The Ongoing Moment was published by Pantheon in 2005 and won the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award. It is Dyer’s book about photography — but characteristically, it refuses to be a conventional history or survey. Instead, Dyer organizes his material by motif: he traces how certain subjects (a park bench, a road disappearing into distance, a pair of hands, a hat, a door, a blind person) have been photographed again and again by different photographers across the history of the medium.
The result is a book that reveals invisible connections between photographers who never knew each other’s work: Alfred Stieglitz’s New York and William Eggleston’s Memphis, André Kertész’s Budapest and Garry Winogrand’s Los Angeles. By grouping photographs by subject rather than by maker, Dyer reveals the medium’s obsessions — the things photography cannot stop looking at — and suggests that photographic tradition operates through visual repetition (the same bench, the same hat, the same vanishing road) rather than through the conscious influence that literary tradition transmits through reading.
Dyer’s prose about photographs is extraordinary — he describes what he sees with a precision that makes the reader feel they are looking at the image, and his interpretations are simultaneously playful and profound. The book makes an implicit argument that the best criticism works by juxtaposition rather than analysis — by placing two things next to each other and letting the reader see the connection.
Collecting The Ongoing Moment
First edition (Pantheon, New York, 2005): Cloth binding, dust jacket, with photographic plates.
Market values:
- First US edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- First UK edition (Little, Brown, 2005): $25–$60