See/Saw: Looking at Photographs

Geoff Dyer has spent thirty years writing about photography in a style that is erudite without ever feeling academic, and See/Saw gathers a decade's worth of that criticism into a single wide-ranging collection. The book moves essay by essay through individual photographers and often individual images, letting Dyer's associative, digressive style connect figures as different as Eugène Atget, Vivian Maier, Roy DeCarava, and Alex Webb. He is less interested in delivering a definitive reading of any one picture than in modeling a way of looking closely and staying with an image until it gives something up.

The essays have the loose, exploratory feel of watching a genuinely engaged critic think in real time. The collection works equally well read straight through or dipped into a chapter at a time, and it positions itself in a lineage alongside Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and John Berger while remaining recognizably Dyer's own: witty, occasionally contrarian, and always readable.