This book may be more meaningful for the reader with some knowlege in the field. It's coversational tone and references to photographers
and their works already familiar to the reader promotes a feeling of intimacy.
I found the author's views on photography interesting. His views on the
works of well-known photographers,their similar subjects and their personal approaches to these like subjects proved illuminating as well.

Dyer, a non-photographer has taken on the task of trying to catalog trends in photography. Its weaknesses are that it is limited as the author writes (he did have to get permission to use images) and is mainly American men and twentieth century. While it includes Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange and Nan Goldin extensively and two brief mentions of Imogen Cunningham. The absence of Margaret Bourke-White, Lisette Model, Sally Mann, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Tina Barney when they would have fit into what was studied created the typical boys club attitude.

That being said it is still a good introductory to thinking about what is going in your photographs. Without taking a photograph he illuminates the subject of subject matter.

By having no chapters but rather by slipping in and out of subject matter he does a very good job of introducing photographic history and theory to the beginner. He allows people to think about how they have been influenced by the images and social meanings of subject matter that goes into a photographer's decision to trip the shutter.

One of the greatest lessons for a photographer to learn is that you are not photographing a completely new idea. You as a photographer have been influenced by the society that you have grown up in and while you may not consciously recognize that an image is familiar to you that image has been seen before. Dyer indicates that quotation can sometimes create better images by the quoter than the quoted and allows the photographer to make a statement about the quoted.

Dyer as an Englishman can take an outsider's view of American photography and recognize cultural differences and preferences that an American inherently overlooks as natural. I think that this helps him understand Robert Frank even more than Americans think they do, however it also ignored William Klein's work that was always overshadowed by Frank's coming out a year or two later and grabbing the attention.

Overall he did a thorough examination within the limitations of the length of the book and images to use (images should be larger) and tied it altogether by the end. It is hard to write a cohesive book on such a wide subject so the author who hopes that his book can be read non-linearally did an excellent job of weaving an image into his tapestry.

This book is admittedly the first and only by Geoff Dyer that I have read but I have a feeling that will change for me. As an interested reader about photography, the book is a wonderful weaving of history and culture in the production of the "representative" photograph.

One need not have a deep knowledge of the history of photography to be amazed at the linkages and connections that Dyer proposes between photographers and their photographic products. Examples are presented in the book to facilitate Dyer's exposure (perhaps fabrication) of a long extended conversation amongst recognized photographers through the subjects they photographed. Whether by fact or fiction or insider knowledge, it turns out not to matter, for the wonderful thing about looking at such photographs is that the content can mean so many different things depending upon the life and experiences of the viewer - true of any art done well.

This book is not a history of photography--nor is it meant to be--though it does look at photography over a large span of time and so is by default a history of sorts. But the book is really one writer's meditation on photography. As such, much is left out, but the omissions in no way mar the book; being comprehensive is not the point. One reviewer above calls the book cynical, like cocktail chatter (not sure what the two have in common or how Dyer could in any way be construed as cynical), which seems preposterous. Simply put, Dyer writes as a person fascinated with and under the spell of photography (an approach he took to his book on jazz), and in doing so offers keen insights--the likes of which are not to be found in other books on the subject. His viewpoint as an outsider is actually a benefit. Beautifully written, this book is a classic, something a reader will return to again and again.

"The Ongoing Moment" is an examination of the content of some famous modern photographs. This is by no means a history of photography. Instead, Dyer suggests that something may be learned about photography by examining photographs with similar content taken by different photographers. In doing so, the author organizes the photographs by subject matter into a taxonomy that is, by the author's own admission, idiosyncratic, and perhaps bizarre. For example, his categories include pictures of blind people, pictures with hats and pictures of barbershops.

He focuses (pardon the pun, but Dyer seems to love that kind of clever speech) on the documentary photographers of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Alfred Stieglitz and Robert Frank, and mostly on photographers in America although there is reference to Atget and Brassai and other photographers not working in America. His method is to discuss individual pictures with the same subject, occasionally placing the picture in context by referring to some other art with a similar theme like a poem by Robert Frost or "The Moviegoer" by Walker Percy. But the discussion seems to be purely descriptive. It's said that a picture is worth 10,000 words and speaks for itself. If that's true, what are we to learn from Dyer?

Dyer says that he suspects that the book will be a source of irritation to many people, especially those who know more than him about photography. He gleefully acknowledges that he doesn't even own a camera but that he wrote the book in an attempt to comprehend photography. After reading the book, I don't know if Dyer comprehended photography, but I was certainly irritated.

Dyer's discussions sound like cocktail party conversation by a witty, cynical person. He includes lots of stories about the photographers, often scabrous, and is not above being sexually and scatologically vulgar, perhaps to impress us that he is a man of the world. But his examination of the photographs deals with the denotation of the subject, and seldom the connotation. This may be because of his insistence on examining content only. Yet it is the form of art that allows the artist to convey to us what is going on in the work beyond the simple subject.

I also have to complain about the photographs included and not included in the book. The included pictures were often too small. But in many cases Dyer makes reference to a picture that is not included, usually for the purpose of comparison. He is then forced to give a lengthy description of the non-illustration. I understand that the author may not have been able to get the rights to print a particular picture. However, if, as Dyer seems to suggest, there are a set of favorite subjects of photographers which in many ways are similar, it would have been better to select another photograph that we could see.

Dyer himself says that there are many great books available about the ideas of photography and seems to recommend them to the reader. This left me with the question "What is this book for?"