The zoo cannot but disappoint.
JOHN BERGERThe zoo cannot but disappoint.
JOHN BERGEREvery city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
JOHN BERGERHope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
JOHN BERGERI wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
JOHN BERGERAll photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.
JOHN BERGERTo remain innocent may also be. to remain ignorant.
JOHN BERGERThese contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
JOHN BERGEREthics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
JOHN BERGERWe who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination
JOHN BERGERTraditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
JOHN BERGERYou are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest – if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
JOHN BERGERAll weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.
JOHN BERGERWhen 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.
JOHN BERGEREvery authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.
JOHN BERGERCompassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
JOHN BERGERWe never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
JOHN BERGER