Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights. This is true even in the most casual family snapshot. The photographer’s way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject.

— John Berger

John Berger Quotes

Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident.

— John Berger

It is a mistake to think of publicity supplanting the visual art of post-Renaissance Europe; it is the last moribund form of that art.

— John Berger

Just after the Second World War Picasso bought a house in the South of France and paid for it with one still-life. Picasso has now in fact transcended the need for money. Whatever he wishes to own, he can acquire by drawing it. The truth has become a little like the fable of Midas.

— John Berger

The photographic moment for Cartier-Bresson is an instant, a fraction of a second, and he stalks that instant as though it were a wild animal. The photographic moment for Strand is a biographical or historic moment, whose duration is ideally measured not by seconds but by its relation to a lifetime. Strand does not pursue an instant, but encourages a moment to arise as one might encourage a story to be told.

— John Berger

Like an artist, or like anybody else who believes that his work justifies his life, Sassall – by our society’s miserable standards – is a fortunate man.

— John Berger

Falling in love at five or six, although rare, is the same as falling in love at fifty. One may interpret one’s feelings differently, the outcome may be different, but the state of feeling and of being is the same.

— John Berger

The gap between what publicity actually offers and the future it promises, corresponds with the gap between what the spectator-buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be. The two gaps become one; and instead of the single gap being bridged by action or lived experience, it is filled with glamorous daydreams.

— John Berger

Lace is a kind of white writing which you can only read when there’s skin behind it.

— John Berger

Most people, she said, can’t stand the truth. It’s too bad but there it is, most people can’t stand it.

— John Berger

Clouds gather visibility, and then disperse into invisibility. All appearances are of the nature of clouds.

— John Berger

In the imaginative movement which prompts the impulse to draw repeats implicitly the same pattern... there is a symbiotic desire to get closer and closer, to enter the self of what is being drawn, and, simultaneously, there is the foreknowledge of immanent distance. Such drawings aspire to be both a secret rendezvous and a au-revoir! Alternately and at infinitum.

— John Berger

You were like no man I had ever heard of. You could have made whatever you liked of me. But you did nothing. A woman isn’t like money that put in a bank and it will bring you interest without you doing anything about it. A woman is a person.

— John Berger

One’s death is already one’s own. It belongs to nobody else: not even to a killer. This means that it is already part of one’s life.

— John Berger

The inability to remember is itself perhaps a memory.

— John Berger

A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history.

— John Berger

The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless.

— John Berger

Who does not know what it is like to go with a friend to a railway station and then to watch the train take them away? As you walk along the platform back into the city, the person who has just gone is often more there, more totally there, than when you embraced them before they climbed into the train. When we embrace to say goodbye, maybe we do it for this reason – to take into our arms what we want to keep when they’ve gone.

— John Berger

Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights. This is true even in the most casual family snapshot. The photographer’s way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject.

— John Berger

Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.

— John Berger

If the word revolution is used seriously and not merely as an epithet for this season’s novelties, it implies a process. No revolution is simply the result of personal originality. The maximum that such originality can achieve is madness: madness is revolutionary freedom confined to the self.

— John Berger
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