Review: 'See/Saw: Looking at Photographs,' by Geoff Dyer

A shutter snaps, a picture results, and time is frozen in a way unlike anything else in our natural lives. What exactly is taking place in this flash from the past, and who are these people, anyway? Is that Cousin Ida, or a total stranger? Still photographs, with their "captionless indeterminacy," are an incentive for descriptive narrative, Geoff Dyer tells us in "See/Saw," a remarkable compilation of short essays published over the past 10 years.

In his distinctively lively, digressive style, Dyer offers the reader a provocative, sometimes zany guidebook to more than 40 modern (1900-present) photographers and their work. Reading Dyer, in a word, is fun, and this collection is an intellectual funhouse.

In each essay, Dyer addresses the same central question: What do we see when we look at a still photograph? For instance, in Eugène Atget's work, we see stately Parisian monuments and vistas, but where are all the people? Is it too early for people — or have they already left? Musing over the stillness of this busy city, Dyer concludes that Atget produced "pictures in which people are everywhere suggested by their absence."

While Dyer is often perplexed at first (like the reader), the questions he asks help to open up the photos he includes. Why, for instance, is Roy DeCarava's 1960 portrait of jazz legends John Coltrane and Ben Webster so blurry and so underexposed? And what sort of statement might this be making about the fluidity of their friendship, about jazz, about Blackness — and about DeCarava? Why, in Eli Weinberg's 1956 photo of a Johannesburg anti-apartheid demonstration, is a 13-year-old white boy in shorts and sandals standing amid the Black protesters? Here, he writes, we have "documentary evidence of the unknowable."

Dyer's excellent essay on Andy Warhol explains how his images have "recalibrated our mind's eye." Warhol's electric chair photos, printed in different colors with differing levels of clarity, separate the electric chair from its purpose and time, leaving only image. Furthermore, Dyer observes, as lethal injection has replaced the electric chair, it has been further removed from its initial purpose — it's a "period piece."

Matters of time are never far from Dyer's thoughts. He reminds us that the people we see in photos from the past are often dead, "stuck in the amber of history," yet communicating to us wordlessly. What would they say? August Sander's portraits of German people in the 1920s are solidified in the past, "as extinct as mammoths." Dennis Hopper's photos of Brando, Dean and Hockney, by contrast, capture "myths in the process of formation."

Deeply attuned to paradox, Dyer discusses Lee Friedlander's 1970s photos of Confederate monuments, how ignored they appear to be in the picture (though they were erected to stir memory), how remembered they have become as they are removed in the 2020s.

Dyer's exploratory prose descriptions offer the reader a short course in parsing inscrutable photos. His prose is witty, full of puns (London street photographer Matt Stuart's "brilliant site gags," for instance), odd comparisons and unexpected connections. An essay might hop from a critical opinion by Garry Winogrand to King Lear to a neighbor's comments on Prada to thoughts on Madonna's performing venues — within the space of a few paragraphs. Graywolf Press has given us a very attractive volume that should delight fans of Dyer's rich imagination and everyone else who has ever wondered what's going on in a photograph.

Tom Zelman is professor emeritus of English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth.

See/Saw
By: Geoff Dyer.
Publisher: Graywolf Press, 336 pages, $24.