John Berger
John Berger
John Peter Bergeris an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth5 November 1926
government people wielding-power
As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances. A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.
inspirational photography light
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
orphan form autobiography
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
compassion order way
Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity. Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.
dream publicity culture
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.
village emigration metropolis
Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
sadness men doe
So time doesn't count, and place does?' I said this to tease her. When I was a man, I liked teasing her and she went along with it, consenting, for it reminded us both of a sadness that had passed.
power illusion greater
The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
artist unity together
It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours. Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
writing trying stories
It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
memories stranger photograph
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
names needs stories
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
loss might would-be
What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
medicine soul mountain
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.