Лучшие книги Джеффа Дайера

В книге «Самое время» Джефф Дайер предлагает неклассический - нехронологический и нелинейный - взгляд на историю фотографии. Это попытка классификации и систематизации заведомо необъятного материала, при том что используемые критерии заведомо необъективны. Сам Дайер признает, что большего всего его работа похожа на «одну китайскую энциклопедию» Борхеса.
Несмотря на всю импрессионистичность подхода, на первый взгляд кажущиеся разрозненными фрагменты на деле складываются в серьезное и всеобъемлющее исследование. Дайер изучает фотографии и обнаруживающиеся в них сквозные мотивы, находит тончайшие аллюзии и, кропотливо распутывая клубок, в который они неминуемо сплетаются, переходит от одного кадра к другому, от одного сюжета к другому. От «слепых музыкантов» к «ночным городам», от «рук» к «шляпам».

Журналист Джефф Атман приезжает на открытие венецианского биеннале. Он рассчитывает увидеть там искусство во всех видах, побывать на массе вечеринок и выпить целое море беллини, но вместо этого встречает обворожительную американку Лору, которая превращает эти несколько суток в Венеции в сплошное сияние. Другой город, другое задание - на этот раз на берегах Ганга в Варанаси. Среди гхатов, кремаций и хаоса этого священного для всех индусов города таятся опыт и переживания совсем иного рода.

Garry Winogrand―along with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander―was one of the most important photographers of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as one of the world’s foremost street photographers. Award-winning writer Geoff Dyer has admired Winogrand’s work for many years. Modeled on John Szarkowski’s classic book Atget, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand is a masterfully curated selection of one hundred photographs from the Winogrand archive at the Center for Creative Photography, with each image accompanied by an original essay.

Dyer takes the viewer/reader on a wildly original journey through both iconic and unseen images from the archive, including eighteen previously unpublished color photographs. The book encompasses most of Winogrand’s themes and subjects and remains broadly faithful to the chronological and geographical facts of his life, but Dyer’s responses to the photographs are unorthodox, eye-opening, and often hilarious. This inimitable combination of photographer and writer, images and text, itself offers what Dyer claims for Winogrand’s photography―an education in seeing.

A lavishly illustrated history of photography in essays by the author of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition


See/Saw shows how photographs frame and change our perspective on the world. Taking in photographers from early in the last century to the present day―including artists such as Eugène Atget, Vivian Maier, Roy DeCarava, and Alex Webb―the celebrated writer Geoff Dyer offers a series of moving, witty, prescient, surprising, and intimate encounters with images.


Dyer has been writing about photography for thirty years, and this tour de force of visual scrutiny and stylistic flair gathers his lively, engaged criticism over the course of a decade. A rich addition to Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, and heir to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Susan Sontag’s On Photography, and John Berger’s Understanding a Photograph, See/Saw shows how a photograph can simultaneously record and invent the world, revealing a brilliant seer at work. It is a paean to art and art writing by one of the liveliest critics of our day.

From the acclaimed writer and critic Geoff Dyer, an extremely funny scene-by-scene analysis of Where Eagles Dare - published as the film reaches its 50th anniversary

A thrilling Alpine adventure starring a magnificent, bleary-eyed Richard Burton and a coolly anachronistic Clint Eastwood, Where Eagles Dare is the apex of 1960s war movies, by turns enjoyable and preposterous. 'Broadsword Calling Danny Boy' is Geoff Dyer's tribute to the film he has loved since childhood: an analysis taking us from its snowy, Teutonic opening credits to its vertigo-inducing climax. For those who have not even seen Where Eagles Dare, this book is a comic tour-de-force of criticism. But for the film's legions of fans, whose hearts will always belong to Ron Goodwin's theme tune, it will be the fulfilment of a dream.

From "one of our most original writers" (Kathryn Schulz) comes an expansive and exacting book--firmly grounded, but elegant, witty, and always inquisitive--about travel, unexpected awareness, and the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves.

Geoff Dyer's perennial search for tranquility, for "something better," continues in this series of fascinating and seemingly unrelated pilgrimages--with a tour guide who is in fact not a tour guide at the Forbidden City in Beijing, with friends at the Lightning Field in New Mexico, with a hitchhiker picked up near a prison at White Sands, and with "a dream of how things should have been" at the Watts Towers in Los Angeles.

Weaving stories about places to which he has recently traveled with images and memories that have persisted since childhood, Dyer tries "to work out what a certain place--a certain way of marking the landscape--means; what it's trying to tell us; what we go to it for." He takes his title from Gaugin's masterwork, and asks the same questions: Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going? The answers are elusive, hiding in French Polynesia, where he travels to write about Gaugin and the lure of the exotic; at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he goes to see the masterpiece in person only to be told it is traveling; and in Norway, where he and his wife journey to see, but end up not seeing, the Northern Lights. But at home in California, after a medical event that makes Dyer see everything in a different way, he may finally have found what he's been searching for.

In this spellbinding new book, the man described by the "Daily Telegraph" as 'possibly the best living writer in Britain' takes on his biggest challenge yet: unlocking the film that has obsessed him all his adult life. Like the film "Stalker" itself, it confronts the most mysterious and enduring questions of life and how to live.

There is no other writer at work today like the award-winning Geoff Dyer. Here he embarks on an investigation into Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, the masterpiece of cinema that has haunted him since he first saw it thirty years ago.

Geoff Dyer’s classic The Missing of the Somme is part travelogue, part meditation on remembrance—and completely, unabashedly, unlike any other book about the First World War. Through visits to battlefields and memorials, he examines the way that photographs and film, poetry and prose determined—sometimes in advance of the events described—the way we would think about and remember the war. With his characteristic originality and insight, Dyer untangles and reconstructs the network of myth and memory that illuminates our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War.

*Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism*
*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice*
*A New York Times Top 10 Nonfiction Book of the Year, as selected by Dwight Garner*

Geoff Dyer has earned the devotion of passionate fans on both sides of the Atlantic through his wildly inventive, romantic novels as well as several brilliant, uncategorizable works of nonfiction. All the while he has been writing some of the wittiest, most incisive criticism we have on an astonishing array of subjects—music, literature, photography, and travel journalism—that, in Dyer's expert hands, becomes a kind of irresistible self-reportage.

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition collects twenty-five years of essays, reviews, and misadventures. Here he is pursuing the shadow of Camus in Algeria and remembering life on the dole in Brixton in the 1980s; reflecting on Richard Avedon and Ruth Orkin, on the status of jazz and the wonderous Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, on the sculptor ZadKine and the saxophonist David Murray (in the same essay), on his heroes Rebecca West and Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, on haute couture and sex in hotels. Whatever he writes about, his responses never fail to surprise. For Dyer there is no division between the reflective work of the critic and the novelist's commitment to lived experience: they are mutually illuminating ways to sharpen our perceptions. His is the rare body of work that manages to both frame our world and enlarge it.

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In eight poetically charged vignettes, Geoff Dyer skillfully evokes the music and the men who shaped modern jazz. Drawing on photos, anecdotes, and, most important, the way he hears the music, Dyer imaginatively reconstructs scenes from the embattled lives of some of the greats: Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonius Monk creating his own private language on the piano. However, music is the driving force of But Beautiful, and Dyer brings it to life in luminescent and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician’s style.