PHOTOGRAPHY THEORY #4: John Berger

From a beginner's guide to photography by The Telegraph 

'Photographs of Agony' by John Berger (1972), digested by Rachel Segal HamiltonWhat's it about?How much photojournalism can change things for the better is subject to ongoing debate. One of the earlier writers to raise the issue was John Berger in this essay, first published in New Society magazine. Referring to a Don McCullin photograph of a wounded Vietnamese man and child, Berger considers why it has lately become acceptable to publish such graphic images. He gives two reasons. First, that newspapers are responding to readers who want to see the truth. Second, that readers have have become desensitised to these images and newspapers are publishing ever more shocking pictures to win their attention. Dismissing both explanations, Berger suggests a third: that these photographs can be published precisely because they don't make viewers question who might be responsible for the violence. If they did then papers – in thrall, he says, to the political establishment – wouldn't publish them. So what effect do they have? McCullin's images often capture moments in which time suddenly seems to pause – the instant a person cries out in grief, say. For viewers, time is similarly interrupted as we are, briefly, overcome with the victim's pain. But we mistakenly interpret this interruption as our own moral failure because we can't respond directly. We either think, "Well, what can I do?" and do nothing, or try to assuage our guilt by donating to charity. War photographs don't lead us to query the political systems under which wars take place – they just make war seem like some awful but inevitable feature of human life. In his own words:"[Photographs of agony] bring us up short. The most literal adjective that could be applied to them is arresting. We are seized by them.” “The reader who has been arrested by the photograph may tend to feel this discontinuity as his own moral inadequacy. And as soon as this happens even his sense of shock is dispersed: his own moral inadequacy may now shock him as much as the crimes being committed in the war.” “What we are shown horrifies us. The next step should be for us to confront our own lack of political freedom. In the political systems as they exist, we have no opportunity of effectively influencing the conduct of wars waged in our name.” How to sound as if you've read it:War photography - what is it good for? Making us feel bad about ourselves and despairing of humanity.

The first episode of his BBC series Ways Of Seeing:



Also later turned into a book:

A 2011 interview from BBC Newsnight:



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PHOTOGRAPHY THEORY #3: Walter Benjamin

From a beginner's guide to photography by The Telegraph 

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin (1936), digested by Lewis Bush 

What's it about? 

Walter Benjamin was a German-Jewish critic and essayist. In his lifetime he was relatively unappreciated but since his suicide in 1940 he has been reappraised as one of the 20th century’s most important writers. Published in 1936 and originally aimed at a small group of Marxist intellectuals this essay has rather surprisingly become Benjamin’s best known, partly helped by its prominence in John Berger’s influential 1972 television series Ways of Seeing.
Benjamin packs a remarkably wide ranging discussion into a relatively short space, but a key concept is the idea that unique works of art such as paintings possess an "aura" that copies and reproductions like photographs do not. Even though works of art have always been reproducible, whether by hand or through semi-mechanical processes such as stamping, modern forms of reproduction such as photography represent something new, allowing the artwork to be seen in very different contexts to the original, potentially changing how the work of art is understood.
For photography this essay is significant in two main respects. Firstly because it explores the belief that photographs are inferior to traditional forms of art such as painting. Secondly because it’s a very specific example of the way the context of a photograph alters the way a viewer understands the thing that it shows.  

In his own words: 

"Objects made by humans could always be copied by humans….but the technological reproduction of artworks is something new."
"In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art, its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence and nothing else that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject."
"What withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art."  

How to sound as if you've read it: 

The infinitely reproducible photograph lacks the aura of the unique work of art.