a brief book review...I've been reading
The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer.
http://www.amazon.com/Ongoing-Moment-Geoff-Dyer/dp/0375422153Dyer is not a photographer himself, but a skilled writer and astute observer of images. He brings great visual literacy to this breezy overview of some of the world's most famous images.
Dyer picks up on recurring motifs and subjects and compares the way these are used in the hands of a variety of photographers. For example he considers the frequent appearance of the silhouetted, overcoated figure of a man in many Kertész photographs, imagining this lonely figure as Kertesz himself, adrift in an uncaring world. When such a figure crops up in the work of another, be it Lange, Winogrand or Stieglitz, he describes it as if these photographers had actually met, in spirit if not in the physical world.
Dyer's reverie spans the 20th century, effortlessly flicking forward and back from decade to decade and country to country, in the process teaching so much about the language of photography. His behind the scenes glimpses into the photographer's lives while they were at work, is revealing. Highly recommended.
But to the section late in the book which caught my attention and boggled my mind..Dyer writes, and draws quotes from Szarkowski's
Winogrand, Figments from the Real World, in turn reviewed here:
http://photo.net/photo/winograndBut Winogrand had always been a heavy shooter, but it is difficult to say how much Winogrand shot in California (Los Angeles,1978 to 1984), but it is certain the totals were prodigious. ''At the time of his death in 1984 more than 2500 rolls of film remained undeveloped, which seemed appalling, but the real situation was much worse. An additional 6500 rolls had been developed but not proofed. Contact sheets had been made from some 3000 additional rolls, but only a few of these bear the marks of even desultory editing''.
'It would seem', Szarkowsky observes with a mixture of wonderment and bafflement, 'that in his Los Angeles years he made more than a third of a million exposures that he never even looked at.'
Szarkowsky concludes 'that he photographed whether or not he had anything to photograph, and that he photographed most when he had no subject, in the hope that the act of photographing would lead him to one.'
The curator Trudy Wilner Stack wrote of Winogrand that 'he believed the world stopped when he stopped photographing it.' By the late 1970s this idea seems to have taken hold of him completely. When Robert Frank first saw Walker Evans pictures he had 'thought of something Malraux wrote: ''To transform destiny into awareness'' '. It was Winogrand's destiny to to turn awareness into a kind of oblivion.
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The Ongoing Moment p.242-3
cheers- db
(x-posted from my blog)
