The Ongoing Moment

With no chapter breaks or headers, the book runs as one continuous digression, and many of the photographs Dyer describes in close detail aren't even reproduced on the page, so readers report stopping mid-sentence to search for the image on a phone. The ones that are included print small and low-contrast, one reader calling them “tiny, very hard to see any detail at all.” The Stieglitz section runs so long that one reader complains, “I know more about his tragic sex life than his photos,” and another mocks the method itself after a passage built around a photograph of a fence: “It's a fucking fence. I put it on Instagram last night.” A critic pushes further, arguing the book's core premise, that these photographers were unconsciously echoing each other, falls apart once you look closely at the examples.