When he turns to Lange’s “Migrant Mother”, what holds him is a sense of the energy and intellect she has to muster in extremis: “At a certain point of hardship... even instinct requires thought if it is to stand a chance of being acted upon.” Lighting on a motif he finds in numerous photographs, Dyer also notices the anxious gesture of the woman’s hand. Coincidentally, The Oxford Companion to the Photograph informs us that Lange removed from her negative the woman’s left thumb, which originally protruded into the foreground.
The Oxford Companion is a massive, and massively ambitious, volume. Five years in the making, 800 pages long and containing more than 1,600 entries by an impressive international array of academics, curators and independent critics, it is as comprehensive as you could hope from such a book. The Companion is drawn (like Dyer) away from aesthetic or technical questions to conclude that the meaning of a photograph has largely to do with its contingent subject matter.
As a practical A-Z reference to the whole field of photography - from art to advertising, family albums to medical imaging - its strengths are historical and contextual. Its content is mostly text rather than images. Biographical entries are restricted to a few hundred words. The result is a book that covers a range of lesser-known figures; it frames its subject more as a broad cultural practice than as the artistic or technical preserve of individuals. Its geographical scope is especially impressive - there are entries on contemporary African photography, 19th-century Japan and photography along the East/West German border.
The volume is not without humour: the entry for “camera never lies, the” drily advises the reader to “See Cottingley Fairies” (the faked photographs of supposed sprites that two teenage girls took in 1917, fooling many, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). There are other ironies among its lengthier entries. This is a reference book that occasionally runs into trouble trying to define some fundamental terms. Take, for example, the entry on “composition”, a term that the novice assumes must have a precise application for the expert. But good composition, we are told, is “easier to recognise than to define”, as too, it seems, are “style” and “contrast”.
The art of photography cannot help but capture a concrete living moment. This may seem obvious, until you recall that some great photographers have conceived of their work wholly in terms of abstract volumes in space. Henri Cartier-Bresson was one such photographer. As Pierre Assouline’s biography of “HCB” tells us, he lived by the motto of his art teacher, Andre Lhote: “No composition, no salvation.” At the same time, as Assouline notes, Cartier-Bresson described a less austere relationship with his camera, the iconic Leica: “It can be like a passionate kiss, but also like a gunshot or a psychoanalyst’s couch.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson: A Biography spends next to no time describing the photographs - and in fact the book contains none of Cartier-Bresson’s images. Assouline offers many insights into the man, but resorts too often to soft-focus cliche. Of the young photographer, we’re told: “HCB was 23, and all that remained for him was to live through the century and go on to the next one.” An early announcement that “my hero became my friend” is a bad sign in a biographer and before long Assouline is proclaiming of this “national treasure”, “to retrace his life and revisit his work is to tell the story of one man’s vision.”
Geoff Dyer, who might have written better about Cartier-Bresson’s work, apparently has little interest in it: perhaps because his art is so devoted to formal perfection and the ideology of the “decisive moment” that it leaves little room to reflect on the objects or bodies that were photographed.
While Dyer’s canon is largely a classical, realist one - the book rarely advances past the early 1970s - his approach has much in common with the concerns of contemporary art. He mostly ignores the conceptualist photographers who have in recent decades depicted the physical world in rigorous series (as in Lewis Baltz’s photographs of suburban California or Bernd and Hilla Becher’s industrial architecture). Instead, he seems to see the history of photography as a set of resonant repetitions. All those hats, hands, benches and blind men amount in the end to Dyer’s own conceptual project: an inventory of meaningful objects in our recent memory.
A comparable photographer might be Stephen Shore, whose ostensibly ordinary snapshots amount to a rigorous study of the nature of things. Shore’s American Surfaces - a series of more than 300 photographs taken in 1972 - is a record of the photographer’s travels across America, capturing as he went some of the wondrous banality of the country. Shore repeatedly photographs the remains of his meals at restaurants and diners: garish fare atop Formica tables. He pictures flickering televisions in motel rooms, payphones and public toilets, the facades of anonymous buildings at the edge of town. His compositions are “bad”: he introduces into art photography the careless framing of the snapshot, the sort of image any of us might produce when we want simply to record the thing itself.
Dyer has a taste, he says, for images by one photographer that resemble those of another. American Surfaces is full of such odd reminders: a red milk carton on an even redder tabletop that anticipates a lurid red ceiling photographed by William Eggleston a year later; bits of signage that resemble Walker Evans’s late experiments with colour; open fridges like the one famously photographed by Philip-Lorca diCorcia. It is not, says Dyer, just a matter of influence or coincidence. These are pictures about the persistence of things, about the modest rapture of being in their presence and about how we might begin to express that feeling. We could start, suggests Dyer, by simply trying to describe a snapshot.
Brian Dillon is author of “In the Dark Room: A Journey in Memory” (Penguin Ireland).
THE ONGOING MOMENT
by Geoff Dyer
Little, Brown £20, 320 pages
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO THE PHOTOGRAPH
edited by Robin Lenman
Oxford University Press £40, 800 pages
HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: A Biography
by Pierre Assouline
Thames and Hudson £20, 386 pages
AMERICAN SURFACES
by Stephen Shore
Phaidon £35, 224 pages
