Bach and Dyer...

A piece of music and a book have been accompanying me over the last few days… The piece of music is by Bach, a funeral mass he wrote in 1727 on the occasion of the death of the queen of Poland (Christine Eberhardine von Brandenburg-Bayreuth who was married to August dem Starken who at that time was also reigning over Poland)…

She was very popular with the general public but suffered trapped in an unhappy marriage… But the mass is a truly wonderful and inspiring mass; it is believed that Bach himself played the cembalo (and possibly the opening and closing organ pieces) during the funeral service… You have to listen to it to be able to appreciate this highly emotive music…

The book is by Geoff Dyer “The Ongoing Moment”, a book on photography and photographers.

At first a confusing book whose structure is not immediately apparent – at least to me it wasn’t… But maybe when Dyer quotes Dorothea Lange at the beginning, he really meant his book project: “…to know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting…”

After a while this book becomes a very interesting read as Dyer connects various photographers by themes and subjects and makes some very astute and incisive observations on photographs of the likes of Stieglitz, Evans, Strand, Steichen, Winogrand, Lange, Arbus, Evans, Brassaï, Cartier-Bresson, Kertész, Frank, Nachtwey, Weegee, Davidson, Ormerod and many others. It is not a chronological walk through the history of photography, rather a loose stringing together of the main themes in photography: permanence/impermanence of moments and events, life, death and their manifestations in visual imagery.

The book is also peppered with a myriad of quotes from photographers… The book is so original because it aims to ‘emulate the aleatory experience of dipping into a pile of photographs as far as is compatible with the constraints of binding, of its being a book…to reconcile the simultaneous and the successive…’.

In my view, one of the best books on photography.