Good Fortune

A Fortunate Man
John Berger and Jean Mohr (photographer)
Allan Lane, 1967
(this cover Penguin, 1969)

A wonderful collaboration between writer John Berger and photographer Jean Mohr, observing the life of an English country doctor in a small rural community in the mid-1960s. Berger's reportage and left-leaning social commentary is concise, admiring the many qualities of the doctor and the village in which he works, while acknowledging their limitations and the problems they face in a changing world.

Swiss photographer Jean Mohr worked with Berger on at least three further books, him imagery capturing the small-scale, timeless rustic beauty of the landscape, and achieving an intimacy with the locals that echoes their close relationship with their doctor. This is the same world inhabited by the lyrical documentaries 'Requiem for a Village' and 'The Moon and the Sledgehammer', capturing the end of an age as old country practices were dying out in the face of economic pressures and rapid social and technological changes.

In fact, this volume is almost a documentary film in a book. The design layout gives generous space to images and has a carefully considered composition of word and image. This truly is a photobook, images complimenting text and also acting in place of words when an image better communicates a point. 

One can hear Berger's voice as narrator and Mohr's photography is perfect in revealing the locale and the relationship and emotions of the doctor and his patients. Contemporary NHS managers would be advised to read this book and consider the deeper role of rural GPs within the society they care for.

They don't make faces like these any more.

It is noted in the book that the doctor, John Sassall, was prone to periodic deep depression, plagued by self-doubt and worries about his inadequacy and inability to help his fellow man. Fifteen years after the book's publication Sassall shot himself, an act which Berger suggests makes the tone of the book not darker but more mysterious. Thanks to Berger and Mohr, both current members of the medical profession and general reader alike will still empathize with the doctor's predicament.

Live BergerFest event this week at the Royal College of Art.

The horror... the horror

Horror in Architecture
Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing
Oro Editions, 2013 

An examination of horror and its architectural analogues, including historical perspectives and a dissection of the unease at the heart of the modern project.

Written by a pair of Harvard design graduates turned landscape architects, the text sometimes has the feel of a thesis or academic tract, though it is mostly accessible and the profuse illustrations make an interesting photo-essay in themselves. The juxtaposition of rotten architecture with biological freaks, mullet hairstyles and stills from John Carpenter's The Thing, Army of Darkness and other horror films is most enjoyable, so much so that this little paperback has been enlivening my bathroom reading for the past couple of months. I shall miss it but, you know, binge and purge.