10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #2 Geoff Dyer's "Poles Apart"

Photo by George Steinmetz, from Geoff Dyer's "Poles Apart"

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is Geoff Dyer’s superb “Poles Apart” (April 18, 2011). 

In this great piece, Dyer tells about his visit to two remote land-art sites – Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” near Quemado, New Mexico, and Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, Utah. He structures his piece in two parts with an “Intermission” in between, consisting of four brief notes. 

The first part, titled “New Mexico,” describes Dyer’s “Lightning Field” experience. He’s at the site with his wife Rebecca, plus four others – Steve, Anne, Ethan, and Cristina. Here’s the first paragraph:

We came to a place that seemed like nothing much: a homesteader’s cabin and a windmill, in the middle of a vast nowhere. The windmill must have been turning, because the wind was sprinting across the plateau. The sky was not just clear or blue. It was as if we’d ended up in a future where there was no atmosphere, no sky—nothing to insulate earth from cosmos. Scrub extended into the distance and in the distance were mountains, but even the things that were near were far off. The land was camouflage-colored, the dust reddish brown. Near the cabin but still quite distant, almost invisible, were sticks stuck randomly in the ground—some in the far distance as opposed to the near distance, but none in the very far distance, where we could not have seen them even if they had been there.

I find that an appealingly weird beginning – almost as if Dyer is pretending to be an alien from outer space, trying to make sense of this strange place where he’s landed. He’s divested himself of all preconceptions, all prior knowledge. “We came to a place that seemed like nothing much: a homesteader’s cabin and a windmill, in the middle of a vast nowhere.” Seemed – key word. What are those sticks stuck in the ground? Dyer’s next paragraph brings us closer:

The air was thin, cold; the sun was hot on our faces. When the wind subsided, as it did every few minutes, it was still and quiet. As we walked toward the sticks, it became clear that there were more of them than we’d realized, though it was difficult to say how many, because many were hard to see and some were not seeable at all, and it is probably only in retrospect, once we understood that their being invisible was part of their function, that we knew they were there. The sticks, it became evident, once we got close to them, were not sticks but poles: polished steel, shining in the sun, three times my height, and as sharply pointed as javelins. They were two inches in diameter and cold to the touch. If they had been wooden sticks, they could have been stuck there thousands of years ago, but because they were stainless steel they were obviously of more recent provenance. Hundreds of years from now they would still gleam like the promise of a future.

What are these poles? What’s their purpose? Do they have meaning? Where are we? Dyer still hasn’t named the place. He and his companions convene at the cabin:

I was the last man in and could see the other members of our expedition sitting on the wooden porch in wooden rockers and on wooden benches, getting drunk on champagne, watching me walk toward them. It was the kind of hut you see people inhabiting in photographs from the nineteen-thirties by Walker Evans. What had seemed noble but squalid then seemed idyllic now, a boutique hotel, practically, especially with the champagne and laughter.

There’s that word “seemed” again. I love the infusion of champagne and laughter into the narrative. It comes as a relief. These guys are human! The reference to Walker Evans made me smile. Dyer is a fan of his work (see his brilliant The Ongoing Moment), and so am I. 

In the evening, Dyer continues to observe the poles. He writes,

As the sun began to drop toward the horizon, the poles sprouted shadows and the tips sparkled as if stars were perched on them. There were so many competing perspectives that they complicated each other and cancelled each other out. The poles were still slender, but they’d acquired bulk, solidity. There were far more of them than we had thought, and it became obvious that they were not scattered randomly but had been planted in rows. If you positioned yourself next to one and looked past it, you could see a dozen more, glowing, like a fence that let everything through—everything being the sunlight and the wind. The sun was sinking fast and everything began to change. The silver poles glowed goldly. There was a clear demarcation now between the area where there were poles and the area where there were none, even though the poles were arranged so sparsely as to have made the distinction imperceptible at first.

For the first time, Dyer mentions religion: “There was a sense—all the more palpable in such a remote and empty place—of something gathering. Absence had given way to presence. We were in the midst of what may once have been considered a variety of religious experience.”

The next two paragraphs are among my favorites of the piece:

The sky blackened after only a few minutes and we retreated indoors. We ate quesadillas and drank dark wine and looked at the flames of the pellet-burning stove as if it were a television. The vastness outside made the interior of the cabin seem the coziest place on earth, like an igloo.

Later, we went outside again, into the huge night. The poles were gone, but we knew they were there. The sky was nothing but a dome of stars. We were no strangers to the firmament, but none of us had seen anything like this. The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away. The constellations were complicated by passenger jets, blinking planes, flashing satellites. It was like rush hour in the era of interplanetary travel. The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight.

That “The stars poured down all around, down to our ankles, even though they were millions of light-years away” is inspired. The last line – “The sky was frantic and the night was as cold as old starlight” – is among the most beautiful that Dyer has ever written.

Next morning, at sunrise, “the tips of the poles began to twinkle.” And then, as the sun emerged into view, “the poles stood stark and golden, even more sharply defined than they had been the evening before.” Dyer considers their meaning:

Places like Stonehenge had been designed with the solstice in mind, may even have been celestial calendars, attempting to synch man’s experience on earth with the heavens. None of that was relevant here. The placement of poles referred to nothing other than itself. Thousands of years of study would confirm that there was no intended relation between the poles and the equinox, the transit of Venus, or lunar eclipses. What was here was entirely man-made and appealed only to man.

I relish that last line. Dyer is grappling with the meaning of the place. At this point, he drops the “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees” approach and names the place he’s experiencing:

We were—as many of you will have guessed by now—near Quemado, New Mexico, at “The Lightning Field,” by Walter De Maria (completed in 1977). The answer prompts another question—why the subterfuge of inconceivable ignorance?—which can best be answered with further questions. Most visitors who come to see De Maria’s masterpiece these days know roughly what they are in for. But what if we came to “The Lightning Field” and had to try to work it out for ourselves, with no art-historical backup? Asked about the consequences of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai is said to have replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” That’s the response that comes to mind when pondering the significance of the great land-art projects of the late nineteen-sixties and seventies.

The key word here, for me, at least, is “response.” Dyer is trying to get at how he responds to “The Lightening Field.” He’s working through his responses:

There’s a lot of space, but, even as a figure of speech, there’s no room for God. “The Lightning Field” offers an intensity of experience that for a long time could be articulated only—or most conveniently—within the language of religion. Nothing about “The Lightning Field” prompts one to genuflect. Rigorously atheistic, geometrically neutral, it takes the faith and the vaulting promise of modernism into the wilderness. Part of the experience of coming here is the attempt to understand and articulate these responses.

Near the end of the “New Mexico” segment, Dyer describes how he and his companions accessed the “Lightning Field” site:

You leave your cars at Quemado and are taken up, in a van, at two-thirty in the afternoon. The drive takes half an hour, so you arrive at the least impressive time of the day. As we approached, a groan of disappointment swept through our party: we didn’t know exactly what we were expecting, but we expected more. And then you get it, but gradually, in an experience of space that unfolds over time. A narrative is at work.

“An experience of space that unfolds over time” is an excellent description of Dyer’s response to “The Lightning Field.” His writing enacts it. 

The next section of “Poles Apart” is called “Intermission.” It consists of four brief notes on landscape. In Note 1, Dyer remembers an area in a recreation park called the Hump, where he played when he was a kid. He says, “It was the first place in my personal landscape that had special significance.”

In Note 2, he considers how certain places in the landscape “develop a special quality.” He offers the example of a piece of land that becomes a fertility site, how it eventually falls into disuse and ruin, and how, even as a ruin, it retains “what D. H. Lawrence called ‘nodality.’ ” This idea of nodality appears again in the piece’s third section on the “Spiral Jetty.” 

In Note 3, Dyer remembers a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he saw a painting by Elihu Vedder called “The Questioner of the Sphinx” (1863), showing “a dark-skinned traveller crouched by the head of a sphinx that emerges from the sand in which it has been submerged for centuries.” Dyer describes it as “an early depiction of the post-apocalyptic world: one could easily imagine that it’s not the head of the sphinx poking above the sand but the torch of the Statue of Liberty, “Planet of the Apes” style.” He says, “We study the painting closely: a depiction of the effort to work out what certain marks on the landscape mean; what they are trying to tell us; what we go to them for.” 

Note 4 tells about D. H. Lawrence’s experience of New Mexico – “ ‘the greatest experience from the outside world’ that he had ever had.” Note 4 functions as a segue to Part 2 of “Poles Apart” – “Utah.” Dyer writes,

In the American West you can travel hundreds of miles and calculate your arrival time almost to the minute. We turned up for our rendezvous in Quemado at two o’clock on the dot. From Quemado, we drove four hundred and sixty miles to Zion, Utah, and got there exactly in time for our dinner reservation at eight-thirty. Our itinerary was as precise as De Maria’s measuring.

From Zion, we were going to drive north to the “Spiral Jetty.”

Part 2 differs conceptually from Part 1. In Part 1, Dyer’s focus is on the experience of “The Lightning Field.” The journey to the site is secondary and is covered in a few lines near the end of the piece. In contrast, Part 2 is a road trip that ends at “Spiral Jetty.” Dyer writes,

We drove north—Rebecca and I—toward Salt Lake City. No need for a compass. Everything screamed north: the gray-and-white mountains looming Canadianly in the distance, the weather deteriorating by the hour. Opting for directness instead of scenery, we barrelled up the featureless expanse of I-15. Most of what there was to see was traffic-related: gas-station logos, trucks the size of freight trains, snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder. Then Salt Lake City, doing its level best to come and meet us before we got anywhere near it—and reluctant to say goodbye even when we were well beyond. 

That “snakeskin shreds of tire on the soft shoulder” is inspired! I read it fifteen years ago when the piece appeared in The New Yorker. It’s stayed with me ever since. Every time I see a piece of tire on the road, I think of Dyer’s vivid phrase – “snakeskin shreds of tire.” 

They spend the night in Ogden, Utah. Dyer rereads Lawrence’s essay on Taos, New Mexico. He quotes a passage which begins “Taos pueblo still retains its old nodality.” Dyer comments, “Like Vedder’s painting, this bit of writing—analytical, hypnotic, profound—tells us much about the power that some places exert. In their different ways, both De Maria and Smithson were attempting to create nodality.”

The next day, Dyer and Rebecca continue their pilgrimage to “Spiral Jetty.” Dyer writes,

We had been given enigmatically precise directions on how to find the “Spiral Jetty”—“Another .5 miles should bring you to a fence but no cattle guard and no gate”—only to find that the route was discreetly signposted. The gravel road was corrugated, washboarded. We jolted and rattled at fifteen miles an hour, past calves the size of big dogs, and cows the size of cows, all of them black and resigned-looking. The sky slumped over a landscape that gave constant reminders of Britain, that Dartmoor feeling of worn-down ancientness. Seagulls, too. Wordsworth might have had this place in mind when he coined the phrase “visionary dreariness.” Suddenly, there was a single brown cow and, to the south, in a gap between low, dull hills, a pale glow. Light bouncing off the salt flats? That was where we were headed.

We drove more and more slowly as the potholes and trenches increased in width, depth, and frequency. The road continued to deteriorate until it finally gave up any claims to being a road. We left the cocoon of the car and began walking. There’d been no signs for a while, but there were, allegedly, three things to look out for as markers: an abandoned trailer, an old Dodge truck, and—interestingly—an amphibious landing craft. No sign of any of them. But that glow we’d noticed earlier? It wasn’t just the reflection on the lake; the sky itself was brightening. To our left, the lake looked congealed, like a dead ocean on a used-up planet. There was a faint smell of sulfur. It was the kind of location that might have been scouted for the closing scenes of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” where the shining sea turns out to be just a further extent of desolation. Protruding from the lake’s edge were the remains of some kind of enterprise, long since aborted. Was that the “Spiral Jetty”? If it was, then it was in far worse shape than we’d anticipated, not exactly a spiral and barely a jetty at all. I remembered that there had recently been a certain amount of debate on this score: whether to try to preserve the jetty, to raise it up and stop it from disappearing again, or just to leave it to its own devices, to gracefully decay and commend itself to the shallow-looking deep. But, no, it couldn’t be that far gone. We kept walking in that state of foiled uncertainty: had we already had the experience we were eagerly anticipating?

No. Because there it was, a ring of black rocks—not white, and far smaller than expected, but exuding unmistakable “Spiral Jetty”-ness.

I’m tempted to keep quoting. I think I will. This is an eminently quotable piece:

We walked toward the circles of stone and could see that these circles were actually part of an unbroken spiral. We were no longer coming to the “Spiral Jetty.” We were at the “Spiral Jetty,” waiting for the uplift, the feeling of arrival—not just in the getting-there sense but in the way Lawrence experienced it at Taos Pueblo. And it sort of happened. The weather had been quietly improving. The sky, in places, had turned from lead to zinc. Patches of blue appeared. And now, for the first time that day, the sun came out. There were shadows, light, a slow release of color.

We clambered down to the jetty—there was no path—through a slope of black rocks, where someone had fly-tipped an exhausted mattress. The jetty extended in a long straight spur before bending inward. The water was plaster-colored, slightly pink, changing color as it was enfolded by the spiral, at its whitest in the middle of the coil.

Dyer’s response to “Spiral Jetty” is fascinating. He says,

Compared with Angkor and the Pyramids, the jetty has aged at the rate of housing projects put up in a hurry. It had existed for only forty years and already it looked ancient. Which, actually, is the best thing about it. It’s fast-tracked to become a contemporary incarnation of Vedder’s sphinx. “The Lightning Field” looks perpetually sci-fi; in next to no time the “Spiral Jetty” had acquired the bleak gravity, the elemental aura, of prehistory. 

He invokes Lawrence’s notion of nodality:

The sky continued to open up. With the sound of birds and lapping water, it was lovely now—in a subdued, melancholy sort of way. It felt desolate, but this was not a place of abandoned meaning. It had retained—or generated—its own dismal nodality.

“Poles Apart” shows Dyer extracting meaning from two great works of land art – Walter De Maria’s “The Lightning Field” and Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty.” It’s one of his best essays. 

Postscript: “Poles Apart” is included in Dyer’s excellent 2016 collection White Sands. Part 1 “New Mexico” is titled “Space in Time”; Part 2 “Utah” is titled “Time in Space.”

The Adventure of the Ordinary

Last night I found myself still thinking about James Wood’s review of Geoff Dyer’s new memoir Homework, in this week’s New Yorker. Wood praises it for, among other things, its detailed descriptions of a working-class English childhood. He writes, “Down among the Cadbury Fruit & Nut, the Vesta beef curry, and the Huntley & Palmers Breakfast Biscuits is a reality rarely touched by theorists, who are too busy theorizing.” Wood has a taste for writing that makes ordinariness vivid. “The adventure of the ordinary” – that’s what he called it in his great review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. I went back and looked that piece up. Wood writes,

Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary—the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (“the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation”)—is steadily retreating; in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, color, and life back to the soccer boots and to the grass, and to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Ajax. [“Total Recall," The New Yorker, August 13 & 20, 2012]

That passage is one of my touchstones. Wood values it, too. He used it again in his brilliant “Serious Noticing,” the title piece in his 2019 collection.   

July 21, 2025 Issue

Geoff Dyer and James Wood are among my favorite writers. In this week’s issue, Wood writes about Dyer’s new book Homework. The result is double bliss. Wood says,

Dyer’s memoir is a funny and often painful book that both follows and departs from the traditional working-class bildungsroman. It offers, perhaps, a stranger account than even Dyer quite allows: at times, a wounded narrative pretending not to be. Many of the classic elements are here—the murky atrocity of school food; the ecstatic discovery of literature (for Dyer, especially Shakespeare) and music (gallons of dubious prog rock); a spurt or two of rebellion; sexual fumblings in cars; the anxious opening of exam results in “buff-coloured” envelopes, those official passports to the wider world.

He says, 

Here, for the record, are the smallest specificities of a working-class English childhood in the sixties and seventies. Down among the Cadbury Fruit & Nut, the Vesta beef curry, and the Huntley & Palmers Breakfast Biscuits is a reality rarely touched by theorists, who are too busy theorizing. 

I’m interested in that reality. I will read Dyer’s book. Even if I wasn’t interested, I’d read it anyway for the pleasure of Dyer’s delectable style – a combination of “extended riffing, comic loitering, and dry exaggeration” (Wood’s description).

Near the end of his review, Wood touches on something I strongly relate to – the role that chance plays in the way our lives unfold. He says, “Dyer’s rise is solitary, freakish, and shadowed always by the chance that it might never have happened.” Shadowed always by the chance that it might never have happened. Exactly. I know that feeling. Wood expresses it perfectly.

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #3 Geoff Dyer's "The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg"

This is the eighth post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Geoff Dyer’s “The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs” (The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016), retitled “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg,” in Dyer’s superb 2021 essay collection See/Saw: Looking at Photographs.

In this masterful piece, Dyer probes the mysterious heart of a great photograph – Eli Weinberg’s Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, 19 December 1956. He first saw it at the photography exhibition The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, at the Museum Africa, Johannesburg, in 2014. Dyer unfolds his commentary in seven dazzling analytical moves. First, he describes the photo:

Lines of black people, three or four deep. In the foreground, to the left of the frame, a man whose armband marks him out as some kind of steward, his old and very worn jacket sagging from his shoulders. Women are in the front, holding placards reading, “WE STAND BY OUR LEADERS.” There’s a range of ages, the youngest looking like they might be in their late teens. So almost all of them would now be either dead or in their late seventies.

Dyer notes the way the demonstrators fill the frame:

The demonstrators fill the frame so that - in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras - the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute. Beyond the frame of the picture lies the apparatus of the apartheid state with its immense resources of physical intimidation, bureaucratic control and psychological coercion: the police and soldiers making sure that the opposition stand in — and know — their place. (In a picture taken the following day you can see Peter Magubane - best known for his photographs of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 - being arrested, his face pushed up against the wall.) Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.

Then he springs his first surprise:

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy with a pudding-bowl haircut. I’m guessing he’s about thirteen. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left - a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly - and he’s white. He is there, that is the fact of the matter - his watch might even enable us to tell the time he was there, the exact moment the picture was taken. We look at the photograph and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question it insists on our asking: what is he doing there?

Hoping to find out more about the boy in the photo, Dyer contacts the co-curator of the exhibition, Rory Bester. Bester tells him he’s “90 percent sure it’s the photographer’s son. [Mark] often accompanied him while he was working ... both when he was a trade unionist and when he was a photographer.” Dyer digs deeper. He writes,

A 2014 investigation on a South African news website, in which friends of the Weinberg family and fellow activists who were present that day were asked if they could identify the boy in the picture, casts doubts on this score - some were certain it was Mark; some didn’t recognize him. When I checked back with Bester he said that “No more information has come to light about E.W.’s son, except that nobody has contradicted the ‘belief’ that it is indeed his son.”

Then Dyer introduces a new element in his analysis. He says,

Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence, sixty years on, in our remote-ish future. We want to hear his version of what happened. According to Bester, several people in photographs in the show came by to identify themselves and to be re-photographed in front of the old pictures. This has been done in other situations, by other people photographed in the midst of historical events. It’s often illuminating, partly because of the way people’s memories are contradicted, reinforced or even created by the existence of a photograph.

This leads Dyer to another connection:

Consider, for example, a picture that is in some ways the mirror image of this one, taken less than a year later, by Will Counts in Little Rock, Ark. Instead of a solitary white boy surrounded by crowds of peaceful, welcoming black people, there is a solitary black girl surrounded by a baying mob of whites. The black girl is Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine African-American students who were supposed to be entering Little Rock Central High School together at the start of desegregation. At the last moment, she found herself walking alone, being abused by the crowd. One snarling white face, that of 15-year-old Hazel Bryan, became the symbol of intransigent racial bigotry.

Commenting on Counts’ picture, Dyer says that Bryan later apologized to Eckford and that Eckford accepted it and “In 1997, on the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women met in person - at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness.”

This is followed by yet another revelation:

Except it wasn’t the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering them. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

That last sentence is inspired! A great line to end on, but Dyer isn’t done. He pivots back to Weinberg’s photo and unfurls yet another surprise:

Let’s go back to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather from almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

We’re near the end of the piece now. One paragraph left, and … two more revelations! Dyer writes,

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he died in 1965 at twenty-four - so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging 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.

Wow! Who said photographs aren’t narrative? You just have to know how to unpack them. Dyer is a genius at it. He takes us deeper and deeper into meaning.

Credit: The above photo is Eli Weinberg's Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, 19 December 1956.

Peter Campbell and the Art of Book Design

For over ten years Peter Campbell reviewed art exhibitions for the London Review of Books. His writing was one of the main reasons I began subscribing to the magazine. He died in 2011. Last month, the LRB published a wonderful new essay by him - “In the Print Shop.” It contains a footnote: “Peter Campbell began writing this piece in 2010. It was left unpublished at the time of his death the following year.”

Campbell’s essay celebrates the craft of printing. It begins with an extraordinary description of his experience working in a New Zealand print shop. Here’s an excerpt:

It was noisy in Harry H. Tombs Ltd, the New Zealand print shop where I served a small part of an apprenticeship that would have made me a compositor. I worked upstairs in the composing room where the rhythm was set by the Linotype machines: the tap of the keyboard, the rustle of the matrices sliding from the magazine into their place in the line, followed, when the line was full, by a heavy thump as the spaces were wedged home. There were clanks and bangs as the line of matrices was offered up to the mould and the molten type-metal that glistened in the crucible behind was injected. The hot, bright line of newly cast type joined others in the tray with a metallic slither. Meanwhile, we hand-compositors stood at our frames and quietly clicked type into our composing sticks for the odd heading or display line, or dissed it, dropping used type back into the case with a louder click. We assembled the metal lines of type (called slugs) and titles and any other elements of the printed page, and grouped them together with other pages for printing, creating what was known as a forme. From time to time there would be a thump as one of us heaved a forme (four, eight or sixteen pages of type weigh a lot) up onto the stone – the metal table on which they were put together. The pages of the forme were wedged into a metal frame, the chase, where they were held firm by quoins (wedges). A hoist creaked as the finished formes were lowered to the ground-floor press room.

The piece goes on to discuss Linotype and Monotype printing, the design of typeface, and the beauty of letterpress printing:

Letterpress has its own aesthetic. A raised surface – type and blocks – is inked. When it is pressed against a sheet of paper, the raised surface digs into it. It was the tactile quality of the object as much as the detail of the image that distinguished the private press books made around the end of the 19th century from the smooth, commercially printed pages of the books they wanted to improve on. Handmade paper and an even, black impression make the page a three-dimensional object, not a two-dimensional image. 

Campbell’s absorbing essay kindled my own thoughts on book design. My idea of the ideal book is the harmonious marriage of text and picture, elegant serif font, vivid color, wide margins, and texture, texture, texture! Such a book is T. J. Clark’s gorgeous If These Apples Should Fall (2022), published by Hudson & Thames. Such a book is Geoff Dyer’s ravishing The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (2018), published by the University of Texas Press. Yes, these are my models. If my house was burning down, these are the books I’d grab.  

Geoff Dyer's "The Last Days of Roger Federer"

One of the best books I’ve read this summer is Geoff Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer (2022). It’s a tricky book to describe. The jacket flap calls it an “investigation”: 

In this ingeniously structured and endlessly stimulating investigation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last achievements of writers, painters, athletes and musicians who’ve mattered to him throughout his life.

That strikes me as just about right. Its theme is last things. Dyer writes,

Adorno’s “Late Style in Beethoven” was an important early reference point for this book about last things, some of which are late, while some are precociously early. Not that this was ever intended to be a comprehensive study of last things, or of lastness generally. It’s about a congeries of experiences, things, and cultural artefacts that, for various reasons, have come to group themselves around me in a rough constellation during a phase of my life.

Those “congeries of experiences, things, and cultural artifacts” include Burning Man, Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue, John Cohen’s photo of Jack Kerouac, J. C. Chandor’s All Is Lost, J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed, David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Albert Bierstadt’s The Last of the Buffalo, John Graves’ Goodbye to a River, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette and Gary Peacock’s rendition of “Somewhere/Everywhere” on their concert album Somewhere, David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film, William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loop, Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, William Wordsworth’s Preludes, and Peter Hammill’s song “In the End.” That’s quite a grab bag, and it’s only a partial list. 

The book is certainly a curio. It isn’t a narrative, although there are narrative elements, e.g., the Burning Man segments. It isn’t a journal, although there are journal-like entries, e.g., section 53 of Part III (“On 5 July 2018 I took the tube from Wimbledon to Soho, just in time to catch Pharoah Sanders at Ronnie Scott’s”). It isn’t memoir, although there are many memories, e.g., of being at a private gig at Willie Nelson’s recording studio in Austin, Texas:

There was room for about fifty people in the studio. I had no interest in the first band – rockers from L.A. – but the sound was amazing: not particularly loud but so powerful and clear as to be completely enveloping. For the headline act, because of Steph’s VIP status, we were invited into the control booth where, we were told, the sound was even better. I’d not heard of the person we were waiting to see, a soul singer called Charles Bradley who, until recently, had had almost no success. He’d spent time living on the street, had been employed as a James Brown impersonator, and had released his debut album, No Time for Dreaming, only four years previously, when he was sixty-three, in 2011. But hearing the record, another friend said, was nothing compared to seeing him live. The band came on – young white guys – set up a tight groove, and we waited for Bradley to join them. He looked, when he appeared, like someone from another, rougher age. His face was deeply lined; he was wearing a dark sequinned shirt, open to reveal a totemic belly. He opened his mouth and cried out, a moan of deep spiritual and epic lust. It lasted a couple of seconds but tracing its genealogy would require hundreds of pages covering a history extending back more than a century. From that moment on it was obvious that, for the first time in my life, I was at a great soul gig. Except I wasn’t quite. I was in the control booth, hearing the music but separated from the experience by glass. As is often the case the VIP area was the worst place to be. We made our grateful excuses and got out of the booth and into the studio, to share the experience with everyone else. It was wonderful, overpowering, immense.

My favorite section is Dyer’s account of his 2018 Burning Man experience. Here’s a taste: 

All reservations melted away when I saw the dust-blasted figure of Gerry waiting for me at “immigration” and although there were afternoons when I wished I wasn’t there – hunkered down in my trailer, waiting for dust storms to pass – most of the time there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be. Even during the dust storms I was happy reading Zagajewski’s Slight Exaggeration. The trailer was decrepit – the shower didn’t even pretend to work and the generator was powerless to power anything except a single light that took a dim view of the sunken wreck of the sink – but I had it to myself and just being able to shut the door, to have a barrier between myself and everything going on outside, was enough. And what was going on outside, in the festival at large, was better than ever. 

The book proceeds the way a great essay proceeds – associatively, digressively, additively. But it’s not baggy, and it's never boring. The theme of last things holds it together. I enjoyed it immensely. 

The New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

I see The New York Times is picking the 100 best books of the 21st century. Readers are invited to submit their own top ten choices. Here’s what I submitted:

Trawler (2005)

Redmond O’Hanlon

Travels in Siberia (2010)

Ian Frazier

Cross Country (2006)

Robert Sullivan

I Curse the River of Time (2010)

Per Petterson

Iphigenia in Forest Hills (2011)

Janet Malcolm

The Sight of Death (2006)

T. J. Clark

Uncommon Carriers (2006)

John McPhee

A Terrible Country (2018)

Keith Gessen

The Old Ways (2012)

Robert Macfarlane

The Ongoing Moment (2005)

Geoff Dyer

It pains me to leave out James Wood, Peter Schjeldahl, and Helen Vendler – three of my favorite writers. But when you draw up these lists, sometimes you have to be ruthless. 

Favorite Photo Reviews 1: Geoff Dyer's "The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs"

Eli Weinberg, Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956

This is the tenth and final post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Geoff Dyer’s brilliant “The Mystery at the Heart of Great Photographs” (The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016; retitled “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg,” in Dyer’s superb 2021 essay collection See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. 

In this masterful piece, Dyer probes the mysterious heart of a great photograph - Eli Weinberg’s Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, 19 December 1956. He first saw it at the photography exhibition The Rise and Fall of Apartheid, at the Museum Africa, Johannesburg, in 2014.

Dyer unfolds his commentary in at least seven dazzling analytical moves. First, he describes the photo:

Lines of black people, three or four deep. In the foreground, to the left of the frame, a man whose armband marks him out as some kind of steward, his old and very worn jacket sagging from his shoulders. Women are in the front, holding placards reading, “WE STAND BY OUR LEADERS.” There’s a range of ages, the youngest looking like they might be in their late teens. So almost all of them would now be either dead or in their late seventies.

Dyer notes the way the demonstrators fill the frame:

The demonstrators fill the frame so that - in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras - the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute. Beyond the frame of the picture lies the apparatus of the apartheid state with its immense resources of physical intimidation, bureaucratic control and psychological coercion: the police and soldiers making sure that the opposition stand in — and know — their place. (In a picture taken the following day you can see Peter Magubane - best known for his photographs of the Soweto Uprising of 1976 - being arrested, his face pushed up against the wall.) Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.

Then he springs his first surprise:

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy with a pudding-bowl haircut. I’m guessing he’s about thirteen. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left - a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly - and he’s white. He is there, that is the fact of the matter - his watch might even enable us to tell the time he was there, the exact moment the picture was taken. We look at the photograph and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question it insists on our asking: what is he doing there?

Hoping to find out more about the boy in the photo, Dyer contacts the co-curator of the exhibition, Rory Bester. Bester tells him he’s “90 percent sure it’s the photographer’s son. ... [Mark] often accompanied him while he was working ... both when he was a trade unionist and when he was a photographer.” Dyer digs deeper. He writes,

A 2014 investigation on a South African news website, in which friends of the Weinberg family and fellow activists who were present that day were asked if they could identify the boy in the picture, casts doubts on this score - some were certain it was Mark; some didn’t recognize him. When I checked back with Bester he said that “No more information has come to light about E.W.’s son, except that nobody has contradicted the ‘belief’ that it is indeed his son.”

Then Dyer introduces a new element in his analysis. He says,

Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence, sixty years on, in our remote-ish future. We want to hear his version of what happened. According to Bester, several people in photographs in the show came by to identify themselves and to be re-photographed in front of the old pictures. This has been done in other situations, by other people photographed in the midst of historical events. It’s often illuminating, partly because of the way people’s memories are contradicted, reinforced or even created by the existence of a photograph.

This leads Dyer to another connection:

Consider, for example, a picture that is in some ways the mirror image of this one, taken less than a year later, by Will Counts in Little Rock, Ark. Instead of a solitary white boy surrounded by crowds of peaceful, welcoming black people, there is a solitary black girl surrounded by a baying mob of whites. The black girl is Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine African-American students who were supposed to be entering Little Rock Central High School together at the start of desegregation. At the last moment, she found herself walking alone, being abused by the crowd. One snarling white face, that of 15-year-old Hazel Bryan, became the symbol of intransigent racial bigotry.

Commenting on Counts’ picture, Dyer says that Bryan later apologized to Eckford and that Eckford accepted it and “In 1997, on the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women met in person - at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness.”

This is followed by yet another revelation:

Except it wasn’t the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering them. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

That last sentence is inspired! A great line to end on, but Dyer isn’t done. He pivots back to Weinberg’s photo and unfurls yet another surprise:

Let’s go back to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather from almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

We’re near the end of the piece now. One paragraph left, and … two more revelations! Dyer writes,

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he died in 1965 at twenty-four - so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging 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.

Wow! Who said photographs aren’t narrative? You just have to know how to unpack them. Dyer is a genius at it. Under his perceptive gaze, the meaning of Weinberg’s great photo waxes ever richer and more mysterious. 

Critics as Makers of Works of Art (Contra Colin Burrow)

Colin Burrow, in his absorbing review of Christopher Ricks’ new essay collection Along Heroic Lines (London Review of Books, October 7, 2021), says, “Critics see things, but do not make things.” Really? Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman isn’t made? T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death isn’t made? Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment isn’t made? Howard Moss’s The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust isn’t made? Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue isn’t made? Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida isn’t made? I could keep going, but I think I’ve made my point. There are works of criticism that are as much works of art as the subjects they consider. It’s time to drop the condescension and recognize them as such.  

My Favorite Book of 2021: Geoff Dyer's "See/Saw"

My favorite book of 2021 is Geoff Dyer’s brilliant See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. Dyer is to photography what Pauline Kael was to movies – its greatest critic. Kael’s memory was a bottomless reservoir of movie associations. She could watch, say, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and see reflections of, among other films, William Wyler’s Dead End (1937), Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), and John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). William Shawn, in his Foreword to Kael’s superb 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), said, “It is unlikely that anyone in the world carries around in his or her head more information about movies.” The same goes for Dyer; his head is packed with photographic precedents; he looks at a picture and sees countless allusions and influences – what he calls “visual echoes.” In almost every one of See/Saw’s fifty-two essays (including the excellent Introduction), he traces the echoes. For example, in his review of a Zoe Strauss exhibition, he writes,

It’s obvious, to anyone who visits this show that Strauss is an artist with a distinctive visual style; and it’s equally obvious that this distinction is impossible to separate from the way that so many threads of American photographic history seem to have found their way into the tightly bound forms of her pictures. The tattooed girl—Monique—with a beaten face and a black eye recalls a self-portrait made by Nan Goldin after she’d been battered. There’s a lot of Eggleston—most notably a green version of his famous red ceiling—and a lot of Stephen Shore too. And there are traces of Walker Evans—how could there not be?—everywhere. No sooner have these influences—or presences—been registered, however, than one becomes conscious of how Strauss’s relationship to photography and to the world adds to or alters them. She never simply ‘does’ an Evans or an Eggleston. Take Goldin, for example. The pictures in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency are frank, intimate, beautiful and profoundly narcissistic. They are advertisements for a life being led: a bohemia that was longing to be recognised, a bunch of people whose poverty was a form of indulgence, who believed they were artists—even if there was no chance of their ever creating works of art. Except they were justified in their belief after all because they ended up in works of art, in Nan’s pictures. It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia, where the poverty is as matter-of-fact as it is in an Evans photograph of rural Alabama. The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted. By the time she began ranging further afield—in Vegas, say—she was able to take this home-grown familiarity and confidence with her. As she puts it, rather beautifully, in a Facebook exchange with a friend (included in the catalogue for the Philadelphia/ICP exhibition): “I just always let everything in and keep everyone who’s ever mattered as a part of myself.” To which the friend replies, rightly: “Wow… That is a phenomenal outlook on life.” [“Zoe Strauss”]

This is quintessential Dyer. Note the move from identifying the “presences” (Goldin, Eggleston, Shore, Evans) to analyzing the differences (“It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia …”) to distinguishing Strauss’s work from Evans’s and Arbus’s (“The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted”). That delightful Facebook quote at the end is inspired!

Zoe Strauss, Monique Showing Black Eye, Philadelphia, 2006

“Zoe Strauss” is one of See/Saw’s best pieces. Another one is “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg.” I first read it when it appeared in The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016. It blew me away then; it blows me away now. It’s an essay on a remarkable photo by Eli Weinberg called “Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg December 19, 1956.” Dyer describes it in detail, providing context and history, noting the way “the demonstrators fill the frame so that – in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras – the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute.” He says, “Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.” That seems to end the matter: nothing more to build on there. Instead, it’s just the overture. The next paragraph raises a fascinating question: 

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy. I’m guessing he’s about 13. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left, a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly. And he’s white. We look at the photograph, and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question that it insists on our asking: What is he doing there?

Eli Weinberg, Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956

The essay now becomes a work of detection. Dyer makes inquiries and finds out that it’s highly likely the boy is Eli Weinberg’s son, Mark. Dyer then wonders why Weinberg included Mark in the picture. He says, “In a sense, then, Weinberg could be said to have staged the picture, to have worked on its magic.” He further observes, “Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence. We want to hear his version of what happened.”  

This line of thought causes Dyer to remember another photo – Will Counts’ 1957 shot of a solitary black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by an angry mob of whites, including a young woman named Hazel Bryan. Dyer says, 

In 1997, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women [Eckford and Bryan] met in person – at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness. They became friends, spoke in public about the need for harmony and — the apotheosis! — appeared on Oprah together. A wonderful ending and an advertisement for the long-deferred, much broken promise of racial equality.

But that’s not the end of this story either. Dyer provides a coda: 

Except that this wasn’t quite the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering Eckford and Bryan. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

Dyer then refocuses on the Weinberg photo and concludes with these two extraordinary paragraphs:

Let’s go back in history to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather than almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he had died in 1965 at the age of twenty-four – so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging 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.

Wow! What an amazing unpacking of a photograph that, at first glance, seems strictly documentary! The whole book is like that. If you relish close readings of photos, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Geoff Dyer’s masterly See/Saw. 

Svetlana Alpers' "Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch"

I’m a fan of Walker Evans’s photography. I first encountered it forty years ago when a friend gave me a slim, elegant volume of Evans’s photos published by Aperture – #10 in its series Masters of Photography. I’m also a fan of Svetlana Alpers’ writing. I first encountered it in 1983, when I read her superb The Art of Describing. Both these items – Evans’s photography and Alpers’ writing – come together deliciously in Alpers’ new book Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch. It’s a study of the way Evans made his pictures. It moves sagaciously, omnivorously through Evans’s oeuvre, starting with his brilliant Corrugated Tin Façade, Moundville, Alabama (1936), looping back to his first pictures (e.g., Girl in Fulton Street, New York, 1929), then proceeding chronologically through his work (Interior Detail of a Portuguese House, Vagrant in the Prado of Havana, Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation, Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife, and many, many more) right up to his death in 1975, tracking the development of his style. 

Ah, yes, Evans’s incomparable style – how to describe it? Alpers shows the way. She says of his Girl in Fulton Street:

But it was the woman on Fulton Street who caught Evans’s eye – a more firmly stationed version of the one in France, face three-quarter viewed, head defined by a fitted black cloche, coat marked by a large fur collar and muff. A strip of three negatives (unfortunately not numbered) leaves a trail of Evans’s pursuit. Both she and he hold still (he here with a small camera), while men wearing fedora hats move by and in between. Evans was attracted to reflections in the window glass behind her, the rising diagonal of the crane near her head, the sign with the letter R, more bits of sign over the window and the lettering SPAGHETTI above her head. The reflecting band widens and wanes, faces and hats come in between, and finally he gets his shot. In the mid-sized reflection there is a building, the figure of a hatted man and things not quite possible to read. To capture it all he sacrificed the sign with letters spelling out SPAGHETTI, but he retained its lower frame above her head.

Not content to just describe, Alpers also analyzes:

It is hard to put one’s finger on what is so remarkable here, but it is worth trying because the elements occur again and again in Evans’s work. First, there is the distant take he has on a woman seen. Her power is in her presence – the set look of the features and her costume. Given the formality of his address she seems not simply dressed, but in costume. He does not probe further. He likes what he sees and lets her be. There is a resistance to judge or intervene in any way. That holding back, that keeping his distance, is a great skill. I could say (and I do believe) that that is the basis to the nature of photography. But indeed it is Evans with the camera. She is still while around her swirls the world. – Fulton Street, the city. The swirl is provisional, thrown together from pieces of steel, iron, glass, cloth, stone. And her presence holds out, as it were, against the world. Surely when he saw the woman the periphery also caught his eye.

I find such descriptive analysis thrilling. Alpers’ book brims with it.

Walker Evans, Girl in Fulton Street, New York (1929)

But Alpers also makes some questionable statements. For example, in the Preface, she says, “First of all, photographs are not singular.” Later in the book, she contradicts herself. She says of Evans’s famous portrait of Ellie Mae Burroughs (Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife, 1936), “Evans’s photograph of Burroughs is a singular image, though not a portrait of someone great. How is it singular? How did that come about?” 

She continues,

Attempts to explain it have dwelt on the special encounter between the photographer and his subject. Evans with his 8 x 10 view camera stood less than three feet away from the serious, gaunt woman backed up against the clapboard wall of her house. She takes her place before the camera and establishes herself as a subject in her own right rather than serving as an object before Evans’s camera. That makes the singularity of the woman in the photograph a matter of relationship – photographer and subject rather than photographer and object. It was famously praised in those terms by Lionel Trilling.

Surely, Alpers is right about the Burroughs portrait; it is singular. And so are Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931), Joe’s Auto Graveyard, Pennsylvania (1935), and many, many other Evans images. So it strikes me as a curious thing to say, at the beginning of her book, that photographs aren’t singular, when the rest of her text argues they are. 

Another questionable observation she makes is “An essential quality of a great photograph is that it makes the world strange.” Really? What is strange about Evans’s photos? Alpers appears to define “strange” in terms of either surrealism or abstraction. She says, “Though we have become used to them in the almost two centuries since their invention, photographs are visually unexpected and strange in nature. Surreal is a default of photography.” A few lines later, she adds, “Another default of photography on exhibit at Levy’s gallery during those years was abstraction.” But later, she contends that Evans avoided surrealism and abstraction:

The surreal and the abstract are defaults for the camera. They are seductive moves for a photographer. Neither surrealism nor abstraction was a possibility of the medium for Evans. They were seductions that he avoided.

So in what way are Evans’s photos strange? I question Alpers’ premise. Not all photographers make the world strange. Many – Evans included, I’d argue – are just out to show the world as it is. Evans’s style is nothing if not matter-of-fact. I find it difficult to square his factual style with a word like “strange.” Maybe I’m just hung up on the word. “Strange” to me means peculiar, weird, odd, bizarre. Evans’s photos don’t strike me as any of those things. But as soon as I say that, I recall Geoff Dyer’s wonderful reading of Evans’s Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931):

And yet, the more I look at this photo the stranger it seems, for the street looks like it might not be a street and could actually pass for a canal or river. Asked, rhetorically, what he most loves Joseph Brodsky replies, unhesitatingly, “Rivers and streets – the long things of life.” Evans’s photo is the representation of this longed for elision. Not so much parked as moored, the cars seem oddly amphibious. The trees have something of the watery melancholy of weeping willows. There is a touch of Venice or Amsterdam about the scene. You feel that if you wanted to cross this wet road a bridge would come in handy. The impression of a street as waterway is enhanced by the way it kinks, bends, before dissolving not in countryside or suburbs but into a damp mist that might be the sea. The carefully incremented details – cars, trees, buildings – fade and recede into an unfathomable, indistinct mass of grey. That’s when you realize that although it may be a picture of a street that looks like a river, its real subject is time. And it was not quite right to say that “to look at this photograph is to walk down the street shown in it.” More accurately – and even more remarkably – it is to have walked down it, before returning to one’s room at the United States Hotel and looking down at the rain-slick street. [The Ongoing Moment, 2005]

Walker Evans, Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931)

And yet, the more I look at this photo the stranger it seems … – So there you go, I’ve contradicted my own argument. Perhaps every photo, if looked at closely enough, imaginatively enough, appears strange. I just wish Alpers had elaborated a bit more on what she means by “making the world strange,” especially in view of her ruling out, in Evans’s case, both surrealism and abstraction. 

Another curious statement made by Alpers is that “It is in the nature of a photograph by Evans, that a story is promised.” I’m not sure about that. Later in the book, Alpers quotes John Szarkowski as saying, “Intuitively, he [the photographer] sought and found the significant detail. His work, incapable of narrative, turned toward symbol.” Incapable of narrative – this is closer to my own view of Evans’s photos. I see them as images – pure images – not stories, not symbols – images that stand for themselves. It seems to me that Alpers eventually swings around to this viewpoint when she says, “Put succinctly, a photograph by Evans is seeing and (in my own words) also telling. The word telling used here not so much as in ‘to tell a story,’ but as in 'having a striking or telling effect.' ” 

So these are some of the questions arising from my reading of this absorbing book. But they’re mere quibbles compared to the many satisfactions it affords. This book helped me grasp why I love Evans’s photos so much. It abounds in illuminating observations. For example:

Keep in mind his taste for tin. It was a humble American material and attracted Evans’s eye.

But finding the right place to stand, the right view, is the heart of the matter for Evans.

It is not only the look of his photographs that is classic, but also their making.

The flatness and right-angled structure of buildings built from over-lapping strips of wood painted white or left bare are the American county churches and houses of Evans’s photographs. Not thick halls of marble, but thin walls of wood. Evans’s level, centered, straight-on photography is at one with that aesthetic.

Reading Flaubert sharpens our looking at Evans.

Evans repeatedly does re-takes on Atget – mirrors, carts, the wild cactus in Truro seen in one of the interiors favored for a lifetime by Evans and before by Atget.

Evans made the expected photographs of a much-admired, new modern house, but preferred to photograph an old fisherman. 

Evans had a taste for brooms in his interiors. There is a sense in which, metaphorically, they emphasize the clean style of his photographic address.

The finest photographs are the tightest and leanest.

Following Evans along the trail of photographs made, reproduced, admired, and written about is different from following the trail of the life.

To me, it seems likely that it was something simpler, more basic: that in the strange, withdrawn state of the individuals down in the subway he found versions of himself.

Forget the vernacular as such for its own sake, what interests him is the beauty of what, in a dense phrase, he describes as (let me repeat) the esthetically rejected object.

At the end of the day and of his life, the photographer for us to turn to when we look at how Evans approached the end is Eugène Atget.

I admire Alpers’ writing immensely. She lets the reader in on her thought processes. Her analytical moves are dazzling. “Let us begin with three Cuban photographs and see where they lead,” she says, and I’m right there with her, happy to tag along.

My favorite sentence in Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch occurs during Alpers’ description of Evans’s great Moving Truck and Bureau Mirror, Brooklyn, New York (1929-31). Noting the “tightly knit jumble of things captured by Evans’s photograph,” she says, “It is the Flaubertian airlessness of the cactus at Truro all over again.”

The book is beautifully produced, with a gallery of 143 Evans photos at the front. Each photo is numbered, and the number helpfully appears in the margin of the text, whenever a photo is discussed. Time and again, I found myself using this feature to quickly flip back to the portfolio, looking afresh at the pictures in light of Alpers’ insightful commentary.