Critic and novelist John Berger died on Monday at the age of ninety. Here, from his introduction to a recent edition of Berger’s Understanding a Photograph, Geoff Dyer considers the seminal critic’s deep engagement with the medium. —Bookforum
In 1962 Diane Arbus asked John Szarkowski, head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for August Sander’s address, “because there is something I would like to write to him about.” Several things make this request remarkable. First, there’s the shock that Sander (1876–1964) and Arbus (1923–1971) were even alive at the same time. Then there’s the ordinariness of the proposal, as if an up-and-coming songwriter were casually asking for Bob Dylan’s e-mail. Finally, there is the appropriateness of Arbus’s presumption. Sander’s photographs played a crucial part in the development of Arbus’s mature style, but her
When the writer and painter John Berger won the Booker Prize in 1972—for his novel G., about sex, loneliness, a failed revolution, and the imminent devastation of the First World War—he rather famously donated half of his award money to the Black Panthers. On the political spectrum of his day, Berger’s action outraged the right and the left alike, the former for giving any cash at all to a band of militants, the latter for holding back the other half. A few months ago, the novelist and critic Geoff Dyer retold this story, off the cuff, at the start of
I didn’t make it to the huge Garry Winogrand retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco but if the very large catalogue is anything to go by the show was obviously … not nearly big enough! How could it have been? Winogrand is inexhaustible. There’s probably more to look at in a Winogrand photo than in one by anyone else (part of the attraction of a wide-angle lens was the way it enabled him not only to get more people in the picture but also to cram the frame, so to speak, with the space between them)
I’d heard that the title essay of Jonathan Franzen’s new collection was about his punishing experiences on a rough and tiny island. Some of what happened there is by now well known. The inhabitants of this island welcomed him by printing the wrong version of his novel Freedom, necessitating the pulping of its entire first print run.
I can’t remember whether it’s the author (played by Charlotte Rampling) or her publisher (Charles Dance), but in François Ozon’s film The Swimming Pool one of them remarks that literary prizes are like hemorrhoids: Sooner or later, every asshole gets one. This sentiment might have been used as an epigraph to the Austrian author Thomas Bernhard’s My Prizes, an “accounting” of the many literary awards that began coming his way in the mid- 1960s. Being Thomas Bernhard, of course, it’s not just the recipients of these prizes who are “All Assholes”—“a whole row of assholes,” to be precise—it’s also the
We may take Milan Kundera for granted, but in his new collection of essays, the author casts an undeniably powerful spell—even if you have no previous knowledge of the artists that he discusses.
