The Ongoing Moment

[And the thing I see is outside myself - always. I'm not trying to describe an inner state of being- Paul Strand] 'The ongoing moment', that careful retreat into a chemically documented space, is the liberating subject of Geoff Dyer's heartfelt exploration of the history of photography. It patiently traces not the periods of creative movements, elegant theories or overbearing characters, but...more

[And the thing I see is outside myself - always. I'm not trying to describe an inner state of being- Paul Strand] 'The ongoing moment', that careful retreat into a chemically documented space, is the liberating subject of Geoff Dyer's heartfelt exploration of the history of photography. It patiently traces not the periods of creative movements, elegant theories or overbearing characters, but instead the delicate subject choice those passionate outsiders are intimately fascinated by. The targets range far and wide, from that bizarre cliche of the accordion player (oddly common in American work) to gaping doorways, hunched figures and desolate gas stations. The book is a gentle exploration: Dyer is bleakly desperate to avoid the usual photographic idioms of theorists like Sontag and Bachelard, though he occasional strays jarringly into that polemic realm. It is a refreshingly democratic and human journey, of banal, dirty landscapes and crumbling planar facades, of flat-nosed men wearing battered hats and chance shots of the grizzly artists themselves. Dyer muses of his purpose, that he simply is engrossed in 'the kind of photographs I might have taken if I were one [photographer]'. Legions of whimsical prints are joyfully flawed and misconstrued. Opportune errors revel in the angled shadow of the taker, with tumbling stray dogs lurching into shot or foregrounds that are punctured with spin-drift litter and deconstructed benches. In many aspects this joyful optical history is the true measure of our democratising relationship with consumer technology: the cheap freely available disposable format enables the clumsiest of individuals to engage and measure the environment they inhabit. Dyer is a refreshing, almost naive optimist: initially a stranger to art reviews, instead he treats the turbulent subject like his anecdotal travelogues, compounding endless vivid frames into a mesmerising and charming blur of rambling opinion. Like the mighty sketches of Piranessi's corrugated zones, Dyer's subjects reside within the spaces between abortive success. We are now travellers in Rem Koolhaus' super-generic-city, absorbing the multihued strobe flashes of experience and documenting this detritus with aplomb: Dyer's resultant book is a charming celebration of those microscopic victories of empathy notified by cascading photons, that thus rightly deserves much merit...   hide