Photocopies: Encounters (Paperback)

"Photocopies" opens not with a photocopy, but with a photograph: the blurred, poorly-lighted photograph of a man and a woman standing under a tree. It is a sort of introduction to the first story, "A Woman and Man Standing by a Plum Tree," where Berger relates his memory of a woman he once met at a reading in Madrid who then turned up, several years later, at his country home in France. The woman is not identified by name. She is in her thirties, an artist and photographer who makes her living by restoring frescoes. The woman brings along a primitive, home-made plywood camera and, at the end of her visit, takes a picture of the two of them together under a plum tree:

"The two of us stood there facing the camera. We moved, of course, but not more than the plum trees did in the wind. Minutes passed. Whilst we stood there, we reflected the light, and what we reflected went through the black hole into the dark box. It'll be of us, she said, and we waited expectantly."

Unlike the photograph, the story that accompanies it, and the other twenty-seven stories in the collection, are clear, precise, vividly-rendered pictures from John Berger's memory. In this sense, Berger's use of a blurred photographic image to introduce the collection is a bit of irony. Ordinarily, a photograph is considered a very exact image of a moment in time. In Berger's telling, however, the more exact image is found in Berger's memory and in the reproduction (or "photocopy") of that memory that is rendered in prose.

"Photocopies" includes recollections of Henri Cartier-Bresson ("A Man Begging in the Metro") and Simone Weil ("A Girl Like Antigone"), as well as numerous unidentifiable, but memorable, friends and acquaintances of Berger. It also includes, in typical Berger fashion, insightful thoughts on drawing ("A Young Woman with Hand to Her Chin") and on the way that images of the body are influenced by local terrain and climate ("Island of Sifnos").

"Photocopies" is a stunning example of how a sensitive, perceptive observer can render a vivid image of the world in prose. In this sense, Berger's collection is a true work of art, a book that I highly recommend not only as entertaining literature, but as a text that merits close reading and careful study by writers and artists.

There are not many Authors who can skillfully execute short literary works. By their definition they allow comparatively short spans of space and reading time to take the reader where the Author has mapped his or her trip. So what level of skill and experience can make a reader enjoy and think when provided with only a handful of words? Quite high for the former, and lengthy for the latter I think.

Not many writers can create a sentence that includes the work of both Donatello and Thelonius Monk to explain the achievement of a prison escape. The reader is also treated to metaphors that will become memories. Mr. Berger in describing the aged hands of a laborer could have slipped into cliché, or a variant on many others. However he compares the hands to, "certain old words that today are going out of use".

This volume is a remarkable collection of thoughts, observations and memories that never exceed a few pages, and in one example consumes only a single leaf. Yet they are all of interest, they provoke thought, and they illustrate what results when skill, gifts, and life experience are placed on paper.