Geoff Dyer

  • culture January 03, 2017

    Understanding a Photograph by John Berger

    Critic and novelist John Berger died on Monday at the age of ninety. Here, from his introduction to a recent edition of Berger's Understanding a Photograph, Geoff Dyer considers the seminal critic's deep engagement with the medium.

    Critic and novelist John Berger died on Monday at the age of ninety. Here, from his introduction to a recent edition of Berger's Understanding a Photograph, Geoff Dyer considers the seminal critic's deep engagement with the medium. —Bookforum

    I became interested in photography not by taking or looking at photographs but by reading about them. The names of the three writers who served as guides will come as no surprise: Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and John Berger. I read Sontag on Diane Arbus before I'd seen any photographs by Arbus (there are no pictures in On Photography), and Barthes on

  • print Dec/Jan 2015

    Twenty Years Booked

    Bookforum asked contributors to weigh in on the most distinctive and influential works of the past two decades. The writers named the best works in a number of categories—and came up with a few new genres in the process.

    LITERARY RANT - J. HOBERMAN

    ART THEORY - DAVE HICKEY

    PHOTOGRAPHY BOOK - GEOFF DYER

    NEW YORK BOOK - LUC SANTE

    INVENTIVE FICTION - WAYNE KOESTENBAUM

    PORTRAIT OF EVIL - WENDY LESSER

    CRIME - GEOFFREY O’BRIEN

    FUTURE OF FICTION - CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN

    NOT POETRY - ALBERT MOBILIO

    BUSH-ERA NOVEL - CURTIS SITTENFELD

    CULTURAL CRITICISM - ANDREW HULTKRANS

    WHAT WE LEARNED FROM

  • print Dec/Jan 2015

    Photography Book

    Atget (2000), certainly one of the best photography books of the past two decades, could also come under the heading of “Most simply conceived book.” After a brief introduction, John Szarkowski (former head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) presents us with a hundred photographs by Eugène Atget (1857–1927). On each verso page there is a photograph and on the facing page a couple of paragraphs about that picture. It’s a design that complements and emphasizes the essential quiet and stillness of Atget’s world. In both images and writing the simplicity of composition is

  • culture Apr/May 2014

    Categorical Imperative

    In 1962 Diane Arbus asked John Szarkowski, head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for August Sander’s address, “because there is something I would like to write to him about.” Several things make this request remarkable. First, there’s the shock that Sander (1876–1964) and Arbus (1923–1971) were even alive at the same time. Then there’s the ordinariness of the proposal, as if an up-and-coming songwriter were casually asking for Bob Dylan’s e-mail. Finally, there is the appropriateness of Arbus’s presumption. Sander’s photographs played a crucial part in the development of

  • culture January 17, 2014

    On John Berger's "Understanding a Photograph"

    For Understanding a Photograph (Aperture), an illuminating new book of John Berger’s previously uncollected writings on photography, the novelist and critic Geoff Dyer selected twenty-four glinting works of prose—on subjects ranging from August Sander and André Kertész to Jean Mohr and Ahlam Shibli—from nearly five decades of essays, stories, interviews, and experimental texts. Here, in his introduction

    When the writer and painter John Berger won the Booker Prize in 1972—for his novel G., about sex, loneliness, a failed revolution, and the imminent devastation of the First World War—he rather famously donated half of his award money to the Black Panthers. On the political spectrum of his day, Berger’s action outraged the right and the left alike, the former for giving any cash at all to a band of militants, the latter for holding back the other half. A few months ago, the novelist and critic Geoff Dyer retold this story, off the cuff, at the start of a panel discussion in New York devoted to

  • culture June 17, 2013

    In Transit: On Garry Winogrand

    I didn’t make it to the huge Garry Winogrand retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco but if the very large catalogue is anything to go by the show was obviously … not nearly big enough!​ How could it have been? Winogrand is inexhaustible. There’s probably more to look at in a Winogrand photo than in one by anyone else (part of the attraction of a wide-angle lens was the way it enabled him not only to get more people in the picture but also to cram the frame, so to speak, with the space between them) and still we want more photographs. He shot more film than almost any other

  • print June/July/Aug 2013

    Artist in Training

    In Just Kids Patti Smith explains how, in the late 1960s, she and Robert Mapplethorpe met in New York, where they were both determined to become artists (were pretty convinced, actually, that they already were artists) even though they hadn’t a clue about what kind of art they might create. Mike Brodie is a guy who, having taken pictures of the kids he was hanging out with, ended up becoming . . . a diesel mechanic! But the pictures made him “Internet famous,” and a wonderful selection of them has now been published. Dreams can come true, it seems, even a dream you never dreamt of dreaming. We

  • culture June 12, 2012

    Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen

    I'd heard that the title essay of Jonathan Franzen's new collection was about his punishing experiences on a rough and tiny island. Some of what happened there is by now well known. The inhabitants of this island welcomed him by printing the wrong version of his novel Freedom, necessitating the pulping of its entire first print run.

  • politics Sept/Oct/Nov 2010

    Sore Winner

    I can’t remember whether it’s the author (played by Charlotte Rampling) or her publisher (Charles Dance), but in François Ozon’s film The Swimming Pool one of them remarks that literary prizes are like hemorrhoids: Sooner or later, every asshole gets one. This sentiment might have been used as an epigraph to the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard’s My Prizes, an “accounting” of the many literary awards that began coming his way in the mid- 1960s. Being Thomas Bernhard, of course, it’s not just the recipients of these prizes who are “All Assholes”—“a whole row of assholes,” to be precise—it’s also

  • culture August 24, 2010

    Encounter: Essays by Milan Kundera

    We may take Milan Kundera for granted, but in his new collection of essays, the author casts an undeniably powerful spell—even if you have no previous knowledge of the artists that he discusses.