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.
JOHN BERGEREvery painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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Nothing fortuitous happens in a child’s world. There are no accidents. Everything is connected with everything else and everything can be explained by everything else. . . . For a young child everything that happens is a necessity.
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All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.
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The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
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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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If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
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Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
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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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If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
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(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.
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There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].
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All publicity works upon anxiety.
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You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest – if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
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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.
JOHN BERGER