Man without a Camera

I've been reading a book a friend recommended which is about photography, almost entirely devoted to the work of American photographers. The author is the novelist Geoff Dyer, who doesn't own and never has owned a camera. He doesn't know what it is like to choose a shot, select the aperture or the speed, decide on methods of printing. But he knows how to look, how to interpret, how to place in context, how to understand. He is, after all, a novelist.

I am entranced. I don't own a camera either, and have begun to realise why I have so few pictures of my children as they were growing up. It was their voices that captured me more than their appearance - working in radio may have been the root of this - but to read what another novelist has to say about photographs is magic. I wish I had come across this before I wrote The Small Book because one of the main protagonists in it is a photographer. Do read this: The Ongoing Moment