Geoff Dyer's "The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs"

Photograph by Eli Weinberg

This, for me, has been a Geoff Dyer summer. First, I read his great new collection, White Sands. Then I went back and reread his wonderful New Yorker piece, “Poles Apart.” A few days ago, I started reading his The Missing of the Somme. Yesterday, perusing the online version of this week’s The New York Times Magazine, I encountered his “The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs.” What an extraordinary essay! It’s a consideration of Eli Weinberg’s 1956 photo “Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956.” It brims with illuminating perceptions and features at least five bravura analytical moves. First, he views the presence of the solitary white boy in the front row as a “crucial component.” Second, after making inquiries, he concludes with reasonable certainty that the boy is Weinberg’s son, Mark. Third, he compares Weinberg’s photo with one taken less than a year later by Will Counts in Little Rock, Arkansas. Fourth, he looks at another photograph of the scene depicted in Weinberg’s picture, which leads to his realization that Mark is “dressed for completely different weather than almost everyone else.” And lastly, he reveals two facts he’s discovered about Mark:

First, it seems that he died in 1965 at 24, so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging that he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident, Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Dyer’s brilliant piece shows how criticism can enrich and amplify a great photograph.