Summary
Critic of the visual arts whose work on photography and representation Said uses as a guide for interference across fields in essay 13 and treats at length in essay 14, “Bursts of Meaning” (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.153-154, p.157-161).
Details
- In essay 13 Berger suggests photography, coeval in its origins with sociology and positivism, shared their hope that observable quantifiable facts recorded by experts would constitute proven truth; instead the way opened to a view reducing everything and everybody to a factor in a calculation, “and the calculation was profit” (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.153-154). His alternative use of photography — photomontage telling other stories than the official ones — is one of the essay’s two concrete tasks (PDF p.154).
- Essay 14: the standard objection that Berger’s criticism is too sentimental and too earnest is, in Said’s account, inaccurate and uninteresting; Berger is an unorthodox Marxist who constructs no massive new theoretical framework, and his project is to distinguish the authentic from the merely successful — in Pig Earth, and in his studies of Picasso, photography and “ways of seeing” (PDF p.157).
- Another Way of Telling, co-authored with Jean Mohr, with whom he also produced A Fortunate Man and A Seventh Man, is his most ambitious account of art’s positive uses: Mohr’s reflections, Berger’s “Appearances”, 150 photographs by Mohr around the life of an elderly French peasant woman, Berger’s “Stories”, and a closing photograph-poem pair replacing narrative with constellations of experience (PDF p.157-158).
- Berger’s argument against linear sequence: the conflation of time with History made “public photography” reduce its subjects to statistics, while the photograph’s ambiguity can be acknowledged through interpretive words or denied under “the opportunism of corporate capitalism” (PDF p.158-159); a sequence read his way becomes a “field of coexistence like the field of memory” (PDF p.160).
- Said’s skepticism: unlike Lukács and Gramsci, Berger fails to deal with ideology’s power to saturate culture, and he does not connect his aesthetics with action or with the future — a step his achievement makes it seem would not be hard for him to take (PDF p.160-161).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said, György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci