5 ideas
Public zoos spread in the nineteenth century as animals were being pushed out of everyday life by industrialisation. The zoo claims to let people meet animals, but it is a monument to the impossibility of that meeting. Caged and made dependent on their keepers, the animals are marginal and lethargic, and they no longer return the human look that once helped humans define themselves.
A private photograph, such as a family snapshot, is read within the life it was taken from, so the viewer's memory supplies what the image leaves out. A public photograph shows strangers to strangers. It is cut off from any lived continuity, so it works like the memory of a stranger and can be given almost any meaning. The same image changes from testimony into loose information depending on whether a living context surrounds it.
Because a camera lifts an instant out of time, a photograph's meaning comes from what is placed around it, not from the image itself. To use photography for social and political memory, you build context radially: surround the image with words, other images and history, so it links outward in many directions instead of illustrating one caption. This returns the photographed moment to the continuity it was taken from.
In Sander's 1914 photograph, three young Westerwald farmers walk to a dance wearing their best dark suits. Their large hands, thick bodies and wide stances look clumsy and ill-fitting in the clothes. Berger reads the image as class written on the body: the suit was designed for the sedentary gestures of the bourgeoisie, and by adopting it the peasants accept a standard against which their working bodies will always look second-rate.
Millet set out to paint peasant labour seriously and from within. However, oil painting's pictorial conventions had grown up to serve landowners and the picturesque, and they had no way to express peasant experience. His failure shows that an artistic tradition can make whole classes of experience unpaintable.