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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.

John Berger

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John Berger
Age: 90 †
Born: 1926
Born: November 5
Died: 2017
Died: January 2
Art Critic
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Author
Critic
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Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Painter
Poet
Screenwriter
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Hackney
John Peter Berger
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Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it. You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn't work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.
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Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.
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The envied are like bureaucrats the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
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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
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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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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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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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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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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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[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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Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
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The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
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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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Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
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Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one's self to be bored.
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Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
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Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
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