John Berger

Every revolutionary protest is also a project against people being the objects of history.

The Surrealist painter Magritte commented on this always-present gap between words and seeing in a painting called The Key of Dreams.

The reciprocal nature of vision is more fundamental than that of spoken dialogue. And often dialogue is an attempt to verbalize this – an attempt to explain how, either metaphorically or literally, ‘you see things’, and an attempt to discover how ‘he sees things’

Yet, although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing.

The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past. The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act. Cultural mystification of the past entails a double loss. Works of art are made unnecessarily remote. And the past offers us fewer conclusions to complete in action.

When we ‘see’ a landscape, we situate ourselves in it. If we ‘saw’ the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history. When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us. Who benefits from this deprivation? In the end, the art of the past is being mystified because a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes, and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms. And so, inevitably, it mystifies.

The way that it appeared and disappeared gave it the mysterious intimacy of a household god. I have always thought that household gods were animals. Sometimes visible and sometimes invisible, but always present

Why is it that what is useful is always so ugly?

Today, when things are changing politically and it seems possible for man to change his fate, such people are becoming aware of the differences between different countries.

The space for this construction is, as it were, cleared by his rejection of what he did not choose to photograph.