A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
JOHN BERGERIf the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
More John Berger Quotes
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No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
JOHN BERGER -
Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
JOHN BERGER -
A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.
JOHN BERGER -
Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.
JOHN BERGER -
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it
JOHN BERGER -
A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
JOHN BERGER -
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
JOHN BERGER -
Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
JOHN BERGER -
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.
JOHN BERGER -
Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER -
Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
JOHN BERGER -
You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.
JOHN BERGER -
Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.
JOHN BERGER -
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.
JOHN BERGER