See/Saw: Looking at Photographs, Essays 2010–2020

Abstract

Geoff Dyer’s interest in photography began not so much by looking at photographs or by making them, but by reading what other people had written about them. Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and John Berger emerge as key influences on Dyer’s own critical responses to the medium. This collection brings together more than fifty such responses drawn from a decade of short reviews and longer essays in which Dyer engages in a series of close readings of photographs by August Sander, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Eug ene Atget, Dennis Hopper and Lee Friedlander, to name some of the more famous. Such writing may well have begun as a sideline but is now the author’s ‘main sideline’, and Dyer has himself become a thinker of influence, not least because of his earlier books The Ongoing Moment (2005) and The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (2018). This volume will no doubt further enhance his reputation as a thoughtful, amusing and idiosyncratic observer of photography. Dyer claims to have no method: ‘I just look, and think about what I’m looking at’, a statement that manages to be simultaneously disingenuous and modest as the author’s methodology is in fact revealed in some detail as this anthology proceeds. See/Saw’s real introduction – what he calls an ‘after-intro’ – appears only in the latter stages when discussing the work of Roland Barthes and, particularly, John Berger, the subject of his first book, Ways of Telling (1986). Dyer holds Berger in high regard and the latter’s ‘interrogation of the visible’ is evident in much of his writing as he attempts to closely examine precisely what he is looking at, from the multiple perspectives of history, culture, technology and art. Barthes and Berger shared the same quest, he says, ‘to articulate the essence of photography’, but their importance for any ontology of the photographic image seems less important than their epistemological enquiries. With all the information, sometimes unintended, provided by photographs – what Barthes termed their ‘analogical plenitude’ – just what kind of knowledge might we confidently derive from them? Indeed, how can a machine designed specifically to record the surface appearance of the world contribute to our understanding of its deeper, underlying processes? Dyer cites Berger’s essay on Sander, ‘The Suit and the Photograph’ (1979), as exemplary. While most studies of Sander have understandably focused on his overall project, here was a thoroughgoing examination of only a few images, abstracted from their immense entirety: a historically informed sociology of the image. Berger’s method was to write about the obvious as if it was important, reckoning on the fact that it usually is, and both Berger and Dyer share a sense of being driven by an intense curiosity. As Dyer remarked in a recent interview, ‘The most important skill a writer can have is curiosity [... ] It’s always been a source of surprise to me that