The Ongoing Moment Revisited - Photography And Fish

R T Crawshay, c.1870, Untitled

In 2005, Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment (London: Little Brown) appeared on book stores' bookshelves in Britain.

The Observer described it as 'odd and illuminating' suggesting that, while it was less than rigorous, it 'may yet [take] its place among the classic works' on photography (16.10.2005).

Geoff Dyer's publisher describes it thus: 'With characteristic perversity . . . Dyer looks at the ways that canonical figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Andre Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston have photographed the same things (benches, barber shops, signs, roads)'.

The result is a new, if eccentric and skewed, perspective on the history of the medium.  A history harnessed to the 'form of writing that Dyer has made his own: the non-fiction work of art'.

Around the same time, a curator of photographs approached me in his role as co-editor for a new series of photography books, interested to know if there were an angle on photography that I would care to write about.

I said, 'yes, photography and fish'.

But my passion for the poisson in the history of photography was received like a damp squib.

My suggestion was rejected.