I have to say I am very disappointed with this book which discusses photographers and their work with only mean illustrations to look at. A coffee table book without actually being a coffee table book. Not worth the money. ( )

I was so impressed by this book. You see, until I took the plunge with See/Saw, I had just been chipping around the edges of Geoff Dyer’s impressive work in periodicals for years. Yet, I had been listening to Vicky and others praise his books so highly for all that time. Vicky, my late wife, would have followed him into just about any topic or media.

This book is printed on heavy semi-glossy paper, is a little oversized (7 x 9 inches plus), and consists of mostly three-to-six-page essays about a photographer’s work, and a single photograph is printed nearby. The book was over 300 pages altogether, and I love the way photography books of any size have that weight, that heft and that presence. There are well over fifty essays from the years 2010 to 2020. These works are about a broad array of photographers, and a few writers writing about photography that Dyer has picked for this collection. Not that I would say I have a well-rounded feel of the world’s gallery of photographers, but it was fascinating to be introduced to artist after artist that were new to me. It was like a private and most informative showing of some of Geoff Dyer’s chosen artists.

The thing about Dyer’s writing is that it’s so beautifully descriptive that even when he’s writing about photographs that aren’t pictured, even ones that I’ve never seen, I finish his descriptions having a feel for what they must look like. Though I have easily heard that “a picture is worth a thousand words” more than a thousand times in my life, it amazes me how quickly a few hundred of Dyer’s words brought forth an image in my mind. Drawing on his vast knowledge and experience, and using his impressive intellect, it feels like he has the world at his fingertips for relating so much to the reader. John Berger, a man who would know, once said the following of Dyer. “The author has encyclopedic knowledge of the history of photography …. Dyer has written a book that cunningly resists the downsizing of the human that is endemic to information-culture.”

He constantly illustrated so many connections with other photographers and art movements, and showed how a photographer’s work fit into the overall history of the form. Even though I lived through it, I wasn’t as aware as I should have been, that color photography didn’t really dominate photography until some key gallery and museum showings in the 1970s. Dyer introduces so many thoughts and theories about photography that I felt like I had started to explore a world that was ever-expanding, but then he would mention people speaking about the importance of all that wasn’t in a photograph. Or related how photographer Garry Winogrand said that a photograph had no narrative ability, because a viewer can’t even tell if a man is taking his hat off or putting it on.

Let me briefly mention some of the highlights of the book.

Some world known photographers like Eugène Atget are recognizable for his distinctive work—those hazy photos of an older Paris—but any solid biographical knowledge on him barely runs two paragraphs. Dyer points out the none too subtle connection between August Sanders (1876-1964) and Diane Arbus (1923-1971) by mentioning Sanders works ‘Idiots, the Sick, the Insane,’ which ran into trouble with Nazi censors. While discussing Helen Levitt’s brilliant street scene of children playing in 1940 New York, he writes about current overzealous parenting, by writing the following. “Although it seems to these kids that they have all the time in the world—remember how, as a child. afternoons were prairie-vast? —the watching adults (us included) know how fleeting that eternity will turn out to be.” He quotes Larry Sultan about staging photographs. “The more you try to control the world, the less magic you get.” Then you can swing to his essay on Dennis Hooper’s freewheeling film career, as a photographer, director, and actor.

Over the years I’ve become familiar with the yearly photos of the Brown Sisters by Nicholas Nixon. The simplicity is deceptive but captivating, as the portraits of the four sisters are displaying so much with their faces and postures. It started in 1975. “A single picture of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters—Nicholas Nixon has created a profound and ongoing exploration of what it is to be human—which is, uniquely among animals, to live in time.” Each chosen photo of the foursome seems to stand as a permanent record of the entire year. I think this concept hits me even harder because my only brother and sister have been more than three thousand miles away from me for most of my life, there are no more than a few photos of us together in all that time. Dyer is brilliant when he relates to Annie Dillard in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, where she “likens being born to opening up a summer cottage, The similarity comes from the fact that at the moment you are born or enter the cottage ‘you have all the time you are ever going to have.’ After a certain age, typically from fifty onwards or from when your parents die, one of your main experiences is of time running out, or running away with you.” In the essay’s end, Dyer wonders what will change when one of the sisters dies, or will they all simply disappear, because Dyer has died. He also mentions a Pico Iyer essay, one where Iyer shares, “D.H. Lawrence’s belief that in hot sunny places life lurks in the shadows.”

Later, in a discussion on Thomas Ruff, he relates about seeing porn in a hotel room in Belgrade, for the first time at age 34. “I’d never seen anything like it. Despite the aesthetic shortcomings, it was a glimpse of crudely illuminated bliss.” [I find that phrase “crudely illuminated bliss” priceless.] He then goes on with the following. “When I was a teenager masturbation was always and only a substitute for sex with someone. Porn aims to make us forget this, to convince us that masturbation is sex.” While writing about Prabuddha Dasgupta he launches into the following. “Longing is not always future-orientated. It can as easily and frequently be retrospective. You can long for what you have already experienced. Sexual fantasies, for example, are memories (sometimes slightly improved on) as often as they are inventions.” He quotes Walker Evans. “I do like to suggest people sometimes by their absence. I like to make you feel that an interior is almost inhabited by somebody.” While writing about Thomas Peter, he lets loose the following. “For feminists in the 1970s the bra was the symbol of vestimentary oppression, but it might more sensibly have been high heels, since you can play sport and wage war in a bra but in heels you can only look seductive and totter from taxi to restaurant or photo shoot.”

In SEE/SAW, Dyer passed on and shared so much information and enthusiasm for photography that he changed my outlook. As Zadie Smith said of him, “[Dyer’s humor is] what separates him from Berger and Lawrence and Sontag” it’s what makes these essays not just an education, but a joy.” It’s always such a pleasure to find such a rich world within a book. ( )

I've reviewed this book, including quotes and photographies, here: https://niklas.reviews/2021/05/25/geoff-dyer-see-saw/ ( )