THE ONGOING MOMENT on Geoff Dyer.

THE ONGOING MOMENT

on Geoff Dyer. Pantheon Books/285 pp/$2850 (hb)

The author of numerous main division s on several disparate subjects, Geoff Dyer claims no authority in succession the subject of photography or its history; in fact, he claims not to uniform own a camera. He grants that he is not trying to improve relating to the work of historians, critics, and well-spoken photographers before him and admits, "with the bar fix so high I was emancipated to walk right under it." The flow of his stroll beneath that bar is his just discovered book The Ongoing Moment, a patchwork of perspectives well worth considering.

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Rather than conceiving of photography as separate terminations captured by individuals, Dyer diverts from tradition and views a pattern where themes weave and repeat to influence photographers across eras. Using a mode of expression that mimics his thesis, Dyer writes the same ongoing chapter, sometimes doubling back or jumping forward decades to couple distant moments. The result is the fabric of time as a skillfully and continually stitched crazy quilt, each section influencing the placement of the nearest For example, Dyer relates Paul Strand's iconic 1916 photo of a blind woman to single Lewis Hine made a hardly any years before. He jumps forward to images of the blind by the agency of Gary Winogrand and Philip Lorca-DiCorcia and then spins us back to a Walker Evans image of a blind man with an accordion onward the subway. The survey then actuates to ruminations on images of accordion players--blind and sighted--by Bruce Davidson, Andre Kertesz and others.

Dyer's dizzying wanderings by the agency of time offer an unusual view of photographic history that is seemingly oppos to chronological order. This main division offers unique insights for the able looking for a creative perspective, further the novice reader may become disoriented.

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