I think this sample of Berger’s writing shows exactly what is valuable in it. The italics are my own.
How much this photograph says about politics! About how politics, at their origin, are irrepressible. These five men, with their loves, their children, their songs and their Anatolian memory, are the dupes of nobody. They were often badly led, carelessly organized, often the first victims of the charismatic self-indulgence of their leaders, but none of this has surprised them. Of this present world which they know so well, they did not expect better.
They know there has never been a winter in Anatolia without snow, a summer without animals dying from drought, a workers’ movement without repression. Utopias exist only in carpets. But they know too that what they have been subjected to in their lives is intolerable. And the naming of the intolerable is itself the hope.1
- John Berger : Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos↩