Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
JOHN BERGERDrawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
More John Berger Quotes
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Every 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.
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By contrast, a woman’s presence… defines what can and cannot be done to her.
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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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Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.
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I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.
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Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.
JOHN BERGER -
The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
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Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
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Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
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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.
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Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
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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 -
Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
JOHN BERGER