Geoff Dyer is the author of three novels: Paris Trance, The Search and The Colour of Memory and several works of non-fiction including Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It and The Ongoing Moment, winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography. In 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2006 he received the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His new book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is published in April 2009.

In his most recent book, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, Geoff Dyer confessed that not only did he not take pictures in the course of his travels but that he does not even own a camera. With characteristic perver-sity—and trademark originality—Dyer has now come up with an idiosyncratic history of

. . . photography. Seeking to identify their signature styles, Dyer looks at the ways in which such canonical figures as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, André Kertész, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, and William Eggleston, among others, have photographed the same things (barber shops, benches, hands, roads, and signs, for example). In doing so, he constructs a narrative in which these photographers—many of whom never met—constantly encounter one another.

Great photographs change the way we see the world; The Ongoing Moment changes the way we look at both. It is the most ambitious example to date of a form of writing that Dyer has made his own: the nonfiction work of art.