John Berger – Photocopies

Like a photographer with his camera, John Berger uses words to capture moments: preserving them, denying their inherent transience. A passing encounter, an almost unnoticed gesture, a brief pause. 

Berger observes and transcribes them, and in so doing uncovers the extraordinary heart of the ordinary. This collection of stories brings a richly imagined landscape of elusive and ephemeral moments into eloquent existence.

This is a collection of short pieces (published in 1996), each based around an image or recollection. 

They don't really become stories, and that fact often enhances their reach, as the abiding feeling is that we have a sure-footed but unjudgmental author, an expatriate in more ways than one, who is keen to observe but not to dissect. Obviously he opines occasionally, and his persona interacts in the first person with them, but the overall feeling is of exploring a frozen moment with a set of suppositions, some incontrovertible facts and a few flashes of enlightenment.

John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a college text.

Later he was self exiled to continental Europe, living between the french Alps in summer and the suburbs of Paris in winter. Since then, his production has increased considerably, including a variety of genres, from novel to social essay, or poetry. One of the most common themes that appears on his books is the dialectics established between modernity and memory and loss, 


Another of his most remarkable works has been the trilogy titled Into Their Labours, that includes the books Pig Earth (1979), Once In Europa (1983) Lilac And Flag (1990). 

With those books, Berger makes a meditation about the way of the peasant, that changes one poverty for another in the city. This theme is also observed in his novel King, but there he focuses more in the rural diaspora and the bitter side of the urban way of life.