Non-existent Photograph

John Berger

The photograph which lies on the table in front of me has become incriminating. Better not to print it—even thousands of miles away from Turkey. It shows six men standing in a line, in a wooden-panelled room somewhere on the outskirts of Ankara. The photo was taken after a political committee meeting, two years ago. Five of the men are workers. The eldest is in his fifties, the youngest in his late twenties.

Each one is as unmistakably himself as he would be in the eyes of his own mother. One is bald, one has curly hair, two are thin and wiry, one is broad-shouldered and well-covered. All are wearing skimpy, cheap trousers and jackets. These clothes bear the same relation to the suits of the bourgeois as the capital’s shantytowns, where the five live, bear to the villas with French furniture where the bosses and merchants live.

Yet, with their clothes taken off, in a public bath, a police or army officer would have little difficulty in identifying them as workers. Even if the five half-closed their eyes so as to mask their expressions, so as to pretend to a commendable indifference, their social class would still be evident. Even if with the magical aid of certain djinn they assumed, with consummate art, the typical facial expression of a speculator’s mistress—an expression of sugared charm, sugared indifference and greed—the way they hold their heads would still betray them.

It is as if a court, at the moments of their conception, had sentenced them all to have their heads severed from their necks at the age of fifteen. When the time came, they resisted, as all workers resist, and their heads remained on their shoulders. But the tension and obstinacy of that resistance has remained, and still remains, visible—there between the nape of the neck and the shoulder blades. Most workers in the world carry the same physical stigma: a sign of how the labor power of their bodies has been wrenched away from their heads, where their thoughts and imaginings continue, but deprived now of the possession of their own days and working energy.

For the five in the wood-panelled room, resistance is more than a reflex, more than the muscles’ primitive refusal of what the body knows to be an injustice—because what its effort is continually creating is immediately and irredeemably taken out of its hands. Their resistance has mounted, and entered their thoughts, their hopes, their explanations of the world.