Sontag and Dyer

I finished reading Susan Sontag's 'On Photography' and started on Geoff Dyer's 'The Ongoing Moment'.  Sontag is concerned with feelings and morality, on the changes that photography has made to art, to how events are viewed, to how photographs themselves are perceived.  She says of the photographs of Diane Arbus, 'The photographs make a compassionate response feel irrelevant.' (Sontag 1978, p 41.)
An event becomes important because it is photographed, yet the image is quickly detached from its emotional context and becomes only a picture, maybe a work of art.  She regards photography as Surrealist: 'Surrealism is the art of generalizing the grotesque and then discovering nuances (and charms) in that. No activity is better equipped to exercise the Surrealist way of looking than photography, and eventually we look at all photographs surrealistically.' (Sontag 1978 p74)

I found it difficult to get into Dyer past the front cover puff from Sukhdev Sandhu of the Daily Telegraph, 'Quite possibly the best living writer in Britain'.  But once I had, I found him informing and entertaining.
Dyer reviews not so much movements in photography as the themes to which photographers seem compelled to return: the blind beggar; benches; hats and poverty.  'Except there is, I am beginning to suspect, a strange rule in photography, namely that we never see the last of anyone or anything.  They disappear or die and then, years later, they reappear, are reincarnated, in another lens.'  (Dyer 2005 p156.)
Photographers look at photographs and are inspired by them, so that they tend to look like each other in a way that painters don't.  Braque and Picasso issued pictorial challenges to and fro but their paintings are still distinguishable. The book contains very poor reproductions of photographs but even these serve to give a flavour of some of the originals.
There's more history, too, and interesting to hear the back stories of Weston, Steiglitz and Strand.  Via painting I came across Georgia O'Keefe long before I heard of Steiglitz.

Dyer, G. (2005) The Ongoing Moment, London, Little, Brown.
Sontag, S. (1978) On photography. London, Penguin Books