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
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
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: Difficulty, Imagination
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
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
—John Berger
Topics: Time Management, Time
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
Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
—John Berger
Topics: Legacy, Autobiography
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
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
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
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
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one’s faculties slowly dying?
—John Berger
Topics: Boredom, Bores
Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
—John Berger
Topics: Men, Men & Women, Women
To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.
—John Berger
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
Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant. This ideology is compounded from different sources: items that have survived from religion, items of empirical knowledge, items of protective skepticism, items culled for comfort from the superficial learning that is supplied. But the point is that common-sense can never teach itself, can never advance beyond its own limits, for as soon as the lack of fundamental learning has been made good, all items become questionable and the whole function of common-sense is destroyed. Common-sense can only exist as a category insofar as it can be distinguished from the spirit of inquiry, from philosophy.
—John Berger
Topics: Common Sense
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
The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.
—John Berger
Topics: The Past, Past
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
What makes photography a strange invention—with unforeseeable consequences—is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
—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
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.
—John Berger
Topics: Wealth
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
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
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
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
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
Topics: Words
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
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 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
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
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