Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.
JOHN BERGERPhotographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.
More John Berger Quotes
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For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.
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There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].
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We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.
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Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
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What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
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The zoo cannot but disappoint.
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The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.
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It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours.
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It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.
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Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.
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To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.
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The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.
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Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
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One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.
JOHN BERGER