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Nudity
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Nakedness reveals itself.
Nudity is placed on display.
The nude is condemned to never
being naked.
Nudity is a form of dress.
-John Berger
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Past, the
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The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
-John Berger
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Photography
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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. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
-John Berger
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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. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
-John Berger
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
-John Berger
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The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.
-John Berger
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Pleasure
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The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation. 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
-John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, pt. 2, Random House (1984)
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Politics
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In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.
-John Berger
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Poverty
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The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
-John Berger
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Reading
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When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. 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.
-John Berger
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Television
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Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.
-John Berger
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Time
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Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
-John Berger
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Travel
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Ours is the century of enforced travel. . . of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
-John Berger, Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye, in Expressen (Stockholm; repr. in Keeping a Rendezvous, 1992), November 3, 1990
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Wealth
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Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
-John Berger
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Words
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Today the discredit of words is very great. Most of the time the media transmit lies. In the face of an intolerable world, words appear to change very little. State power has become congenitally deaf, which is why --but the editorialists forget it --terrorists are reduced to bombs and hijacking.
-John Berger
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Books by and about John Berger