See/Saw - by Geoff Dyer (Paperback)

About the Book

See/Saw' is an illuminating history of how photographs frame and change our perspectives. Starting from single images by the world's most important photographers - from Eugene Atget to Alex Webb - Geoff Dyer shows us how to read a photograph, as he takes us through a series of close readings that are by turns moving, funny, prescient and surprising. Following Dyer's previous books on photography, 'The Ongoing Moment' and 'The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand', 'See/Saw' brilliantly combines visual scrutiny and stylistic flair. It shows us how a photograph can simultaneously record and invent the world, and reveals a master seer at work. In the spirit of the intellectual curiosity of Berger, Sontag and Didion, Geoff Dyer helps us to see the world around us, and within us, afresh.

Book Synopsis

A lavishly illustrated history of photography in essays by the author of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

See/Saw shows how photographs frame and change our perspective on the world. Taking in photographers from early in the last century to the present day--including artists such as Eugène Atget, Vivian Maier, Roy DeCarava, and Alex Webb--the celebrated writer Geoff Dyer offers a series of moving, witty, prescient, surprising, and intimate encounters with images.

Dyer has been writing about photography for thirty years, and this tour de force of visual scrutiny and stylistic flair gathers his lively, engaged criticism over the course of a decade. A rich addition to Dyer's The Ongoing Moment, and heir to Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Susan Sontag's On Photography, and John Berger's Understanding a Photograph, See/Saw shows how a photograph can simultaneously record and invent the world, revealing a brilliant seer at work. It is a paean to art and art writing by one of the liveliest critics of our day.

Review Quotes

"Geoff Dyer is an idiosyncratic master of both the image and the word."--Harper's

"Remarkable. . . .An intellectual fun house."--Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

"Enthusiastic and entertaining essays. . . . An intelligent writer with a renaissance inclusiveness of subject matter, Dyer is famed for his ability to cover a wide range of cultural topics, draw on an eclectic knowledge base, and think across genres and disciplines, all in order to decipher bold and imaginative insights."--Rain Taxi Review of Books

About the Author

Geoff Dyer is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of Southern California