Quote

The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.

John Berger

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Invisible
Photograph
True
Form
Play
Time
Derives
Content

More quotes by John Berger

Image
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
John Berger
Image
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
John Berger
Image
Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
John Berger
Image
Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
John Berger
Image
When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
John Berger
Image
The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
John Berger
Image
It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.
John Berger
Image
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
John Berger
Image
Today the discredit of words is very great.
John Berger
Image
The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality... could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.
John Berger
Image
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
Image
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
John Berger
Image
For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase it is quite literally true.
John Berger
Image
The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
John Berger
Image
In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
John Berger
Image
In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
John Berger
Image
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
John Berger
Image
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
John Berger
Image
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.
John Berger
Image
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.
John Berger