Understanding a Photograph by John Berger – review

This new selection of more than 20 essays, edited by Geoff Dyer and including previously uncollected pieces, is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the power of this ubiquitous medium. Spanning some 40 years, they include pieces on the 1967 photograph of Che Guevara's corpse, on the meaning of photographs ("one learns to read photographs as one learns to read footprints or cardiograms"), on the shock effect of war images (they depoliticise the causes of war, accusing "nobody and everybody"), and a brilliant meditation on August Sander's portrait of three smartly dressed farmers in 1914, in which Berger highlights the suit as a symbol of Gramsci's cultural hegemony and of "sedentary power" – "the power of the administrator and conference table". There are also typically insightful pieces on Paul Strand ("he has an infallible eye for the quintessential"), W Eugene Smith, André Kertész and Henri Cartier-Bresson ("he photographed the apparently unseen"). As ever with Berger's writing, the theoretical is always informed by politics and a deeply felt humanity.

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