Photograph © 2005 Karen Gonzalez

Geoff Dyer is an author whose perspective on photography is that of someone who does not, as he admits, even own a camera. His 2005 volume entitled The Ongoing Moment is a work of “imaginative criticism” that focuses on content rather than form and successfully develops new discursive categories for photography. He discusses the work of Paul Strand, Diane Arbus, Alfred Stieglitz, Bruce Davidson, and William Eggleston, among many others, and compares different ways of seeing often shot phenomena such as trains, barbershops, and nudes.

Many outsiders have written engagingly about photography, but The Ongoing Moment, published in 2005, contributes an engaging new angle. The book is not broken into essays, but is free-ranging, saturated, and satisfying in ways that reflect the varied possibilities of photography itself.

The structure of the book is unique, although comparisons to John Berger, about whom Dyer has written, are apt. Brooks Johnson, one of this year's Infinity Award selectors, writes: “The Ongoing Moment offers a fresh perspective for understanding why photography affects us all so profoundly. Geoff Dyer is a real writer-someone with definite style as well as ideas.”

Dyer was born 1958 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 1980. His first book, Ways of Telling, was published in 1986. Dyer has written a total of ten books, including histories, essays, and novels. He was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1992 for But Beautiful; Out of Sheer Rage was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist in 1997; and his most recent book, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It, won the W. H. Smith Prize for best Travel Book in 2004. Dyer has also published articles, essays, and reviews in most of the leading national newspapers and magazines in the United Kingdom. He lives in London.