Tag: John Berger

Fragments and Traces

That a photograph must tell a story is commonplace. “Storytelling” has conquered every form of photography, from landscape to street photography to elaborately staged scenes. I prefer to see photographs as fragments, extraits from a now lost present. John Berger remarked on the gap between the moment photographed and the present, saying

All photographs are of the past, and yet in them an instant of the past is arrested so that, unlike a lived past, it can never lead to the present.

Urban #230727.1.

Photographs, in being fragments contain only traces of their own immediate pasts. From those traces we imagine a thousand different possible pasts that remain entombed like some ancient insect in the amber of the past.

Urban #230727.2.

July 27, 2023
Simplifying quotation

Every photographer knows that a photograph simplifies.… A photograph quotes from appearances but, in quoting, simplifies them. This simplification can increase legibility.
John Berger, Understanding a Photograph (2013), 74

April 10, 2020
A Photograph is …

A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.
John Berger, Understanding a Photograph, 25.

March 6, 2020
Photographs are not …

Every image embodies a way of seeing. Even a photograph. For photographs are not, as is often assumed, a mechanical record. Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible sights.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 10.

August 7, 2019