Anthropology – Story Table

Why Return to Berger?

John Berger was never just a critic. He was a storyteller, an essayist, a drawer of connections between the visible and the invisible. In And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos—a slim, hybrid work first published in 1984—he dismantles the neat boundaries between art criticism, personal memory, poetry, and philosophy.

I first encountered this book during my master’s studies in cultural anthropology, where Berger’s work was treated not only as literature, but as methodology—a way of seeing and thinking about lives. Reading it again now, the book feels startlingly contemporary, even necessary.

In a world saturated by images and half-told stories, Berger reminds us not only how to look, but why it matters. For those of us engaged in the work of preserving life stories—be it through memoirs, interviews, or everyday remembrance—this book is a quiet manifesto.

I. Seeing as an Act of Love

From the first page, Berger sets up a tension between absence and presence, loss and longing. “To look is an act of choice,” he writes in Ways of Seeing, and Faces extends that insight into the realm of memory. To look at a face, a landscape, a photograph—even briefly—is to engage in a moment of affection, even if that moment is fleeting or fraught.

What Berger does masterfully is connect the visual to the emotional. He does not just ask what we see, but what we miss when something disappears. In this way, looking becomes mourning, and remembering becomes a form of devotion.

Berger’s sensibility often reminds me of Mark Rothko’s paintings—those blurred edges, suspended forms, fields of color that seem to weep without a face. Like Rothko, Berger’s work does not shout, but it lingers. It feels its way into the room. To behold is to ache, both artists seem to say.

For families struggling to understand the people they’ve lost—or are losing—this offers something profound. Berger teaches that the practice of noticing is itself a form of love.
This perspective, in turn, echoes Erich Fromm’s definition of love—not as a fleeting feeling, but as an ongoing act of care, attention, and responsibility.

II. The Body as Archive

Berger returns often to the idea that memory is not just a mental exercise. It is embodied. We carry our pasts in our gestures, in how we sit, how we carry bags, how we turn our faces.

“The memory of the body is stronger than that of the mind,” he writes.

This connects beautifully to what we now understand through neuroscience: that memory is deeply connected to sensation—smells, touches, sounds. Berger intuited this decades ago. He doesn’t just describe a past moment; he inhabits it, and asks us to do the same.

For those trying to reconstruct the lives of their parents or grandparents, this insight is invaluable. Look not only at their words, he says, but at their postures, their rituals, their silences. The body remembers.

III. Time and Fragmentation

There is no linear narrative in Faces. Berger doesn’t believe in biography as chronology. Instead, the book is structured in fragments: prose sections interspersed with short poems, recollections broken up by aphorisms or philosophical insights. This can be disorienting at first. But then you realize: this is how memory actually works.

Time in this book folds in on itself. A lover long gone appears in a sentence as suddenly as a remembered painting. There are no clean beginnings or endings—just returns.

“Every city has a sex and an age which has nothing to do with demography,” he writes. So, too, every memory has a season, a mood, a weather of its own.

For anyone documenting a life story, Berger’s structure is an important reminder: people do not remember linearly. They remember in constellations.

IV. Language and Loss

One of the most poetic threads in the book is Berger’s meditation on language—particularly in exile. Having lived much of his life in rural France, away from his native England, he reflects on how language can become foreign even when it’s yours.

This is especially poignant for anyone who has migrated, or aged into silence, or simply felt their own vocabulary grow strange. Berger’s prose often slips into the language of longing—for a homeland, for a lover, for clarity.

For adult children trying to piece together a parent’s life—especially across cultures—this theme resonates. Berger seems to whisper: they may not have said everything, but they left clues. In silences. In syntax. In the words they couldn’t quite find.

V. Photography and the Presence of Absence

Throughout Faces, Berger writes about photographs—not just as objects, but as vessels of presence and absence. A photograph captures a moment that no longer exists. And yet, the image persists.

“What makes a photograph profound,” he suggests, “is not only what it shows, but what we know has disappeared.”

This is not merely poetic—it is practical. When working with family archives, photographs can feel like puzzles with missing pieces. Who is that person? What day was this taken? Why are they smiling?

Berger’s approach invites us to treat photos not as evidence, but as invitation—to imagine, to speculate, to feel.

VI. Love, Separation, and the Ordinary

One of the most tender themes in Faces is separation. Berger writes about lovers parted by time, by war, by choice. But the book’s most aching moments are about everyday separations—those caused by the drift of years, misunderstandings, or simply growing older.

There’s a section where he writes about waiting for someone who will never arrive. And yet, the book never dips into sentimentality. Berger’s gift is to treat the ordinary—waiting for a train, chopping wood, drying dishes—as sites of philosophical revelation.

For us at StoryTable, this is key. So often, people think their lives aren’t “interesting enough” to preserve. Berger dismantles that. Every life, he insists, is a web of meaning.

VII. A New Kind of Biography

In this book, biography is not about summary. It’s not about achievements or clean timelines. It’s about presence. About holding contradictions.

“To bear witness is not a passive act,” Berger says. It’s participatory.

Faces isn’t just about one man’s thoughts—it’s a blueprint for how we might begin to truly see one another. And in this way, it becomes an argument not only for remembering, but for preserving.

Final Reflection: What Berger Offers Us Now

In the years since its publication, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos has become a quiet classic. Not a bestseller. Not a pop sensation. But a book that is passed from hand to hand when someone loses a parent. Or when someone tries to write their memoir. Or when someone needs to remember how to look.

It’s not a book that explains how to tell stories. It is itself a story: broken, beautiful, unfinished.

In our work documenting lives—especially those of elders—Berger reminds us that we are not just collecting facts. We are holding space. For contradiction. For forgetting. For love.

To tell someone’s story is to risk seeing them fully. It is to say: your face, your voice, your way of being in the world—brief as it was—mattered.

To Me, and Maybe to All of Us

I didn’t grow up thinking life stories needed to be written down.
They lived in fragments — in things people remembered at family dinners, in objects kept in drawers, in the way someone’s voice echoes even after they’re gone.

But lately, I’ve been rethinking that.

It’s not just about nostalgia.
It’s about loneliness.
And about what gets left unsaid.

When Writing Becomes Remembering

Years ago, while working on my cultural anthropology thesis, I spent time with Korean white-collar retirees — men who had risen through banks and government offices in the decades following war and upheaval. They weren’t celebrities. They didn’t lead revolutions. But their lives were full of movement — from villages to cities, from typewriters to meetings, from youth to responsibility.

What I remember most was how quiet they were.
How often they paused when asked simple questions like,
“What did you want, back then?”

Sometimes they couldn’t answer.
Other times they tried — slowly, carefully.
And occasionally, writing helped them get there.

Getting Older Is Getting Used to Silence

As people age, something shifts.
Not just physically, but socially.

The family grows busy with its own life.
The workplace disappears.
Friend groups shrink.

We become more alone — even before we’re truly alone.
And in that quiet, memories gather like dust.
Unshared, unasked, unread.

It’s not about being forgotten.
It’s about being misunderstood.

Your child doesn’t know why you made that decision in your 30s.
Your spouse might not fully understand what you lost in your 40s.
Even you might need help remembering what mattered most.

Writing a life story can feel like an excuse — not in the apologetic sense, but in the explanatory one.
A way of saying: This is why I chose what I did. This is what it meant to me.

My Father, and the Others Like Him

My own father was born in the early 1950s in the Korean countryside. He moved to Seoul for a job, started as a bank teller, worked quietly, and eventually retired as a branch manager.

At work, his coworkers respected him — he was flexible, reliable, generous.
At home, he was stricter, more distant. I now wonder if he felt lonely there.
Maybe it was hard to explain his inner world to us.
Or maybe he didn’t know how.

He was the eldest of eight siblings, raised with responsibility etched into his habits.
Duty, not expression.
Provision, not explanation.

So much of him — like the men I interviewed — remained unsaid.
But I now see: it wasn’t because there was nothing to say.
It was because no one asked.
And maybe, he didn’t know how to start.

Science Has a Name for This

Psychologists call it narrative identity — the idea that we make sense of ourselves through story.
Writing, especially in later life, helps reduce stress, increase emotional clarity, and even alleviate feelings of isolation.

Sociologists frame it as a bridge across generations.
Anthropologists like myself see it as cultural memory — a form of preservation that can outlive the speaker.

When someone writes their life story, they’re not just sharing facts.
They’re building a path for others to walk through their mind and time.

Family Is the Closest, Yet Sometimes the Least Understood

We think we know our parents.
Or our grandparents.
But we know them mostly through roles — not reflections.

Writing a life story gives the family something rare:
A chance to understand.
Even when the person is no longer around.
Even when distance, death, or silence have stepped in.

It’s not about legacy in the traditional sense.
It’s about repairing the unseen misunderstandings that time has layered into relationships.

When someone writes down what they felt — not just what they did — we begin to know them as people.
And that knowledge softens things.
Even the difficult parts.

A Gentle Invitation

You don’t have to be a writer.
You don’t need perfect grammar.
But you have a life no one else has lived.
And someone — maybe even your future self — needs to hear it.

I believe this not just as a son, but as a researcher.
Not just as a Korean, but as someone trying to make sense of what connects people across time.

We’re made of more than events.
We’re made of meaning.

Writing your story might be the most generous thing you do — for yourself, for your family, and for the quiet places inside you that are still waiting to speak.

Tag: Anthropology

Looking and Remembering: John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos