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Informationen zum Autor A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Geoff Dyer has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and, in 2015, the Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. The author of four novels and nine works of non-fiction, Dyer is writer in residence at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. Klappentext Great photographs change the way we see the world; The Ongoing Moment changes the way we look at both.Focusing on the ways in which canonical figures like Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston have photographed the same things-barber shops, benches, hands, roads, signs-award-winning writer Geoff Dyer seeks to identify their signature styles. In doing so, he constructs a narrative in which these photographers-many of whom never met-constantly encounter one another. The result is a kaleidoscopic work of extraordinary originality and insight. Leseprobe I am not the first researcher to draw inspiration from a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ described by Borges. According to this arcane work ‘animals are divided into: (a) those that belong to the Emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) et cetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at distance resemble flies.’ While the survey of photography undertaken in these pages can claim neither this degree of rigour nor eccentricity, it takes heart from earlier, well-intended attempts to marshal the infinite variety of photographic possibilities into some kind of haphazard order. Walker Evans said it was ‘a pet subject’ of his – how writers like James Joyce and Henry James were ‘unconscious photographers’. In the case of Walt Whitman there was nothing unconscious about it. ‘In these Leaves [of Grass] every thing is literally photographed,’ he insisted. ‘Nothing is poeticized.’ Keen to emulate the ‘Priests of the Sun’, Whitman created poems that, at times, read like extended captions in a huge, constantly evolving catalogue of photographs: See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce, See, the many-cylinder’d steam-printing-press – see, the electric telegraph stretching across the continent, [. . .] See, the strong and quick locomotive as it departs, panting, blowing the steam-whistle, See ploughmen ploughing farms – see, miners digging mines – see, the numberless factories, See mechanics busy at their benches with tools [. . .] For his part Evans, in 1934, compiled a list of picture categories as a way of clarifying his own ideas about what he was trying to do in his work: People, all classes, surrounded by bunches of the new down-and-out. Automobiles and the automobile landscape. Architecture, American urban taste, commerce, small scale, large scale, clubs, the city atmosphere, the street smell, the hateful stuff, women’s clubs, fake culture, bad education, religion in decay. The movies. Evidence of what people of the city read, eat, see for amusement, do for relaxation and not get it. Sex. Advertising. A lot else, you see what I mean. The cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg has pointed out that this list calls to mind Lewis Hine’s earlier Catalogue of Social and Industrial Photographs, ‘...
