{"title":"See/Saw: Looking at Photographs, Essays 2010–2020","authors":"Brian Stokoe","doi":"10.1080/03087298.2023.2186064","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"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","PeriodicalId":13024,"journal":{"name":"History of Photography","volume":"46 1","pages":"220 - 223"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"History of Photography","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2023.2186064","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ART","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
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
杰夫·戴尔(Geoff Dyer)对摄影的兴趣并不是从看照片或制作照片开始的,而是从阅读别人对照片的评论开始的。苏珊·桑塔格、罗兰·巴特和约翰·伯杰对戴尔自己对媒介的批判反应产生了关键影响。这本作品集汇集了50多个这样的回应,这些回应来自十年来的简短评论和长篇文章,在这些文章中,戴尔仔细阅读了奥古斯特·桑德、阿尔文·兰登·科伯恩、尤金·阿特吉、丹尼斯·霍珀和李·弗里德兰德的照片,并列举了一些更著名的照片。这样的写作很可能是作为副业开始的,但现在是作者的“主要副业”,戴尔自己也成为了一位有影响力的思想家,尤其是因为他早期的作品《正在进行的时刻》(2005)和《加里·温诺格兰德的街头哲学》(2018)。这本书无疑将进一步提高他作为一个深思熟虑,有趣和独特的摄影观察者的声誉。戴尔声称自己没有方法:“我只是看,然后思考我正在看的东西”,这句话设法同时表现出虚伪和谦虚,因为作者的方法实际上在这本选集的一些细节中得到了揭示。See/Saw真正的介绍——他称之为“后介绍”——只出现在讨论罗兰·巴特的作品的最后阶段,尤其是约翰·伯杰的作品,他的第一本书《讲述的方式》(Ways of Telling, 1986)的主题。戴尔对伯杰的评价很高,后者的“对可见事物的质疑”在他的许多作品中都很明显,因为他试图从历史、文化、技术和艺术的多个角度仔细审视他所看到的东西。巴特和伯杰有着同样的追求,他说,“阐明摄影的本质”,但他们对摄影图像的任何本体论的重要性似乎不如他们的认识论研究重要。有了照片提供的所有信息,有时是无意的——巴特称之为“类比的丰足性”——我们能自信地从照片中获得什么样的知识呢?的确,一台专门用来记录世界表面现象的机器,如何能帮助我们理解其更深层次的潜在过程呢?戴尔引用了伯杰关于桑德的文章《西装与照片》(The Suit and The photo, 1979)作为例证。可以理解的是,大多数关于桑德的研究都集中在他的整体项目上,而这里只对少数几个图像进行了彻底的检查,从它们巨大的整体中抽象出来:一个关于图像的历史社会学。伯杰的方法是把显而易见的事情写下来,就好像它很重要一样,并考虑到它通常很重要的事实。伯杰和戴尔都有一种强烈的好奇心驱使着他们。正如戴尔在最近的一次采访中所说,“一个作家最重要的技能是好奇心……这对我来说一直是一个惊喜的来源
期刊介绍:
History of Photography is an international quarterly devoted to the history, practice and theory of photography. It intends to address all aspects of the medium, treating the processes, circulation, functions, and reception of photography in all its aspects, including documentary, popular and polemical work as well as fine art photography. The goal of the journal is to be inclusive and interdisciplinary in nature, welcoming all scholarly approaches, whether archival, historical, art historical, anthropological, sociological or theoretical. It is intended also to embrace world photography, ranging from Europe and the Americas to the Far East.