John Berger, “Uses of Photography”, About Looking (1980) (New York, Vintage International, 1991), p. 64. (via Bryce Wilner, text OCRed below):
The alternative use of photographs which already exist leads us back once more to the phenomenon and faculty of memory. The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with words, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images. How? Normally photographs are used in a very unilinear way — they are used to illustrate an argument, or to demonstrate a thought which goes like this:
[image of long, straight arrow pointing right]
Very frequently also they are used tautologically so that the photograph merely repeats what is being said in words. Memory is not unilinear at all. Memory works radially, that is to say with an enormous number of associations all leading to the same event. The diagram is like this:
[image of an empty point with un-arrowed line segments radiating out in eight directions (N NE E SE S SW W NW), equally spaced]
