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
according change forgets looking meaning opposite painter paintings photo record remind ways
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.
god photography memories
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
photograph ifs meaningless
If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
memories stranger photograph
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
play invisible photograph
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
photography flirting flow
Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
photographer contradiction natural
A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
photography memories cameras
The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
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.
inspirational photography light
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
photography decision choices
Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer's decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
I very seldom read back into what I've written.
invariably serves
Propaganda invariably serves the long-term interests of some elite.