Author of quotes: John Berger. Page 2

In the era of reproducibility images, the value of the paintings are already not assigned to him; its value is transferable: that is, it becomes a kind of information, like any information, it is either used or ignored; information has no special power by itself. When the picture is used, its value is either modificarea, or completely changed. We must clearly realize, what exactly this means. It's not about the fact that the reproduction is unable to correctly reproduce certain aspects of the original; a reproduction makes it possible (and even inevitable) that the image will be used for a variety of purposes, and a copy, unlike the original, will be able to adapt to them all.

Camera isolated momentary images and thus destroyed the idea of their timeless nature. Or, in other words, the camera showed that the idea of time passing was inseparable from the visual experience (this applies to everything except painting). What you see depends on where you were and when. What you saw was derived from your position in time and space. It became impossible to continue to assume that everything converges on the eye as the vanishing point of infinity.
I don't want to say that before the invention of the camera men believed that everyone sees everything. But the prospect of organized visual space as if it actually was the ideal. Every drawing or painting using perspective, tells his audience that he is the center of the world. However, the camera - especially the camera - shows that center there.
The invention of the camera changed the way of seeing the world. Visible has come to mean for us something different. This instantly had an effect on painting.
For the Impressionists the visible world is another, he does not wait, when people will consider it. On the contrary, the visible becomes fluid and fleeting. For the Cubists the visible - it is not something that may catch one's eye, but a whole host of possible views on the subject or the represented person.

Looking at the "virgin of the rocks", the visitor of the National gallery (thanks to all that he heard and read about this picture) would feel about the following: "I stand in front of her. I can see it. This painting by Leonardo is not like any other painting in the world. The National gallery stored its original. If I'm diligent enough to look at her, you can sense its authenticity. "Madonna of the rocks" Leonardo da Vinci: it is authentic and therefore beautiful!"
To reject such feelings as naive would be wrong. They correspond to a complex view of specialists in the art, to which is written the catalogue of the National gallery. An article about "the virgin of the rocks" one of the longest in it. It is fourteen pages in small print. And not a word about the meaning of this picture. It tells about who ordered this picture, on the legal disputes about who she belonged to, about the probable date of its creation, the families of its owners. For this information there are years of researches, aimed to dispel the slightest doubt that this picture really painted by Leonardo. The second goal is to prove that is almost identical to the picture stored in the Louvre is a copy that hangs in the National gallery.
French art historians try to prove the opposite.

Today we see the art of the past as nobody had never seen. We even perceive it differently. This difference can be illustrated by the example of how at different times understood the term. The term - conditional, inherent only in the European art and as first developed in the Early Renaissance, centers everything in the eye of the viewer. It's like a lighthouse beam, only the spot of light coming out, take up images, going inside. The images of these used to be called reality. Perspective makes the eye the centre of the visible world. It all fits in the eye as the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was thought to be arranged for God.
According to the conventions of perspective visuality is not mutual. God doesn't need to put himself in any relationship with others: it's everywhere. The prospect has an internal contradiction: it structures all the images of reality so that they were addressed to only one viewer, but this viewer, unlike God, can only be in one place at a given point in time.

We see only what we look. And to watch is to make a choice. The result of the choice made what we see, is made available to us (but not necessarily physically available). To touch anything means to engage with this subject in some relationships. (Eyes closed, walk around the room and notice how touch is like vision, but only static, limited.) We never look just at one thing, we look at the relations between things and us. Our vision is active, it is movable, it keeps things in the space around itself, it says everything that there is for us such what we are.
Shortly after we begin to see, we realize that we can see. This strange sight is connected with our own look to our identity as the visible world has become quite undeniable.

When one is in love, the image of the beloved has the perfection, the completeness of which can not be measured with words or arms, - it on some time can hold a love connection.

What we know or what we believe affects how we see things around us. For example, in the Middle ages, when people believed in the real existence of Hell, the burning fire has meant to them something different from what he means to us. Nevertheless, their view of Hell owes much to the spectacle of the all-consuming fire, and species remaining after the ash, as well as the pain from his injuries.

What makes photography a strange invention is that the primary raw material for it is light and time.