Photography and Its Purposes

The poet and prose writer, critic and art historian, theoretician and practitioner of art, as well as director, actor, and TV host (plus, of course, a publicist and social activist, an aesthetician and a leftist, a Marxist and a French farmer, a wit and, ultimately, a cult figure), John Berger created (synthesized, structured) a special style and method of storytelling in which various arts, artistic schools and movements, as well as individual creative biographies play the role of characters and narrative figures. <...> the author's grasp of textures here is always broader than the stated theme and implies a mass of underlying currents and interests, a multi-layered narrative capable of unfolding later through a deeper understanding of the context. The longer you stay within such a book, the more effective and profound it becomes, as the second wind that connects to its content belongs to the reader. To their perception.

The book by British writer and art critic John Berger (1926-2017), specially compiled by the author for Russian readers, includes essays from various years dedicated to photography, the principles of functioning of the post-war art system, as well as some important figures of 20th-century culture, from Mayakovsky to Le Corbusier. The texts, mostly written in the 1960s, contain both reactions to the events of that time (the death of Che Guevara, the publication of Susan Sontag's "On Photography"), as well as more universal works on theory and history of art ("The Moment of Cubism", "The Historical Function of the Museum"), which have not lost their relevance to this day.