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“[Photographer] Dorothea Lange also believed that ‘to know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting.’ As far as she was concerned it was fine for a photographer to work ‘completely without plan’ and just photograph ‘that to which he instinctively responds’. Taking Lange at her word I tried as far as possible to be open to anything, ‘like a piece of unexposed, sensitized material’. Certain pictures caught my eye, just as certain things happened to catch the eye of the photographers who took them in the first place. Initially chance played a key part in both processes. After a point, though, I began to see that a number of these photos had something in common — a hat, say — and once I became aware of this I started to look out for pictures of hats. I wanted my take on photography to be arbitrary, incidental, but at some point things necessarily coalesced under particular areas of interest. As soon as I realized I was drawn to hats the idea of the hat became an organizing principle or node” (6).

“I wanted, among other things, to look at photographs to see what new knowledge I could derive from them — though I couldn’t do this without bringing a certain amount of old knowledge to bear on them” (7).

“Music evokes a sense of sightlessness or loss — a loss for which it is both lament and compensation” (25).

“They have no memories, [Edward] Hopper’s pictures. That’s why they generate such intense curiosity about what is happening either side of the moment depicted” (197).

“The poet Mark Strand has pointed out that ‘Hopper’s use of light is almost always descriptive of time.’ His ability ‘to use space convincingly as a metaphor for time is extraordinary. It demonstrates the ratio between stillness and emptiness, so that we are able to experience the emptiness of
moments, hours, a whole lifetime’” (222).

“The same question keeps coming up: how long does a coincidence last?” (237).

Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment (2005)