Art & Creativity Quote by John Berger

Berger’s gambit here is to make photography feel less like art and more like evidence. He draws a hard line between the hand-made image (painting, drawing) and the mechanically produced one, insisting the photograph isn’t merely “about” its subject but physically tethered to it: light bouncing off a face, a street, a body, and chemically or digitally inscribing itself onto a surface. Calling it a “trace” is doing heavy work. It smuggles in the language of forensics and relics, turning the photograph into something like a fingerprint or a footprint - proof that “this has been.”

That claim is seductive because it flatters our desire for certainty. We want photographs to stabilize reality, to anchor memory, to settle disputes. Berger knows the cultural power that falls out of that belief: if the camera captures traces, then photographs can be weaponized as truth in courts, in journalism, in family albums, in colonial archives. The subtext is not that photographs are neutral, but that they arrive with an aura of neutrality precisely because of their indexical relationship to the world.

Context matters: Berger is writing out of a 20th-century skepticism toward images as ideology, when mass media and advertising were refining the art of persuasion. By elevating the photograph’s “belonging” to its subject, he also sets up a tension: photographs feel incontrovertible, yet they are endlessly recruitable - framed, cropped, captioned, circulated. The “trace” is real; the story it’s forced to tell is up for grabs.