John Berger
John Berger
John Peter Bergeris an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth5 November 1926
believe men cities
Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
artist drawing discovery
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
men done contrast
A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence . . . defines what can and cannot be done to her.
loss space together
Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart... Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
orphan form autobiography
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
photography drawing doe
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
photography opposites different
All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
mean thinking forget-everything
What do drawings mean to me? I really don't know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don't think happens with any other activity.
village emigration metropolis
Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
beauty naked oneself
To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
government people wielding-power
As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances. A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
wall book reading
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own.
world facts seeing
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
invisible destination draws
We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination