See/Saw: Looking at Photographs

Description

See/Saw is an illuminating history of how photographs frame and change our perspectives. Starting from single images by the world's most important photographers - from Eugene Atget to Alex Webb - Geoff Dyer shows us how to read a photograph, as he takes us through a series of close readings that are by turns moving, funny, prescient and surprising. Following Dyer's previous books on photography, The Ongoing Moment and The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, See/Saw brilliantly combines visual scrutiny and stylistic flair. It shows us how a photograph can simultaneously record and invent the world, and reveals a master seer at work. In the spirit of the intellectual curiosity of Berger, Sontag and Didion, Geoff Dyer helps us to see the world around us, and within us, afresh.

Geoff Dyer is the author of ten non-fiction books and four novels. He has won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, a Lannan Literary Award, the International Center of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award for writing on photography and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E.M. Forster Award. In 2012 he won a National Book Critics Circle Award and in 2015 he received a Windham Campbell Prize for non-fiction. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California.

'A national treasure' - ZADIE SMITH 'Brilliant . . . Dyer's eyes miss nothing' - Observer 'There's no other writer quite like Dyer' - Time