A Delightful Read

T he Ongoing Moment
by Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer writes about the history of photography when making photographs required cameras containing film to record images. While there is no lack of such histories of photography's first 150 years, Dyer presents the information in a novel and entertaining style.  

Like any good historian, Dyer employs scholarly methodology to present the relevant details of photographers' lives and personalities which contributed to the unique qualities of their work.  Additionally, and more importantly, he illuminates the photographic productions of each photographer by identifying and comparing treatments of subjects and themes which were common to all.  

Sometimes influence was obvious as in these shots by Strand and Kertesz.

Strand

Kertesz

More often, photographs simply reflected elements which were common to the reality of reigning customs such as the wearing of hats.  So, with photographers who focused broadly on society, hats were an inevitable element of the their compositions as, during most of the period here discussed, adults very rarely exposed their heads in public places.  

Take a look, for example at the vast catalog of portraits of people riding the New York subway by Walker Evans; you will be hard pressed to find more than one or two -- man or woman -- without a hat.

Evans

Hats, fences, benches, doorways, roadways, stairways, building fronts -- there were a lot of common elements which showed up, but of course each of the famous photographers of the era put their own spin on the subject. Dyer presents all of this with insightful observation and humor.

Kertesz and Strand excelled at making images of groups of pedestrians seen from a high vantage point.  

Dorothea Lange used hats as a central element in portraying social status as in her White Angel Breadline.

Lange

As Dyer points out there was a somewhat surprising interest shown by top-tier photographers in the public life of blind people, who were often pictured trying to scrape out a living on city streets.  Those images came from photographers as diverse as Lewis Hine, Gary Winogrand and Diane Arbus, who chronicled  the life of the blind 60s street musician and poet, Moondog.

Arbus

 The last photographs in Dyer's book are dated 2001.  That is a significant inflection point because it signaled the definitive abandonment of the old print-based media for the emerging internet platforms.

In the older era, outlets for public access to photographic artistry was largely confined to a few magazines, newspapers and books, along with occasional gallery and museum exhibitions.  Those limited outlets offered opportunities for a relatively small number of photographic artists whose careers could be subject to examination by critics and historians.

The exponential expansion of media space in the internet universe made a coherent conceptualization of the photographic arts challenging, if not impossible.  There are authors today attempting to  meaningfully examine contemporary photography, but the possibility that any of them will achieve the kind of definitive synthesis available to Newhall or Szarkowski is remote given the immense scope of the task.