Geoff Dyer
THE ONGOING MOMENT
285pp. Little, Brown. £20.
0 316 73025 4
US: Pantheon. $28.50. 0 375 42215 3
The history of photography is a history of scandal. Any daily newspaper makes the point – indeed, one scholarly study of photojournalism is titled Scoop, Scandal and Strife. The early morning doorstep shot of a Cabinet minister leaving the home of a woman (or man) not his wife, the long-lens snap of a just-married movie star playing beach blanket bingo with the wrong partner, or, nowadays, the mobile-phone camera click on a supermodel inhaling through a rolled-up banknote – these are part of even a broadsheet reader’s daily diet. So powerful is the association that the photo itself becomes almost redundant, as in the infamous Polaroid cited in divorce proceedings against the late Duchess of Argyll which showed her, wearing only her usual triple strand of pearls, and the torso of an unknown man. Fifty years later, when the “headless man” was revealed to be Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, the story still made both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, though only a handful of people had ever seen the actual photo.
As for the rather louche figure of the photographer, that, too, has a long history (if hardly a surprising one, pedants might argue, given that the word “louche”, French for squint, comes from the Latin luscus, meaning “blind in one eye”). Eadweard Muybridge, the Englishman whose nineteenth-century motion studies were a precursor to the movies, and whose panoramic views of Yosemite opened the American West to tourism, had to flee the United States after he shot his wife’s lover; this was long before Weegee, Diane Arbus, Helmut Newton or even E. J. Bellocq had ever pressed a shutter.
The real scandal, though, has little to do with photography’s often sensational subject matter or the sometimes sordid lives of its practitioners. The scandal of photography is that it is too easy. “Anyone who has mastered a few simple instructions can make printable negatives with a pocket kodak [sic]”, sniffs the author of “Photographic Art” in my fourteenth-edition (1940) Encyclopaedia Britannica. Edward Weston, who wrote those words, may still have been smarting from photography’s dismissal by D. H. Lawrence. After sitting for Weston in 1924 – the result, which apparently pleased the novelist, can be seen in the National Portrait Gallery – Lawrence fulminated against “the habit we have formed: of visualizing everything . . . . A picture! A Kodak snap, in a universal film of snaps”.
Geoff Dyer, whose Out of Sheer Rage has been called “the best book about not writing a book about D. H. Lawrence ever written”, makes great play of pulling apart the “numerous ironies” in the famous writer’s encounter with the legendary photographer. A connoisseur of the ironic, Dyer has also written three novels, Ways of Telling (a critical study of the critic John Berger), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (a travel book), and But Beautiful (a book that might be described as “Jazz for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Listen to Records”). In Yoga, Dyer remarked that he doesn’t take pictures, doesn’t even own a camera, a datum he repeats in the introduction to The Ongoing Moment, which, ironically enough, is a history of photography.
A shrewd observer and engaging writer, Dyer is not really proposing total ignorance as an ideal qualification (though it is an interesting idea. Next in the series: George W. Bush on the Theory of Relativity? Madonna’s Guide to the Monasteries of Mount Athos?). He is instead taking the essential precaution for anyone about to engage with such a scandalous medium: constructing an alibi. For decades photographers themselves felt the same necessity – indeed the early history of photography is itself the history of these alibis, which usually amounted either to Art (Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Cartier-Bresson) or Document (Mathew Brady, Dorothea Lange, Arnold Rothstein), or, in Weston’s day, Document as Art (André Kertesz, Walker Evans, or Weston’s lover, Tina Modotti). By the time Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, came along in the 1940s with his fedora, Speed Graphic and police scanner, the jig was up. As Dyer points out, in 1955 the Swiss photographer Robert Frank was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel around the United States just taking pictures. His application, supported by Walker Evans, listed “a town at night, a parking lot, a supermarket, a highway, a man who owns three cars and the man who owns none” as potential
subjects. The lines from Frank to Arbus to
Richard Avedon to Robert Mapplethorpe, and from Evans to Frank to Garry Winogrand to Lee Friedlander, are as straight as spurs on the Illinois Central.
But if photography itself has dispensed with alibis (though not scandal), writing about photography still suffers from a similar embarrassment. We live in a world of images, an iconographic jungle where more people recognize Golden Arches than the cross or the crescent. Photographic literacy is so basic a competence that to write about it at all is to risk derision. Even Roland Barthes, who shamelessly analysed advertisements for soap powder, steak and chips, and the semiology of Marlon Brando’s hairstyle, felt the need for some kind of pretext to license his reflections on photography: “I was overcome”, he confesses in Camera Lucida, “by an ‘ontological’ desire: I wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was ‘in itself’. . . . In this investigation of Photography, I borrowed something from phenomenology’s project and something from its language”. Not to mention philosophy’s dignity. This is more than just some structuralist stratagem; unlike many of his epigones, Barthes was a supple stylist perfectly capable of writing lucidly when he wanted to. Against the scandalous ubiquity of the image, Barthes offered the difficulty, the resistance, of his text.
And if that is too strenuous, there is always On Photography, Susan Sontag’s fierce, mostly uncredited, adaptation of Barthes for American readers. Sontag’s debt to Barthes is immense – her verdict on Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man exhibition, which she says “denies the determining weight of history”, is a straight lift from Barthes in Mythologies – but her alibis, like her leap from Steichen to Arbus, are her own. Where Barthes, at least in Camera Lucida, takes refuge in method, and even in reverie, Sontag, no slouch herself when it comes to method, is also implacable, unabashedly political, and at times wilfully perverse (as in publishing a photography book without a single plate or illustration). Her tone, though, is mesmerizing: “Recently, photography has become almost as widely practised an amusement as sex and dancing – which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practised by most people as an art”. And her argument is equally compelling. “The knowledge gained through still photographs”, she insists, “will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist.” Sontag is deeply suspicious of photography. When she writes, “The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions”, it is not meant as an invitation. In the end it is Sontag’s insistent moralism that both excuses her own appropriations and gives her criticism its durability. Re-reading her complaint that “photographs actively promote nostalgia”, I found myself missing her astringent intelligence.
But then Sontag was actually interested in photography, unlike Barthes, who was really writing a book about his late mother, and about grief. At first, Dyer also seems interested in
photography – or, at any rate, in photographers:
“I wanted . . . to look at photographs to see what new knowledge I could derive from them . . . .
I also wanted to learn more about – or at least become more sensitive to – the differences between certain photographers, to get more of an idea of their styles. To see if style could be identified in and by – to see if it inhered in – content. The only way to do this was to see how different people photographed the same thing.”
A very Barthesian project, then: an investigation of “style” through a systematic examination of the commonplace.
Only Dyer, who has some interesting things to say about style, starting with the way photographers seem drawn to take pictures of blind people – illustrated by examples from Paul Strand, Lewis Hine, Winogrand, Evans, Ben Shahn and Kertesz – soon abandons his argument in favour of random musing about trains, Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings”, his own dislike of cigarettes and make-up, Avedon’s photo of Borges (who at least was blind) and Roman Vishniac’s portrait of Albert Einstein. Dyer never gives the title of Larkin’s poem, nor, in a book filled with reproduced photographs, is there space for the Avedon/Borges, the Vishniac/Einstein
or, indeed, dozens of the pictures which are discussed at length. (Though given the appallingly muddy quality of the pictures that are reproduced, this may be a blessing. Readers with broadband connections would do well to keep Google’s image search handy. I was able to locate most of Dyer’s missing pictures in seconds – and with much better image quality. I also inadvertently learned that some of the pictures that are in the book are mis-captioned –and, in the case of Hine’s “Blind Beggar and Poor Children”, which Dyer has as simply “A Blind Beggar in Italian Market District”, the error changes the meaning.)
But where in Sontag perversity arises from necessity, a correlative of her rejection of sentimentality, of sheer political rage – she was writing towards the end of the Vietnam War – and her unshaken belief in the primacy of the written word, Dyer’s frustrating turns and rhetorical sleights of hand seem like no more than a stance, an accessory. When he spends the better part of a page describing a Dorothea Lange photograph of a sheriff’s back, only to tell us, in a last short paragraph, that the picture is actually “not by Dorothea Lange, it’s by Ben Shahn”, he may think he is making a point about the identification of photographer and subject matter. But the effect – particularly Dyer’s thinly metaphorical account of the sheriff’s (entirely imaginary) efforts in the jailhouse toilet – is of a bizarre kind of whimsy. The result is certainly disarming. As Sontag observed: “Nothing makes any difference with whimsy. Whimsy is for low stakes”. But perhaps not in the way Dyer intended.
Some readers may also be charmed by Dyer’s regular-guy irritation at the piety of Stieglitz’s nude portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe: “Not to put too fine a point on it, one becomes impatient for O’Keeffe to get the rest of her kit off”. Still, when Dyer goes on to berate Stieglitz – “spoil-sport!” – for printing a photo of O’Keeffe sans kit, “so that her pubic hair is a mass of ink-dark shadow”, and compares this print unfavourably with another where “we can just make out the impression of her pussy”, others may feel the point could have been made a little more fine. Doubtless Weston had his
pretensions, but is describing him as “one of those men who, as they say, got more ass than a toilet seat” the best way of puncturing them?
The poet Frank O’Hara, who worked for a while as Cecil Beaton’s assistant, described a lot of what he wrote as “I do this, I do that” poems. The same quality of willed insouciance runs through Dyer’s books, except here the hipster has become a slacker. So perhaps The Ongoing Moment is not really “about” photography at all. Maybe I’m just a victim of category error.
After all, no one complains when a jazz player subverts or even abuses the melody. Nor are his improvisations judged by “fidelity” to some score. I have four different versions of “Over the Rainbow” in my iPod, and one of them, by Ben Webster, doesn’t even have words. Perhaps Dyer’s real genre is not criticism but “interpretative performance”, a school whose prose masters include Barthes and Sontag, also Leavis, Nicholson Baker (on Updike) and Updike himself – anyone, in short, who’s ever bred a butterfly from a wheel. From this angle Dyer’s seeming tics – like his punning account of the “flotsam and jissom” on the photographer Nan Goldin’s bed – are revealed as riffs, and his haphazard structure just a “free jazz” approach to his subject. Which in turn becomes merely a pretext for performance, for an overworked standard like “Tea for Two” or “Autumn Leaves” to be transfigured by his prose.
Sometimes it takes off, as in a surprisingly moving description of photographs of Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train: “We look at these pictures as if we are the people in them, looking back on that day when history, instead of passing them by, passed by them”. Geoff Dyer’s response to William Eggleston’s use of colour – “this defamiliarizing of the familiar, the greening of the orange, as it were” – also seems acute (and a nice borrowing, or perhaps I should say “sampling”, of the Russian formalist Viktor Shlovsky’s notion of ostranenie, “making strange”). Mostly, though, it doesn’t work. At least not for a square like me. But what do I know? I don’t even own a camera.
