Garry Winogrand

This remarkable book joins the company of “self-work,” deep acts of memory that serve to illuminate the present by shining the clear light of careful regard on the past. The book finds company in the work of D J Waldie’s Holy Land, Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and the profound My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

See/Saw is an illuminating history of how photographs frame and change our perspectives. Starting from single images by the world's most important photographers – from Eugène Atget to Alex Webb – Geoff Dyer shows us how to read a photograph, as he takes us through a series of close readings that are by turns moving, funny, prescient and surprising. Following Dyer's previous books on photography, The Ongoing Moment and The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, See/Saw brilliantly combines visual scrutiny and stylistic flair. It shows us how a photograph can simultaneously record and invent the world, and reveals a master seer at work. In the spirit of the intellectual curiosity of Berger, Sontag and Didion, Geoff Dyer helps us to see the world around us, and within us, afresh.