This book is an enjoyable read, full of witty observations on photography, photographs, and photographers. It can also be exceedingly frustrating in its lack of direction: there are no chapters and no summaries of what it all means. While themes are certainly evident, they are explored rather like those in music or a novel, obliquely, often inferred, and not all at once. Despite the non-academic approach to composition, Dyer includes a bibliography and annotates, though one wonders how the author decided, with such a meandering text, that a fact or an observation was deemed diversionary. Dyer appears to have viewed a large number of photographs, though from those he quotes it seems his viewing was restricted to the work of more widely known photographers appearing in most history texts. Rather than historical periods, aesthetic trends, or artists, Dyer organizes his writing around subjects such as blind beggars, hats, stairs, men in coats, barber shops, and gas stations. This allows him to exemplify what might be his primary theme, that “the history of photography seems to consist of photographers doing personalized versions of a repertoire of scenes, tropes, subjects or motifs.”
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