Another Way of Telling

John Berger and Jean Mohr

3 ideas

1. Mohr's experiment: one photograph, many readings

   Jean Mohr showed a set of his photographs, without captions, to people of different backgrounds, including a gardener, a clergyman, a banker, an actress and a psychiatrist, and asked each of them what was happening in each image. Their answers diverged widely, and each viewer read the scene through their own occupation, experience and preoccupations rather than through what the photographer had witnessed. The episode is concrete evidence that an uncaptioned photograph does not carry a fixed meaning. Viewers supply the meaning themselves.

2. Photographs quote appearances rather than translate them

   A photograph does not translate a scene into a code the way language does. It lifts appearances directly out of the continuous flow of events, like a quotation. Because the image is cut from the before and after that would explain it, it is ambiguous by nature. Words, captions or the viewer's memory must restore the missing continuity before the image says anything definite.

3. Sequencing images to mimic how memory works

   Photographs can be arranged in a sequence where meaning comes from juxtaposition and resonance between images, not from narrative captions. In such a sequence, each picture's ambiguity becomes an asset, because it can echo or answer others across time. This sets up a 'long quotation' that works the way remembering does: by association and recurrence rather than by chronology.

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