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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.

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
Total
Stranger
Photograph
Memory
Memories
Public
Unknowable
Contributes

More quotes by John Berger

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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase it is quite literally true.
John Berger
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Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
John Berger
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The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.
John Berger
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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.
John Berger
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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. . . .
John Berger
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The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
John Berger
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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.
John Berger
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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
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Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko... all believed in the social role of art... Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering music with painting poetry with design fine art with propaganda photographs with typography diagrams with action the studio with the street.
John Berger
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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.
John Berger
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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
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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
John Berger
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The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
John Berger
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
John Berger
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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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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
John Berger
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Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
John Berger
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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.
John Berger
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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.
John Berger
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We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
John Berger