photojournalism.co.uk

Geoff Dyer for the Indy

 

Geoff Dyer is a polymath-author, who has cast his clear-eyed gaze over a variety of subjects including photography. His book "The Ongoing Moment" traces themes through the history of photographs, making connections that re-map familiar photographs and photographers onto an eclectic and illuminating topography. Dyer's view of photography is like a parallel, personal version of an "orthodox" history of photography, I found it more readable and resonant than those other histories too.

Given his knowledge about, and enthusiasm for photography I was more nervous than usual about the shoot. I might have been trying a bit too hard in retrospect, I rarely light this dramatically but the white wall bounced light to fill-in nicely and the eyes are nice. This is a crop from the original, which has more of the shadows from the banister spindles and the ambient orange light at the top. I doubt I'll have been added to new editions of the book on the basis of this but hopefully not excluded either.

Thinking about looking

Toiwa Sethogwe © Dominick Tyler, from Exiles from the Kalahari

In my final year studying philosophy at UCL I tried to convince my tutor, the brilliant philosopher Jonathan Wolff, that I could combine my growing love of photography with my studies by submitting a photographic dissertation, that is a dissertation in the form of photographs. I failed to convince him, not because he wasn't open to the idea of photography having philosophical value, but because I couldn't really explain what it would look like and what it would communicate. It was an interesting discussion though and I often think if I'd been more diligent in my philosophical studies I would have been able to find some way to look at both disciplines through the frame of the other.

There are, of course, diverse writings on the philosophy of photography from Sontag to Barthes, some of which I've battled through but my ability to read philosophical texts in general has suffered from years of attention span contraction. How wonderful then to find "Philosophy Bites" a blog that presents interviews with leading philosophers as podcasts. A recent addition to the growing library is Cynthia Freeland on Portraits. Cynthia Freeland is Professor and Chair of philosophy at the University of Houston and has written extensively on art theory and aesthetics, her latest book "Portraits and Persons" is particularly concerned with what makes a picture a portrait.