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The Ongoing Moment

Geoff Dyer

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 that 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.

Great photographs change the way we see the world; The Ongoing Moment changes the way we look at both. 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.

First published:
2006
Published by:
Canongate Books
Length:
Hardcover 400 pages

About the author

Geoff Dyer is the author of three novels, a critical study of John Berger, and four genre-defying 'non-fiction' books. But Beautiful won the Somerset Maugham prize and Out of Sheer Rage was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the States.