A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.
JOHN BERGERJapanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.
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What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.
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The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.
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Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
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A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.
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Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)
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Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;
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Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.
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If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
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Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.
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For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.
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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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Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.
JOHN BERGER