School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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The public and the private: John Berger's writing on photography and memory

MCQUIRE, SCOTT (ANU Canberra School of Art Gallery, 2000)

John Berger's writings on photography belong mostly to the 1970s. Like Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Berger is an advocate of realism, although in neither a naive nor a simplistic fashion. I argue that Berger's writing on photography stands out firstly because of its refusal of a blanket response. Instead, the pivot of his analysis is ambiguity: on one level, the ambiguity of photographic meaning, but also the ambiguity of photographic practice due to the social and political contradictions in which the camera is embedded. This refusal to homogenise the entire field is important, because it allowed Berger to remain attentive, at a moment when many were not, to the different registers of photographic usage.