The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer

Author:Geoff Dyer [Dyer, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-53919-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2005-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Strand himself came to feel that White Fence formed ‘the basis for all the work’ he went on to do. One critic went further, claiming, in 1966, that it was the ‘locus classicus for the subsequent development of the main tradition of American photography’. If this is true then the tradition can be seen to culminate in a photograph by an Englishman.

Michael Ormerod was born in 1947, in Hyde, Cheshire. He studied economics at Hull University and photography at Trent Polytechnic. After that he ran a freelance photography business and taught at Newcastle College. All his best-known pictures were made in America where he died — in a road accident while photographing in Arizona — in August 1991. That is all I know about him. I could find out more but I prefer him to be defined — like E. J. Bellocq — entirely by what he saw. Stephen Shore has said that his ‘first view of America was framed by the passenger’s window’ of a car. As someone born outside America, Ormerod’s first view of the country was framed by photos and films, by images. The work collected in the posthumously published book, States of America (1993) is like a reprise and distillation of some of the dominant tropes of American photographs, from the early twentieth century to Eggleston. Ormerod was surely aware of Strand’s picture, and his own photograph of a white fence is, in part, a response and homage.

Behind the white fence photographed by Ormerod in the 1980s (there are no captions or locations in the book) is a small, well-tended and manicured park with a tree-lined path curving pleasantly through it [39]. The fence itself is broken: five of the white uprights are damaged, two of them completely shattered. The neighbouring posts, though, continue to go stiffly about their business, not getting involved. I first saw this picture on the cover of John Cheever’s Journals where it served as a preview of the kind of immaculate suburban devastation recorded with photographic precision in the pages within. Cheever comments more than once on ‘the moral quality of light’, and Ormerod’s fence — damaged, glowing white, casting faint shadows — is evidence of just that. In Cheever’s world marriages go wrong, turn bad, persist as, and even after, they fall apart. ‘The most wonderful thing about life,’ Cheever wrote in 1958, ‘seems to be that we hardly tap our potential for self-destruction. We may desire it, it may be what we dream of, but we are dissuaded by a beam of light, a change in the wind’. Blame, in Cheever’s stories, is the result of inadequate scrutiny: the more closely a situation is examined the more difficult it becomes to assign; in the Journals, where Cheever subjected himself to the most intense self-scrutiny, blame represents a lack of lucidity.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.