The Ongoing Moment

Barbershops, benches, hands, roads and signs recur throughout the book, photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston, photographers of the American tradition across the last century. Rather than treating each photographer separately, Dyer builds a narrative in which these photographers, many of whom never met, keep encountering one another across decades. Images of the same kind of subject are grouped together, so the reader can see how different photographers handled identical things. The text moves back and forth in time and uses the photographs as a starting point for personal and art-historical reflection. It is a discursive essay collection, not a monograph of one photographer or an exhibition catalogue, and it shifts between serious and humorous tones. The publisher's blurb describes its themes as often melancholy, raised with lightness and dry humour.