The Ongoing Moment Geoff Dyer Little, Brown, *285pp, £20 ISBN 0316730254

Despite the well-worn dictum about inspiration and perspiration, looking like you're not trying is a prerequisite of cool, even for geniuses. And that doesn't go just for Sid Vicious and Charlotte Church. The greatest art, wrote Raphael's friend Baldassare Castiglione in 16th-century Italy, is that of sprezzatura, "which conceals art, and presents what is done and said as if it was done without effort and virtually without thought".

Geoff Dyer, English letters' own Renaissance man, is as industrious a seeming dilettante as even Castiglione could hope for. The Ongoing Moment, Dyer's survey of 20th-century American photography, follows a pattern familiar from his 1991 jazz book, But Beautiful. Dyer establishes that he is utterly, sweepingly unqualified to write on a subject ("I mean I don't even own a camera," he exclaims with plaintive disingenuity), then carries out a sneaky sideways raid on the scholars' and experts' territory, creating something unexpected and rather beautiful in the process.

Photography, already staked out by writers such as Susan Sontag, John Berger and Roland Barthes, is a tougher brief than jazz, however. In the face of this competition, Dyer's protesting-too-much achieves camp new heights. "I might not be a photographer," he announces, having invoked Alfred Stieglitz, Cartier-Bresson and Garry Winogrand, "but now I see the kind of photographs I might have taken if I were one." This is faux modesty to vie with Lady Catherine de Bourgh's assertion, in Pride and Prejudice, that had she ever learned to play the piano she "should have been a great proficient".

Once the preliminary eyelash-fluttering is out of the way, The Ongoing Moment picks up sharply. Dyer sets out to watch 20th-century American photographers "doing personalised versions" of recurring images - blind beggars, hats, broken benches, roads, steps and hands - and, having aligned the content, to track down the elusive substance of photographic style. In the process, he weaves narratives that break off and circle back on themselves. Where Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It (2003) was a ramble across several continents, The Ongoing Moment is a picaresque through the history of photography.

But picaresques are notoriously patchy: even Tristram Shandy and The Incredible Journey have their boring bits. When- ever he temporarily forgets where he's going, Dyer has his own brand of cruise control. Let's whip out the polysyllables and the serious-minded italics, you can almost hear him thinking, and give this baby some serious gravitas. The insight that a book on photography and a stack of photographs are physically distinct translates into: "This book aims to emulate the aleatory experience of dipping into a pile of photographs as far as is compatible with the constraints of binding, of its being a book."

At their best, however, Dyer's juxtapositions have a beautiful lightness of touch. Dorothea Lange's The Road West, New Mexico (1938), an empty highway unrolling itself dead straight to the horizon, is Depression-era America's dream of itself on "a long road to some kind of economic salvation". In Robert Frank's echo of Lange's picture, US 285, New Mexico (1955-56), the highway - now with a car heading back towards the camera - offers "the promise and romance of new adventures". Unsurprisingly, Jack Kerouac loved this image. Where Lange, Dyer writes, "documented a desperate search for work, here the search is not for work but for works of art, for images".

Twenty years later, by the time Michael Ormerod is photographing a cowboy through his dirty windscreen, the highway has disappeared from the bottom of the frame, replaced by the hood of the car. There is no road, Dyer suggests, because the road has become a destination, no longer simply a means of reaching a destination; the car "is not simply a thing that enables one to get around but a way of seeing, a world-view".

There is nothing extraordinary or, to contradict most of Dyer's reviewers, extraordinarily clever about these observations. They show us, largely in thoughtful, sensitive prose, that photographers work within a tradition and quote from one another - that photography discusses itself. "Everything he saw," Dyer writes of Walker Evans at the end of his career, "was like a memory of itself." This attentive, from-the-ground-up approach to art is diametrically opposed to, say, John Carey's method of concocting an abstract argument, and then shoehorning even the most recalcitrant evidence in to fit. Dyer's rapturous critical reception is a reminder that intelligent criticism (as opposed to redaction or polemic) of the arts is too rarely available to general readers, and we need more of it.

Rachel Aspden is deputy arts and books editor of the NS

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