AFFINITIES

Essays on images and the slippery feelings they evoke.

In this follow-up to Essayism and Suppose a Sentence, Dillon delivers a series of short, belletristic pieces largely concerned with photography, but he has no broad thesis on the discipline à la Susan Sontag; nor is this exactly criticism of individual photographers and filmmakers, à la Geoff Dyer. Rather, as the book’s title suggests, Dillon is looking to capture moods and resonances that artists collectively generate, “a type of criticism without criticism.” He appreciates Dada collagist Hannah Höch for how images in one of her books “collide and rhyme across double-page spreads.” He seeks to expand the understanding of Diane Arbus as more than a chronicler of “the city’s freaks” and instead as a more nuanced artist exploring New York’s larger atmosphere. William Eggleston, writes Dillon, was a pioneer not just in terms of color art photography, but also in his ability to collapse social strata in his work. The TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited captures “blazing innocence and exhausted experience,” while the cut-up images of John Stezaker suggest “that our fascination with [photographs] is at once visual and tactile, almost grisly.” The essays on the individual artists are too short and subjective to serve as primers on their work, and the multiple pieces on affinity don’t cohere enough into a definition. However, the book is more than the sum of its parts, and Dillon conjures an uncanny mood, as the individual observations combine to create a sense of how eerie and disorienting images can be. That feeling is underscored by melancholy personal essays about his migraine auras, his mother’s death, and a troubled aunt who obsessively photographed her property for fear of its violation. In such moments, he reveals photography as not just an art form, but also a failed attempt to clarify reality and resolve our anxieties.

An engrossing, subjective, intentionally meandering trek through the meaning of images.