Quotations from John Berger’s Understanding a Photograph.
[p. 32] On the contrast between moments—that which is captured in a photograph, and the present moment in one’s life, during which one looks at the photograph:
As we emerge from the photographed moment [of agony] back into our lives, we do not realize this; we assume that the discontinuity is our responsibility. The truth is that any response to that photographed moment is bound to be felt as inadequate. Those who are there in the situation being photographed, those who hold the hand of the dying or staunch a wound, are not seeing the moment as we have and their responses are of an altogether different order. It is not possible for anyone to look pensively at such a moment and to emerge stronger.
[pp. 41-42] Suits:
The suit, as we know it today, developed in Europe as a professional ruling-class costume in the last third of the nineteenth century. Almost anonymous as a uniform, it was the first ruling-class costume to idealize purely sedentary power. The power of the administrator and conference table. Essentially the suit was made for the gestures of talking and calculating abstractly. (As distinct, compared to previous upper-class costumes, from the gestures of riding, hunting, dancing, duelling.)
The working classes — but peasants were simpler and more naïve about it than workers — came to accept as their own certain standards of the class that ruled over them — in this case standards of the chic and sartorial worthiness. At the same time their very acceptance of these standards, their very conforming to these norms which had nothing to do with either their own inheritance or their daily experience, condemned them, within the system of those standards, to being always, and recognizably to the classes above them, second-rate, clumsy, uncouth, defensive. That indeed is to succumb to a cultural hegemony.
[pp. 49-50] On photography and the camera (having read—and in response to—Susan Sontag’s On Photography):
The camera was invented by Fox Talbot in 1839. Within a mere thirty years of its invention as a gadget for an elite, photography was being used for police filing, war reporting, military reconnaissance, pornography, encyclopedic documentation, family albums, postcards, anthropological records (often, as with the Indians in the United States, accompanied by genocide), sentimental moralizing, inquisitive probing (the wrongly named ‘candid camera’), aesthetic effects, news reporting and formal portraiture.
In the first period of its existence photography offered a new technical opportunity; it was an implement. Now, instead of offering new choices, its usage and its ‘reading’ were becoming habitual, an unexamined part of modern perception itself. Many developments contributed to this transformation. The new film industry. The invention of the lightweight camera — so that the taking of a photograph ceased to be a ritual and became a ‘reflex’. The discovery of photojournalism — whereby the text follows the pictures instead of vice versa. The emergence of advertising as a crucial economic force.
[p. 50] Quoting Sontag here:
Through photographs, the world becomes a series of unrelated, free-standing particles; and history, past and present, a set of anecdotes and faits divers. The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.
[pp. 54-55] Effects of the insatiable yearning we now have for (creating and experiencing) images:
Memory implies a certain act of redemption. What is remembered has been saved from nothingness. What is forgotten has been abandoned. If all events are seen, instantaneously, outside time, by a supernatural eye, the distinction between remembering and forgetting is transformed into an act of judgement, into a rendering of justice, whereby recognition is close to being remembered and condemnation is close to being forgotten. Such a presentiment, extracted from man’s long, painful experience of time, is to be found in varying forms in almost every culture and religion, and, very clearly, in Christianity.
The industrialized, ‘developed’ world, terrified of the past, blind to the future, lives within an opportunism which has emptied the principle of justice of all credibility. Such opportunism turns everything — nature, history, suffering, other people, catastrophes, sport, sex, politics — into spectacle. And the implement used to do this — until the act becomes so habitual that the conditioned imagination may do it alone — is the camera.
[p. 55] Quoting Sontag:
Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera’s intervention. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself — so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph.
The preceding three statements nudge me to mull over the role and symbolism of the camera, during particular events that occurred in 2020. Berger said that the camera “which isolates a moment of agony isolates no more violently than the experience of that moment isolates itself” (p. 32). That is, an experience is always sharper than the effect its photograph can evoke. Under what conditions and to what extent does the presence of the camera—its unflinching gaze and propensity for immediate broadcast—deter or subdue acts of violence?
Berger adds, ”[t]he word trigger, applied to rifle and camera, reflects a correspondence which does not stop at the purely mechanical.” Notwithstanding that it can, itself, be a tool for violating others, it can be said that the camera, beyond being a companion or a witness, now also acts as a shield. That is, a trigger that requites violence with evidence. Whilst we contend with the awfully frequent denial and utter disregard for this evidence in administering justice, an equally worrying issue is brewing: the untrustworthy trigger. “Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera’s interventions.” It may be crafted by it too if we’re not careful.
[p. 62] Regarding a photograph of a man and a horse, shown to Berger by a friend:
The photograph offers irrefutable evidence that his man, this horse and this bridle existed. Yes it tells us nothing of the significance of their existence.
Well, it isn’t necessarily true anymore that the subjects and contents of a photograph ever existed. But everything comes from something. Therefore, something about—contained in—every photograph must have existed at some point. Although a photograph needn’t necessarily contain things that exist, it must contain a derivative of such a thing.
[p. 64] On meaning:
And in life meaning is not instantaneous. Meaning is discovered in what connects, and cannot exist without development. Without a story, without an unfolding, there is no meaning. Facts, information, do not in themselves constitute meaning[…] Certainty may be instantaneous: doubt requires duration; meaning is born of the two. An instant photograph can only acquire meaning in so far as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself. When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future.
[p. 72]:
What was achieved was unprecedented scientific and technical progress and, eventually, the subordination of all other values to those of a world market which treats everything, including people and their labour and their lives and their deaths, as a commodity.
[p. 128]:
In the winter of this century, children, women and men protect one another with imagination, with violence, with rage, with incomprehension, with ingenuity. The green heart is their capacity to love: their refusal of the principle of indifference.
[p. 131]:
Countless photographs violate the intimate simply by placing it in the public context of a book, a newspaper, a TV slot. Yet others — like most wedding photographs — make the intimate formal and thus empty of its content.
[p. 173] Quoting Simone Weil:
There are only two services which images can offer the afflicted. One is to find the story which expresses the truth of their affliction. The second is to find the words which can give resonance, through the crust of external circumstances, to the cry which is always inaudible: “Why am I being hurt?”
[p. 180] Quoting Weil (p. 180 ‘Human Personality’ in Simone Weil: An Anthology):
There is a natural alliance between truth and affliction, because both of them are mute supplicants, eternally condemned to stand speechless in our presence.
Just as a vagrant accused of stealling a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions.
[p. 180] Quoting Weil (from ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God’ in Waiting on God)
To love one’s neighbour is a question of being able to ask simply: what is your torment? Of knowing affliction exists, not a statistic, not as an example from a social category labelled ‘underprivileged’, but as something which happens to a human being, exactly comparable with us, who one day was struck and marked down with a mark that is like no other, by affliction. And to know that it is sufficient — but indispensable — to be able to look at this person with recognition and attention.
See other notes on books.