Geoff Dyer, L’infinito istante, 2022

To Geoff Dyer, photography is nothing more than a medium through which the small and big stories of humanity takes place. Like writing and jazz, photography knows how to go beyond the meaning of the subject of the work, but it is necessary to hone one’s sensibility. In L’infinito istante, it is a kind of entropic order that guides the journey into the endless possibilities of the photographic medium. Dyer tries to discern those threads that, as in a novel, bind generations of photography that although they have never met come into contact heedless of time and space thanks to the repetition of the identical. He then collects the shots of Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston and discovers how photographing the same scenes and objects (benches, hats, hands, streets, windows, barber stores, accordion players) creates a constant dialogue between them, a conversation with many voices. His is the gaze of a writer who does not own a camera by his own admission, and who can therefore indulge in the intimate and personal experience of the image. Photography changes the way we see the world; Geoff Dyer changes the way we look at both.