Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.
JOHN BERGERThese contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
More John Berger Quotes
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What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
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To be naked is to be oneself.
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
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For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal
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Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
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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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Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.
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Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
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A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
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A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory.
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When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.
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The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.
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Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
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Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature
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If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
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Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream.
JOHN BERGER -
Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
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All creation is in the art of seeing.
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
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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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We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves inside a message.
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One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
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Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity.
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All publicity works upon anxiety.
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Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
JOHN BERGER