John Berger About Looking

From Uses of Photography

"...unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning.They offer appearances - with all the credibility and gravity we normally lend to appearances - prised away from their meaning. Meaning is the result of understanding functions. "And functioning takes place in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand." Photographs in themselves do not narrate. Photographs preserve instant appearances.
Habit now protects us against the shock involved in such preservation."
(51)

"We must now distinguish between two quite distinct uses of photography. There are photographs which belong to private experience and there are those that are used publicly. The private photograph - a portrait of a mother, a picture of a daughter, a group photo of one's own team - is appreciated and read in a context which is continuous with that from which the camera removed it. (The violence of the removal is sometimes felt as incredulousness: "Was that really Dad?") Nevertheless such a photograph remains surrounded by the meaning from which it was severed. A mechanical device, the camera has been used as an instrument to contribute to a living memory. The photograph is a memento from a life being lived.

The contemporary public photograph usually presents an event, a seized set of appearances, which has nothing to do with us, its readers, or with the original meaning of the event. It offers information, but information severed from all lived experience. If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger. The violence is expressed in that strangeness. It records an instant site about which this stranger has shouted: Look!" (51-52)