commentary in letters on the work of photographer
Martine Franck,Martine Franck: One Day to the
Next(1999), and a stunning revision of his own
work, the novellaOnce In Europa(1987/99), which
he transformed into a dialogue of text and images
with the photographer Patricia Macdonald. In spite
of Berger’s trenchant criticism of photography—he
has famously dubbed it a ‘‘quotation of reality’’ and
like Susan Sontag indicted it for robbing us of the
ability to remember—he has been compelled by the
rich particularity of photographs, especially their
ability to convey social, political, physical, and even
environmental information. As one who believes
deeply in the rootedness of art in its historical and
political situation, Berger cannot help celebrating
and exploring photography’s fundamentally docu-
mentary nature.
Berger’s reputation as a critic of photography
rests largely on three texts: his first collaboration
with Jean Mohr,A Fortunate Man(1967, as of this
writing in its 54th printing), the essayWhy We
Look at Photographs(1978), and another Mohr
collaboration,Another Way of Telling(1982). His
fundamental insight, the ramifications of which he
explores in all three writings, is that photography is
essentially overdetermined in terms of information
and undetermined in terms of meaning. Just as
reality per se cannot explain itself, so the images
captured by the camera can convey an enormous—
indeed, often an uncontrollable—amount of detail
but remain ambiguous and always in need of inter-
pretation. To drive this point home, inAnother
Way of TellingMohr shows to a group of people
various photographs he has taken and asks them to
explain what they see. In only a few cases do their
conjectures approach the original circumstance of
the image, and in some instances completely con-
tradict it.
Such ambiguity poses significant problems. First,
outside their originating contexts, photographs risk
almost complete meaninglessness. So Berger at-
tempts to anchor their interpretation in a visual
‘‘grammar’’ that is little more than the fact of an
image’s coherence in an instant of time and in space.
The ‘‘art’’ of a photograph consists in the complex
of correspondences or relationships it frames. These
correspondences within an image articulate ideas
that include but reach beyond the particulars of
the moment. As Berger puts it, ‘‘In the expressive
photograph, appearances cease to be oracular and
become elucidatory.’’ For one so sensitive to the life
of photographs with in communities of interpreta-
tion, this is a strikingly formalist approach, placing
great weight on the graphic and iconographic struc-
tures of the image.
Nevertheless, photographic images can be used
for any purpose, from propaganda to testimony to
advertising, and as soon as a private image, with
direct and clear significance to some viewer, be-
comes severed from this viewing context, it loses its
anchor (but not necessarily its poignancy). This
suggests another way that photographs can be
made to ‘‘mean’’—as elements of a narrative. Cou-
pling image and text can limit and direct the photo-
graph’s waywardness and even restore it as an agent
of memory. As Berger puts it inWhy We Look at
Photographs, ‘‘A radial system has to be constructed
around the photograph so that it may be seen in
terms which are simultaneously personal, political,
economic, dramatic, everyday and historic.’’
Berger had already embodied this idea of story-
telling inA Fortunate Man, his collaboration with
Mohr detailing the life of the rural English doctor
John Sassall. More narrowly political and psycho-
logical than its journalistic predecessorsLet Us Now
Praise Famous Menby James Agee and photogra-
pher Walker Evans or the photo stories of W.
Eugene Smith for Lifemagazine, Berger’s book
preserves their traditional relation between image
and the explicating, polemical text. Not soOnce In
Europa, his story of love, death, and industrial
exploitation in rural France. Here it is the images
that comment on, contextualize, and expand the
framework of the written story and its characters.
Another Way of Telling takes yet a third ap-
proach, eschewing commentary at the end of the
book in favor of an extended suite of images, which
leave it to the reader to reconstruct a ‘‘story’’ of
French peasant life. This follows the line of Ber-
ger’s didactic and highly successful art history text,
Ways of Seeing(1972), which provides readers var-
ious ways of interrogating art images and objects,
and then gives them images to work on. In truth,
Berger’s photomontages aspire to the condition of
cinema, a form that can fully reap the suggestive
benefits of juxtaposition, explore the texture of
duration and history, and unfold a set of terms
for its own interpretation.
Yet in the end, Berger is drawn to the single
image as the bearer of existential and historical tes-
timony. Where critic Roland Barthes scans pho-
tographs like a visual flaneur, Berger scrutinizes
images for their lived realities and fugitive insights.
He is at his best as an interpreter, discovering
through his responses to what he sees, broader sig-
nificance, whether in August Sander’s image of
three country boys in suits or in Paul Strand’s pho-
tographs. Perhaps what Berger is ultimately seeking
is the core of memory within himself, not sup-
pressed but released by the photograph. TheseBERGER, JOHN