Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  All this may seem close to the old principle of art transforming the particular into the universal. But photography does not deal in constructs. There is no transforming in photography. There is only decision, only focus. The minimal message of a photograph may be less simple than we first thought. Instead of it being: I have decided that seeing this is worth recording, we may now decode it as: The degree to which I believe this is worth looking at can be judged by all that I am willingly not showing because it is contained within it.

  Why complicate in this way an experience which we have many times every day — the experience of looking at a photograph? Because the simplicity with which we usually treat the experience is wasteful and confusing. We think of photographs as works of art, as evidence of a particular truth, as likenesses, as news items. Every photograph is in fact a means of testing, confirming and constructing a total view of reality. Hence the crucial role of photography in ideological struggle. Hence the necessity of our understanding a weapon which we can use and which can be used against us.

  1968

  The Political Uses of Photo-Montage

  John Heartfield, whose real name was Helmut Herzfelde, was born in Berlin in 1891. His father was an unsuccessful poet and anarchist. Threatened with prison for public sacrilege, the father fled from Germany and settled in Austria. Both parents died when Helmut was eight. He was brought up by the peasant mayor of the village on the outskirts of which the Herzfelde family had been living in a forest hut. He had no more than a primary education.

  As a youth he got a job in a relative’s bookshop and from there worked his way to art school in Munich, where he quickly came to the conclusion that the Fine Arts were an anachronism. He adopted the English name Heartfield in defiance of German wartime patriotism. In 1916 he started with his brother Wieland a dissenting left-wing magazine, and, with George Grosz, invented the technique of photo-montage. (Raoul Hausmann claims to have invented it elsewhere at the same time.) In 1918 Heartfield became a founder member of the German Communist Party. In 1920 he played a leading role in the Berlin Dada Fair. Until 1924 he worked in films and for the theatre. Thereafter he worked as a graphic propagandist for the German communist press and between about 1927 and 1937 became internationally famous for the wit and force of his photo-montage posters and cartoons.

  He remained a communist, living after the war in East Berlin, until his death in 1968. During the second half of his life, none of his published work was in any way comparable in originality or passion to the best of his work done in the decade 1927–37. The latter offers a rare example outside the Soviet Union during the revolutionary years of an artist committing his imagination wholly to the service of a mass political struggle.

  What are the qualities of this work? What conclusions may we draw from them? First, a general quality.

  There is a Heartfield cartoon of Streicher standing on a pavement beside the inert body of a beaten-up Jew. The caption reads: ‘A Pan-German’. Streicher stands in his Nazi uniform, hands behind his back, eyes looking straight ahead, with an expression that neither denies nor affirms what has happened at his feet. It is literally and metaphorically beneath his notice. On his jacket are a few slight traces of dirt or blood. They are scarcely enough to incriminate him — in different circumstances they would seem insignificant. All that they do is slightly to soil his tunic.

  In Heartfield’s best critical works there is a sense of everything having been soiled — even though it is not possible, as it is in the Streicher cartoon, to explain exactly why or how. The greyness, the very tonality of the photographic prints suggests it, as do the folds of the grey clothes, the outlines of the frozen gestures, the half-shadows on the pale faces, the textures of the street walls, of the medical overalls, of the black silk hats. Apart from what they depict, the images themselves are sordid: or, more precisely, they express disgust at their own sordidness.

  One finds a comparable physical disgust suggested in nearly all modern political cartoons which have survived their immediate purpose. It does not require a Nazi Germany to provoke such disgust. One sees this quality at its clearest and simplest in the great political portrait caricatures of Daumier. It represents the deepest universal reaction to the stuff of modern politics. And we should understand why.

  It is disgust at that particular kind of sordidness which exudes from those who now wield individual political power. This sordidness is not a confirmation of the abstract moral belief that all power corrupts. It is a specific historical and political phenomenon. It could not occur in a theocracy or a secure feudal society. It must await the principle of modern democracy and then the cynical manipulating of that principle. It is endemic in, but by no means exclusive to, latter-day bourgeois politics and advanced capitalism. It is nurtured from the gulf between the aims a politician claims and the actions he has in fact already decided upon.

  It is not born of personal deception or hypocrisy as such. Rather, it is born of the manipulator’s assurance, of his own indifference to the flagrant contradiction which he himself displays between words and actions, between noble sentiments and routine practice. It resides in his complacent trust in the hidden undemocratic power of the state. Before each public appearance he knows that his words are only for those whom they can persuade, and that with those whom they do not there are other ways of dealing. Note this sordidness when watching the next party political broadcast.

  What is the particular quality of Heartfield’s best work? It stems from the originality and aptness of his use of photo-montage. In Heartfield’s hands the technique becomes a subtle but vivid means of political education, and more precisely of Marxist education.

  With his scissors he cuts out events and objects from the scenes to which they originally belonged. He then arranges them in a new, unexpected, discontinuous scene to make a political point — for example, parliament is being placed in a wooden coffin. But this much might be achieved by a drawing or even a verbal slogan. The peculiar advantage of photo-montage lies in the fact that everything which has been cut out keeps its familiar photographic appearance. We are still looking first at things and only afterwards at symbols.

  But because these things have been shifted, because the natural continuities within which they normally exist have been broken, and because they have now been arranged to transmit an unexpected message, we are made conscious of the arbitrariness of their continuous normal message. Their ideological covering or disguise, which fits them so well when they are in their proper place that it becomes indistinguishable from their appearances, is abruptly revealed for what it is. Appearances themselves are suddenly showing us how they deceive us.

  Two simple examples. (There are many more complex ones.) A photograph of Hitler returning the Nazi salute at a mass meeting (which we do not see). Behind him, and much larger than he is, the faceless figure of a man. This man is discreetly passing a wad of banknotes into Hitler’s open hand raised above his head. The message of the cartoon (October 1932) is that Hitler is being supported and financed by the big industrialists. But, more subtly, Hitler’s charismatic gesture is being divested of its accepted current meaning.

  A cartoon of one month later. Two broken skeletons lying in a crater of mud on the Western Front, photographed from above. Everything has disintegrated except for the nailed boots which are still on their feet, and, although muddy, are in wearable condition. The caption reads: ‘And again?’ Underneath there is a dialogue between the two dead soldiers about how other men are already lining up to take their place. What is being visually contested here is the power and virility normally accorded by Germans to the sight of jackboots.

  Those interested in the future didactic use of photo-montage for social and political comment should, I am sure, experiment further with this ability of the technique to demystify things. Heartfield’s genius lay in his discovery of this possibility.

  Photo-montage is at its weakest when it is purely symbolic, when it uses its own means to further rhetorical mys
tification. Heartfield’s work is not always free from this. The weakness reflects deep political contradictions.

  For several years before 1933, communist policy towards the Nazis on the one hand and the German social democrats on the other was both confused and arbitrary. In 1928, after the fall of Bukharin and under Stalin’s pressure, the Comintern decided to designate all social democrats as ‘social fascists’ — there is a Heartfield cartoon of 1931 in which he shows an S.P.D. leader with the face of a snarling tiger. As a result of this arbitrary scheme of simplified moral clairvoyance being imposed from Moscow on local contradictory facts, any chance of the German communists influencing or collaborating with the 9,000,000 S.P.D. voters who were mostly workers and potential anti-Nazis was forfeited. It is possible that with a different strategy the German working class might have prevented the rise of Hitler.

  Heartfield accepted the party line, apparently without any misgivings. But among his words there is a clear distinction between those which demystify and those which exhort with simplified moral rhetoric. Those which demystify treat of the rise of Nazism in Germany — a social-historical phenomenon with which Heartfield was tragically and intimately familiar; those which exhort are concerned with global generalizations which he inherited ready-made from elsewhere.

  Again, two examples. A cartoon of 1935 shows a minuscule Goebbels standing on a copy of Mein Kampf, putting out his hand in a gesture of dismissal. ‘Away with these degenerate subhumans,’ he says — a quotation from a speech he made at Nuremberg. Towering above him as giants, making his gesture pathetically absurd, is a line of impassive Red Army soldiers with rifles at the ready. The effect of such a cartoon on all but loyal communists could only have been to confirm the Nazi lie that the U.S.S.R. represented a threat to Germany. In ideological contrasts, as distinct from reality, there is only a paper-thin division between thesis and antithesis; a single reflex can turn black into white.

  A poster for the First of May 1937 celebrating the Popular Front in France. An arm holding a red flag and sprigs of cherry blossom; a vague background of clouds (?), sea waves (?), mountains (?). A caption from the Marseillaise: ‘Liberté, liberté chérie, combats avec tes défenseurs!’ Everything about this poster is as symbolic as it is soon to be demonstrated politically false.

  I doubt whether we are in a position to make moral judgements about Heartfield’s integrity. We would need to know and to feel the pressures, both from within and without, under which he worked during that decade of increasing menace and terrible betrayals. But, thanks to his example, and that of other artists such as Mayakovsky or Tatlin, there is one issue which we should be able to see more clearly than was possible earlier.

  It concerns the principal type of moral leverage applied to committed artists and propagandists in order to persuade them to suppress or distort their own original imaginative impulses. I am not speaking now of intimidation but of moral and political argument. Often such arguments were advanced by the artist himself against his own imagination.

  The moral leverage was gained through asking questions concerning utility and effectiveness. Am I being useful enough? Is my work effective enough? These questions were closely connected with the belief that a work of art or a work of propaganda (the distinction is of little importance here) was a weapon of political struggle. Works of imagination can exert great political and social influence. Politically revolutionary artists hope to integrate their work into a mass struggle. But the influence of their work cannot be determined, either by the artist or by a political commissar, in advance. And it is here that we can see that to compare a work of imagination with a weapon is to resort to a dangerous and far-fetched metaphor.

  The effectiveness of a weapon can be estimated quantitatively. Its performance is isolable and repeatable. One chooses a weapon for a situation. The effectiveness of a work of imagination cannot be estimated quantitatively. Its performance is not isolable or repeatable. It changes with circumstances. It creates its own situation. There is no foreseeable quantitative correlation between the quality of a work of imagination and its effectiveness. And this is part of its nature because it is intended to operate within a field of subjective interactions which are interminable and immeasurable. This is not to grant to art an ineffable value; it is only to emphasize that the imagination, when true to its impulse, is continually and inevitably questioning the existing category of usefulness. It is ahead of that part of the social self which asks the question. It must deny itself in order to answer the question in its own terms. By way of this denial revolutionary artists have been persuaded to compromise, and to do so in vain — as I have indicated in the case of John Heartfield.

  It is lies that can be qualified as useful or useless; the lie is surrounded by what has not been said and its usefulness or not can be gauged according to what has been hidden. The truth is always first discovered in open space.

  1969

  The Sight of a Man

  Dedicated to Chris Fox

  There are reports that many thousands of monumental sculptures have been recently put up in the towns and villages of China. These sculptures depict local groups of workers or peasants achieving some revolutionary feat — often a production record. The sculptural style is so naturalistic as to suggest the figures being cast from life. The apotheosis of the living heroes is as immediate as possible. They can straight away look at themselves in the monument, not as in a mirror, but as from the outside, as others in history may see them.

  From here it is impossible to judge the effect of these works on the masses in China. But one can make a number of general comments. The conscious aim behind the policy decision in Peking to produce these monuments is not different in kind — though leading to a cruder practice — from the unformulated aims of nearly all the patrons of European art since the Renaissance. The aim is to isolate and reproduce an aspect of reality in order to award it an outside prize, to confer upon it a value which is not intrinsic to it but which derives from an abstract religious or historical schema. Thus, appearances are abstracted from nature and society, through the imitative faculty of art, and used to dress, to clothe a social-moral-historical ideal. When the schema is not abstract and does not have to be imposed on social life, it has no need of the borrowed clothes of appearances.

  The distinction between works produced according to an abstract schema and those rare works which extend, as distinct from transposing, the experience of the spectator, is that the latter never remove appearances from the essential and specific body of meaning behind them. (They never flay their subjects.) They deny the validity of any outside prize. One must add, however, that such masterpieces have as yet contributed nothing directly to solving the problems of revolutionary political organization and education. It is impossible to oppose them directly to the Chinese monuments. These monuments need not be assessed as art but they can be considered as things to be seen. And it is at this point that — somewhat surprisingly — the example of Cézanne may be relevant.

  Millions of words have been written in psychological and aesthetic studies about Cézanne yet their conclusions lack the gravity of the works. Everyone is agreed that Cézanne’s paintings appear to be different from those of any painter who preceded him; whilst the works of those who came after seem scarcely comparable, for they were produced out of the profound crisis which Cézanne (and probably also Van Gogh) half foresaw and helped to provoke.

  What then made Cézanne’s painting different? Nothing less than his view of the visible. He questioned and finally rejected the belief, which was axiomatic to the whole Renaissance tradition, that things are seen for what they are, that their visibility belongs to them. According to this tradition, to make a likeness was to reconstitute a truth; even fantastic painters, like Bosch, treated visibility in the same way; their only difference was that they conferred visibility upon imagined constructions. To be visible was to be there, to make visible was to make there. Reality (nature) consisted of an infinite number of sights
; the duty of the artist was to bring together and arrange sights. The artist captured appearances and in capturing them preserved a truth. The world offered its visibility to men as a tree offers its reflection to water. The mediation of optics did not alter this fundamental relation. The visible remained the object of every man’s vision.

  Cézanne, intensely introspective yet determinedly objective, propelled forward by continual self-doubt, born at a time when it was possible for a painter to recognize and give equal weight to his petite sensation on the one hand and nature on the other, Cézanne, who consciously strove towards a new synthesis between art and nature, who wanted to renew the European tradition, in fact destroyed for ever the foundation of that tradition by insisting, more and more radically as his work developed, that visibility is as much an extension of ourselves as it is a quality-in-itself of things. Through Cézanne we recognize that a visible world begins and ends with the life of each man, that millions of these visible worlds correspond in so many respects that from the correspondences we can construct the visible world, but that this world of appearances is inseparable from each one of us: and each one of us constitutes its centre.

  What I am saying may become clearer if related to the actual landscapes in which Cézanne found his ‘motifs’. I have been to many places to see how they compare to a painter’s concentrated vision of them (Courbet’s Jura, Van Gogh’s southern Holland, Piero’s Umbria, Poussin’s Rome, etc.); but the experience of visiting and revisiting Cézanne’s landscape round Aix is unique.