Books about photography tend to ‘foreground’, as their writers are apt to say, the backgrounds and angles of the photographers concerned. Quick as a click comes cock-eyed disquisition. The temptation to read into an innocent snap the workings of the snapper’s subconscious is seldom resisted and once theory has been fed into the picture, photographs become pretexts for blinding art-speak.

Geoff Dyer’s approach is an engaging contrast. He admits to not even owning a camera, he’s neither hands-on nor technically academic. As books on photography go this one is meagrely illustrated, but a thousand words or so of description substitute well enough for each photo he fails to reproduce. And his footnotes prickle nicely. (‘Like most people I stopped being interested in unmade beds when Tracy Emin exhibited hers at the Tate in 1998.’)

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