John Berger
[Writer and critic, b. 1926, London, d. 2017, Paris.]
We hate to look at his [Donald McCullin’s] pictures, but we have to. McCullin is the eye we cannot shut.
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.
The private photograph is treated and valued today as if it were the materialization of that glimpse through the window which looked across history towards that which was outside time.
Human visual perception is a far more complex and selective process than that by which a film records. Nevertheless the camera lens and the eye both register images—because of their sensitivity to light—at great speed and in the face of an immediate event. What the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps forever but for as long as the film exists.
A photograph is evidence of an encounter between event and photographer. A drawing slowly questions an event’s appearance and in doing so reminds us that appearances are always a construction with a history.
