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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.

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
Photograph
Contradictory
Using
Viewers
Image
Contradiction
Increase
Meeting
Photographic
Interest
Hide
Photographed
Natural
Meetings
Viewer
Often
Photographer
Contradictions
Place
Interests
Ambiguity

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Today the discredit of words is very great.
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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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Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
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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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All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
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If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
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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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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
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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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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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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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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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