Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
JOHN BERGERThese contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
More John Berger Quotes
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What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
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The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation.
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The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
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Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…
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Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.
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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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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.
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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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Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.
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Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.
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Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
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What do drawings mean to me? I really don’t know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don’t think happens with any other activity.
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Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.
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The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.
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I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.
JOHN BERGER