Phototcopies by John Berger

I know John Berger as the art theorist who wrote Ways of Seeing which I never read but I'm pretty sure was semi-required when I was doing my degree in visual arts. So I was curious to see Berger's name on the literature shelves of my neighbourhood mega-bookstore. The blurb on the back convinced me to plunk down money for it:

"...a collection of moments, each supremely vivd, that together make up a frieze of human history at the end of the millenium..." as well as "...these twenty-nine 'photocopies' teach us about lying and self-invention, dignity and tenderness, charity and courage."

Sounded good to me. I liked the way Berger uses the term photocopies for his anecdotes/memories - they are not the original experience, but the best we can do in this babel-esque world of imperfect communication. The name also works because, despite the impact each anecdote does have, there is something faded in the elements of their telling. As the reader you can enjoy and benefit from the author's epiphanies, but you never forget that you are not really there.

This lack of drama is underlined even more by the fact that Berger's settings are plenty exotic and adventurous. His memories take him high into the alps; into a French prison; to an artist's studio in Paris; shipbound for Sifnos island; on a long walk from India to Lahore during the birth of Pakistan. But it is stuff underneath all this that Berger notes, stuff more human and profound than the external details that help illuminate the stuff, but don't really rate as significant or even that interesting. It is this stuff that Berger portrays so vividly, and makes his elegant quiet tales so full of wonder:

"People ask me about my new projects,[Henri Cartier-Bresson] says, smiling. What shall I say to them? To make love tonight. To do another drawing this afternoon. To be surprised!
  I take the lift down from the apartment on the fifth floor and I think he may do another drawing.
  In the Métro I find a seat in a coach which is more than half full. At the end of the coach, a man in his early forties makes a short speech about his handicapped wife whom he is leading by the hand and who follows him with her eyes shut. They've beeen turned out of their lodgings, he says, and they risk to be separated if they apply to any institution.
  You don't know, the man tells the coach, what it's like loving a handicapped woman - I love her most of the time, I love her at least as much as you love your wives and husbands.
  Some passengers give him money. To each one the man says: Merci pour votre sensibilité
  At a certain moment during this scene I suddenly glanced towards the door, expecting him to be there with his Leica. This gesture of mine was instantaneous and without reflection.
  Photography, he once wrote in his maternal handwriting, is a spontaneous impluse which comes from perpetually looking, and which seizes the instant and its eternity."

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