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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.

John Berger

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John Berger
Age: 90 †
Born: 1926
Born: November 5
Died: 2017
Died: January 2
Art Critic
Art Historian
Author
Critic
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Painter
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Hackney
John Peter Berger
Happen
Grows
Happens
Book
Years
Authors
Unlike
Younger
Pass

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We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
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The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.
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Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion. The woman's sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion
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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
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The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.
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We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
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What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
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[O]ften art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. . . .
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The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
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Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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'Fahrenheit 9/11' is astounding. Not so much as a film - although it is cunning and moving - but as an event.
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Today the discredit of words is very great.
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The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.
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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.
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A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
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The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.
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All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity - their links with their dead and the unborn.
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