Another Way of Telling

[johnastovall]

Another Way of Telling
by John Berger and Jean Mohr
Pantheon Books (NY, NY, 1982)

Until I read this book, I had felt there were only two books which truly attempted to produce a theory of photography. Susan Sontag's On Photography and Roland Barth's Camera Lucida

This book is divided into five parts and structured around the work of Mohr and Beger but it strives to make us aware of the ambiguous nature all photographs have. They are not the product of a pure reality but the meeting ground of the interest of the photographer, the photographed and the viewer who all have contradictory positions. It is the combination of these which both hide and increase the inherent ambiguity of the photographic image.

One section is a 150 image sequence without captions or text and as they say, "It is not a reportage. We hope it maybe read as a work of imagination."

The chapter, "What Did I See" conists of five uncaptioned images and the responses of nine different people's statements about what they saw.

This is a book which isn't about how to take pictures but rather how to think about what you are doing when you take a picture what is going on when people look at your pictures. It should get you to look at pictures in a broader more critical manner as to where this thing called photography fits in the human mind and culture.