GENERAL

K ATIE H ICKMAN PICTUREPERFECT

T HE O NGOING M OMENT

★By Geoff Dyer (Little Brown 285pp £20)

T HE O XFORD C OMPANIONTOTHE P HOTOGRAPH

★

Edited by Robin Lenman (Oxford University Press 769pp £40)

I N The Ongoing Moment Geoff Dyer recounts an anecdote about the Hungarian-born American photographer André Kertész. In Paris, in the 1930s, Kertész pioneered the new style of documentary photography that influenced an entire generation of French and émigré photographers, but in later life when he moved to America his career nose-dived, and the man who had formerly been one of the masters of photographic modernism was almost forgotten. ‘One day an old man with two shopping bags full of photos dropped them off at the Museum of Modern Art. The curator of photography, John Szarkowski, stuck his head out of his office and asked who it was. “My secretary looked down at the sign-in book and said, ‘André Kertész.’ Everybody thought he’d been dead for thirty years.”’ What is strange about this story is not that it should have happened, but that it should have happened in America, where – in marked contrast to Britain – photography had long been recognised as an art form, and photographers acknowledged as artists. Dyer’s book is hard to define. He himself describes it as a ‘survey of photography’, but although it offers the reader something about the history of photography it is more of a sustained mood piece, a personal response to the medium, a ‘way of comprehending’ as he puts it, rather than anything more academic. The photographers covered here are almost all American and twentieth-century; most of them, loosely speaking, documentary photographers in the tradition of Kertész. In addition to Kertész himself Dyer examines the work of Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston and Alfred Stieglitz (a

The steps of Wells Cathedral; Frederick Evans, 1903

seminal figure in American art and culture, who in addition to being himself a master photographer was also the founder, in 1905, of one of the first photographic galleries in New York, Gallery 291, which rapidly became a centre for the avant-garde). Noting that they have often photographed the same things (benches, hats, hands, roads, accordionists), Dyer uses these themes to knit together his narrative: an idiosyncratic, discursive (if occasionally rambling) meditation on the nature of photography and its possibilities. Although he begins by stating his suspicions that his book ‘will be a source of irritation to many people, especially those who know more about photography than I do’, he is in fact both a knowledgeable and an engaging companion on the road. I was particularly fascinated by his musings on the effects of the advent of digital photography, as opposed to the older, silver-based techniques (inconceivable, he points out, that certain photographs by, say, Walker Evans, a photographer much concerned with trying to capture memory and the passage of time, could have been taken with a digital camera: for ‘to look at the picture is to share the viewpoint of the photographer who saw it come gradually into view in the developing tray’). Much earlier and even more controversial was the discovery of colour process. Although a number of colour processes had come and gone as early as the 1890s, why was it that black-and-white for so long retained its pre-eminence in the serious practice of photography as art? Walker Evans famously declared that ‘Colour tends to corrupt photography and absolute colour corrupts absolutely’, but then – duly corrupted – went on to acquire a Polaroid and spent the rest of his life exploring its vulgarities ‘with unfettered relish’. (‘Paradox’, he later stated, ‘is a habit of mine.’) Best of all, though, reading Dyer’s book made me want to revisit the photographs themselves, and this autumn has been a particularly good time to do so. Not only are there two major photographic exhibitions showing in London at the time of writing – Diane Arbus’s magnificent retrospective at the V&A, and Jeff Wall at Tate Modern – but October also saw the longawaited publication of the stupendous Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Four years in the making, and the first Oxford Companion to deal with the subject of photography, this is one of the most lavish and exquisitely printed volumes I think I have ever seen, and practically a work of art in itself.

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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