A. O. Scott on John Berger

A. O. Scott, in his “The Man Who Taught Us How to Pay Attention” (The New York Times Magazine, October 18, 2026), says of John Berger, “For him, attention was not a passive, individual state but rather an action.” I like that. To me, that’s what Berger’s photography essays are – acts of attention. See, for example, his excellent “Paul Strand” (included in his 2013 collection Understanding a Photograph), in which he says of Strand,

His best photographs are unusually dense – not in the sense of being overburdened or obscure, but in the sense of being filled with an unusual amount of substance per square inch. And all this substance becomes the stuff of the life of the subject. Take the famous portrait of Mr. Bennett from Vermont, New England. His jacket, his shirt, the stubble on his chin, the timber of the house behind, the air around him become in this image the face of his life, of which his actual facial expression is the concentrated spirit.

I think what Scott means when he says Berger’s attention is a form of action is that it involves more than just looking. Scott says, “We don’t just see what’s in front of our eyes. We interpret it, looking for patterns and meanings and associations. How we do this depends on where we are, who we’re with and how we see ourselves.” Essentially, it comes down to who we are. 

I like Scott’s emphasis on art’s subjectivity. He says, 

Even as the world of commodities is ruled by equivalence, part of the allure of a painting lies in its uniqueness. A Caravaggio is not the same as a Courbet. You can’t swap Picasso for Francis Bacon. What that means is that art — even art that is anonymously made or consumed en masse — is personal. Somebody made it. Somebody sees it.

Credit: The above portrait of John Berger is by Mike McQuade.