Quote

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.

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
Nothing
Painting
Correct
Done
Modern
Longing
Modernism
Sometimes
Rather
Rage
Concerning
Giving
Desire
Pity
Collaboration
Good
Fear
Creator
Follows
Like
Artist
Illusion
Post
Form
Based
Posts
Seems
Usually
Seldom

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The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
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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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The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
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Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
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To remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
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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.
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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
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Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
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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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History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase it is quite literally true.
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Directors like Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Buñuel, Forman, Scorsese, and Spike Lee have used non-professional actors precisely in order that the people we see on the screen may be scarcely more explained than reality itself. Professionals, except fo the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.
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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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It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
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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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Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
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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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