Photocopies
Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,History & Criticism
Photocopies Details
This is a collection of portraits of a shepherd, a farmer, a painter and blind man, a sylph of Byzantine arrogance and a vagabond cyclist with primroses growing in her basket. The backgrounds range from Prague, Paris, Athens, Lahore and countrysides and mountainscapes. John Berger is the author of "About Looking", "Ways of Seeing", "Art and Revolution", "G" - for which he won the Booker Prize, and the trilogy "Into Their Labours", consisting of "Pig Earth", "Once in Europe" and "Lilac and Flag". His latest novel is "To the Wedding". Read more
Reviews
"Photocopies" is a collection of twenty-eight stories, together with a photograph and a drawing. None of the stories is more than a few pages. Each of the "stories" is a vivid prose rendering of a person or place that left a seemingly indelible impression on John Berger's acutely refined sense of seeing. It is a collection marked by a minimalist sensibility, but not the cold, sterile minimalism found in the writing of Samuel Beckett or Gordon Lish. It is, instead, the warm, heartfelt minimalism of a writer striving to capture the fleeting, but enduringly memorable, moments of a human life."Photocopies" opens not with a photocopy, but with a photograph: the blurred, poorly-lighted photograph of a man and a woman standing under a tree. It is a sort of introduction to the first story, "A Woman and Man Standing by a Plum Tree," where Berger relates his memory of a woman he once met at a reading in Madrid who then turned up, several years later, at his country home in France. The woman is not identified by name. She is in her thirties, an artist and photographer who makes her living by restoring frescoes. The woman brings along a primitive, home-made plywood camera and, at the end of her visit, takes a picture of the two of them together under a plum tree:"The two of us stood there facing the camera. We moved, of course, but not more than the plum trees did in the wind. Minutes passed. Whilst we stood there, we reflected the light, and what we reflected went through the black hole into the dark box. It'll be of us, she said, and we waited expectantly."Unlike the photograph, the story that accompanies it, and the other twenty-seven stories in the collection, are clear, precise, vividly-rendered pictures from John Berger's memory. In this sense, Berger's use of a blurred photographic image to introduce the collection is a bit of irony. Ordinarily, a photograph is considered a very exact image of a moment in time. In Berger's telling, however, the more exact image is found in Berger's memory and in the reproduction (or "photocopy") of that memory that is rendered in prose."Photocopies" includes recollections of Henri Cartier-Bresson ("A Man Begging in the Metro") and Simone Weil ("A Girl Like Antigone"), as well as numerous unidentifiable, but memorable, friends and acquaintances of Berger. It also includes, in typical Berger fashion, insightful thoughts on drawing ("A Young Woman with Hand to Her Chin") and on the way that images of the body are influenced by local terrain and climate ("Island of Sifnos")."Photocopies" is a stunning example of how a sensitive, perceptive observer can render a vivid image of the world in prose. In this sense, Berger's collection is a true work of art, a book that I highly recommend not only as entertaining literature, but as a text that merits close reading and careful study by writers and artists.