What any true painting touches is an absence – an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
JOHN BERGERFor those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
More John Berger Quotes
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Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.
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Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.
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What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
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The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
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(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.
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Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.
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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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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)
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Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
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But toemigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.
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The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
JOHN BERGER