Another way of Telling

Berger, J and Mohr, J

pub. Granta Cambridge, UK, 1989.

This book, a collaboration between a writer and a photographer, is, at its simplest level, about how peasants look at themselves. In it, the authors find themselves questioning and rejecting much of the received wisdom about photography: 'We discovered that photographs did not work as we had been taught.' (p84)...

Ch 2: Appearances. An essay by John Berger

This review is work in progress....

John Berger is not first and foremost a photographer. In order to complete a project, he once took instruction from his friend and colleague Jean Mohr. Since that time he has remained passionate about photography and, despite his 'theoretical and distanced' writings 'photography is still, first and foremost ... a means of expression. The all-important questions is: What kind of means?'

Berger begins his essay with a discussion about a found photograph: an image which was given to him with no contextual information at all. Because of the lack of information, it is almost impossible for the viewer to infer anything definite about the subject matter (a man and a horse, in this case). We cannot even date the image conclusively, let alone say why the man was photographed with a (his?) horse and what they were doing before and after the photograph was taken. To quote Berger: 'The photograph offers irrefutable evidence that this man, this horse and this bridle existed. Yet it tells us nothing of the significance of their existence.' (p86)

Whilst a photograph encapsulates a moment in time, recording an event which has been, it can never again be part of a continuum: 'unlike a lived past, it can never lead to the present'. Berger's point being that the photograph contains two fundamental messages - the event which has been recorded (Barthes' referent) and the slightly less obvious but nonetheless important notion of a 'shock of discontinuity'.

This is a really interesting point - the photograph records a moment in time, something which happened minutes, day, maybe years before the viewer sees it, but between the moment the shutter snapped and the present time there is, in Berger's words 'an abyss'. (p87) He suggests that we are so comfortable with this idea that we rarely acknowledge it except when there is particular significance attached to the photograph, for example when it is of a departed loved-one.

Once a photograph has been taken there is an undeniable record that the subject matter existed; 'the photographic evidence is less ambiguous than any eye-witness account'. (p88) If there is to be any ambiguity, Berger argues, it is in what happens after the moment has been recorded. The instant in time recorded in the photograph lacks meaning unless we give it a past and a future, and it is the role of the photographer to do this when selecting the both the subject matter and moment to release the shutter.

Berger goes on to explore this notion of ambiguity further, by saying that all photographs have been 'taken our of a continuity'. (91) When the image is captured, even of an ostensibly intransigent scene such as a landscape, there is a break in the continuum - in that example it is the light, the cloud formations, the seasonal context which are never to be repeated.

Words and photographs are inextricably linked: 'the photograph begs for an interpretation, the words usually supply it'. (p92) Berger argues that the two are symbiotic - whilst the photograph has irrefutable evidence on its side, it is weak on meaning; and conversely the words which supply that meaning are given authenticity by the evidence in the photograph. The question now asked, which underpins much of this whole essay, is whether the intrinsic ambiguity of a photograph could in fact lead us to 'another way of telling'.

(C) Jean Mohr