The Ongoing Moment
A Book About Photographs
Geoff Dyer
“The point is that there is no meantime. There was just that moment and now there is this moment with nothing in between, just the accordion collapsing and expanding, the tune unchanging”
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‘One of the most graceful ruminations on photography ever … Dyer’s tour de force is as inspirational as it is accessible.’ Sunday Telegraph
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.
“Dyer is a master of the close-up, a hawk-eyed spotter of small coincidences”
independent On Sunday
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“Dyer’s subtle, understated, unforgettable masterpiece deserves to join Susan Sontag’s On Photography on our bookshelves”
scotland On Sunday
“Enjoy a witty, incisive lesson in how to rescue cultural criticism from shuttered academia”
independent
Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and three previous novels, as well as nine non-fiction books. Dyer has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography’s 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ E.M. Forster Award. In 2009 he was named GQ’s Writer of the Year. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 and was a finalist in 1998. In 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.