See/Saw, Looking at Photographs, Geoff Dyer, Canongate, 336pp, £25 (hb)
The critic Geoff Dyer turns his erudite eye on some of the most important photographers of the past 150 years in his latest collection of essays, being published in April. Dyer follows in the footsteps of John Berger and Susan Sontag with this guide on how to “read a photograph”, decoding and deciphering images by August Sander, Dayanita Singh, William Eggleston and Vivian Maier, among others. In his analysis of Maier, Dyer says that “the discovery-lag [of her works posthumously] means that Maier’s work has not played its part in shaping how we see the world in the way that [Diane] Arbus’s has (even if she seems occasionally to have chanced on Arbusian subjects