Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.
JOHN BERGERThe publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
More John Berger Quotes
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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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What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and 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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History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
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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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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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Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
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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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It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours.
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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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Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.
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Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.
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You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
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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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A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist’s own needs; a ‘finished’ statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work – related far more directly to the demands of communication.
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These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.
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Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
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Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
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You cant draw it for others. You can try, of course, but it doesn’t work. People obeying rules laid down my somebody else is not the same thing as respecting life. And if you want to respect life, you have to draw a line.
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Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.
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Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.
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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 century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
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Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.
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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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It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
JOHN BERGER