John Peter Berger (1926–2017) was a prolific English art critic, essayist, and novelist. He was one of the most influential writers of his generation.
Born in London, Berger studied at the Central and Chelsea Schools of Art and launched his career as a painter and a drawing teacher, although he soon turned to write. His famous novels reflect his Marxist ideas and artistic background.
The best-known among Berger’s many works include the Booker Prize-winning novel G (1972) and Ways of Seeing (1972.) Ways of Seeing is an introductory essay on art criticism written as a supplement to a BBC television series of 30-minute films. It is often used as a college text and is has helped transform the way people comprehend art.
Pig Earth (1979) is an anthology of short stories of French peasant life and the first of the Into Their Labours trilogy, with Once in Europa (1989) and Lilac and Flag (1991.)
Actress Tilda Swinton co-produced and directed Seasons in Quincy (2016,) a four-part documentary about Berger’s life, works, and influence.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John Berger
Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
—John Berger
Topics: Men, Men & Women, Women
If I’m a storyteller it’s because I listen. For me, a storyteller is like a passeur who gets contraband across a frontier.
—John Berger
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
—John Berger
Topics: Autobiography, Legacy
Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.
—John Berger
Topics: Audiences, Actors
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.
—John Berger
Topics: Kindness, Compassion
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
—John Berger
Topics: Language
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. 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
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.
—John Berger
Topics: Culture, Capitalism
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.
—John Berger
Topics: Art
What makes photography a strange invention—with unforeseeable consequences—is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
—John Berger
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
Topics: Photography
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
—John Berger
The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters. Modern zoos are an epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man.
—John Berger
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.
—John Berger
Topics: Critics, Criticism
The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together
—John Berger
Topics: Love
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
Topics: Oppression, Travel
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
—John Berger
The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
—John Berger
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
Topics: Politics
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
Topics: Poverty
The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
—John Berger
Topics: Envy
The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognizes neither pity nor pitilessness.
—John Berger
Topics: Media
All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity—their links with their dead and the unborn.
—John Berger
Topics: Nation, Nationalism, Nationality, Nationalities
At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.
—John Berger
Topics: Perfection
Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal
—John Berger
Topics: Advertising
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one’s faculties slowly dying?
—John Berger
Topics: Bores, Boredom
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
Topics: Photography
The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.
—John Berger
Topics: Imagination, Difficulty
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
—John Berger
Topics: The Past, Past
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
Topics: Television
One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.
—John Berger
Topics: Doctors
Animals are born, are sentient and are mortal. In these things they resemble man. In their superficial anatomy — less in their deep anatomy — in their habits, in their time, in their physical capacities, they differ from man. They are both like and unlike.
—John Berger
A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. 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
Topics: Animals
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
—John Berger
Topics: Wealth
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
Topics: Reading, Books
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
Topics: Photography, Memory
Hope is not a form of guarantee; it’s a form of energy, and very frequently that energy is strongest in circumstances that are very dark.
—John Berger
A man’s death makes everything certain about him. Of course, secrets may die with him. And of course, a hundred years later somebody looking through some papers may discover a fact which throws a totally different light on his life and of which all the people who attended his funeral were ignorant. Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively. One does not know more facts about a man because he is dead. But what one already knows hardens and becomes definite. We cannot hope for ambiguities to be clarified, we cannot hope for further change, we cannot hope for more. We are now the protagonists and we have to make up our minds.
—John Berger
Topics: Death, Dying
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
Topics: Pleasure
Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
—John Berger
Topics: Evil
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