See/Saw: Looking at Photographs

Description

'Wide-ranging and eclectic' TLS 'Seductively curious' Observer 'A visual and intellectual journey' Herald 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.

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.

'In these seductively curious essays, Dyer scrutinises images and photographers, unearthing hidden truths and a sense of the uncanny' - Observer, Book of the Day 'Fascinating . . . Dyer is not merely a fine prose stylist but a writer of knowingly stylish prose . . . This is both a beautifully written and a beautiful book' - Stuart Kelly 'The acclaimed essayist and novelist is also one of the world's greatest writers on photography . . . Reading this book is, simply put, a pleasurable experience' - Irish Times 'Fascinating . . . The reader is taken on a visual and intellectual journey, so that once you have read Dyer's words, you return to the photograph he describes, seeing it afresh and in ways that you might never had considered . . . Compelling' - Herald 'A beautifully written book on photography' - Scotland on Sunday 'Wide-ranging and eclectic . . . Dyer is at his best when he stays close to the images, teasing out their meanings with astute observations or poetic readings . . . Fascinating . . . Insightful' - TLS