All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.
JOHN BERGERPhotography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
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If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
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The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.
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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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The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.
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Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.
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These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
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At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
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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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What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.
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The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.
JOHN BERGER -
Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
JOHN BERGER