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 DOI: 10.1177/0306396813509187

2014 55: 79Race ClassMartyn Hudson

Jean Mohr: photography on the world's edge  

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Race & Class Copyright © 2014 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 55(3): 79 –85 10.1177/0306396813509187 http://rac.sagepub.com

Jean Mohr: photography on the world’s edgeMARTYN HUDSON

Abstract: The work of Jean Mohr, the photographer who has often collaborated with John Berger on projects covering migrancy, refuge, displacement, subaltern classes (and their passing) and on Palestine (with Edward Said), is celebrated here. The author argues that the nature and role of photography is rethought by Mohr, as his photographic work, which is integral to the text, transcends time and place to suggest a universality.

Keywords: A Seventh Man, Edward Said, emigration, Haute Savoie, John Berger, Palestine, peasantry, photography, refugee

Jean Mohr is a photographer and, sometimes, a writer. He is often a writer about his own photographs as he thinks they need some explanation. He has often col-laborated with John Berger and has worked with Edward Said on a book about Palestine. He lives in Geneva but travels to take his pictures. His photographs say a little about him and much about the world. I would like to say a little more about Jean Mohr.

Katya Berger’s description of Jean Mohr1 notes the richness and complexity of his face, his sense of being startled, his sharp eyes contrasting with the serenity of his skin. His reflection on his own photographic image of himself, he had said

509187 RAC55310.1177/0306396813509187Race & ClassHudson2014

Martyn Hudson is a researcher in the School of Arts and Cultures at Newcastle University.

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80 Race & Class 55(3)

years earlier, surprised him as he looked at himself truthfully with all of his facial contradictions.2 This sense of surprise in Jean Mohr’s photography of his world has been noted by John Berger: ‘Often alarmingly, and occasionally miraculously, the world is continually startling. The photos Jean has taken all his life are the product of an alertness that comes from being startled.’3 It is that alertness and openness to the world that defines Jean Mohr as a photographer, that and his artistic obsession with migrancy, refuge and displacement. He has captured the peasantry of the Haute Savoie, the struggles of rebels of Chiapas, the haunted children of Cambodia, and the everyday lives of the people of Palestine. Since his first journey there in 1949, Jean Mohr has reflected deeply on how to capture the nature of Palestine and what home might mean to those who have been set aside or are thought about little.

John Berger has argued that those who read or listen to the narratives of Jean and himself see everything as through a lens, and that the lens is the ‘secret of narration’.4 More than this, the lens of Jean Mohr’s camera makes visible stories that would be untold without his dedication to the understanding of what we might think of as the detritus of the twentieth century – those peoples who have not been non-historic but too historic – displaced by the multiple vortices of his-tory and migration.

Figure 1. Portrait of Jean Mohr, taken by his son Michel (photo: courtesy of Michel Mohr)

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Hudson: Jean Mohr: photography on the world’s edge 81

The work of Berger and Mohr specifically has been concerned with the reasser-tion of those multiple stories and histories and the ways in which photography can capture the passing of individuals, peoples, classes and epochs. To do this, they had to rethink the very nature of photography and their assumptions about it.5 To think deeply about capturing lives, their collaboration became more than the sum of its parts. As Iona Hearth has noted on the artistic successes of their work on the medical doctor, Sassall, and the community within which he worked, ‘all depend on intense and generous attention to the dignity and detail of faces and of eyes and of the particular tangible circumstances of individual lives. The photographs do not illustrate the text; they are an integral part of the writing, tak-ing it beyond the limitations of words’.6 The making of the photographs and of the writing illustrate something that points beyond the work of writer and pho-tographer alone – not just to the depth of the images and the commitment to be with the community so much as to be completely enmeshed in its locality and time – but also to the text’s ability to somehow transcend that place and suggest the universality of the kinds of fears and aspirations so present in the pictures, and that Jean Mohr and John Berger have found in Alpine peasant communities and in the migrant hostels of Europe’s cities.

When Jean first visited the rural community in the Haute Savoie where John lived, photographers and their pictures were rare and exotic and a photographer was still thought of ‘as some kind of inspector or obscure State spy’.7 And in many ways, the photographer does act as a kind of judge from outside, a collector, inspec-tor or clerk capturing moments that will pass, if not for that moment of capture.8 Yet, rather than understanding a subject from the outside, Jean Mohr has docu-mented, amongst the peasantry and elsewhere, something that the people wanted capturing and keeping – something to perpetuate or to say that this happened, here, then. For Berger, ‘[t]here is something strangely casual, off-hand, about his images. A kind of nonchalance. Yet a caring nonchalance. And this is precisely why one believes in the special authenticity of his photos’.9 Jean’s alertness and enstartle-ment developed into a project of a half century and more’s duration to understand what some have called the subaltern classes and their passings.

The remarkable essay without words designed around Jean’s pictures, ‘If each time…’,10 helps us think about the kinds of stories that are present in the work of the labouring poor of the earth. But perhaps the most moving set of images from Jean is the capturing of a moment of happiness. As he was staying in Aligarh in India in the 1980s, a curious blind girl came knocking on Jean’s door. Making her laugh by imitating animal noises he captured her laughter and curiosity in a series of pictures that, of course, she will never see. Her story is more than the pictures but the photographs validate forms of existence that remain marginal and forcibly so, to the ruling narratives of Capital. If visibility, as Berger rightly notes, is so central to our orientation to the world11 then it is not lack of the girl’s visibility which is so tragic, but her very invisibility in the world, a world indif-ferent to her. So to mirror the world’s indifference to the poor, there is also on

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82 Race & Class 55(3)

behalf of the metropolis, of the West, an indifference to the world itself – a con-tract of indifference which can only be resolved by making visible and by soli-darity. This is the rectification that Jean’s pictures make. But it also alerts us, Berger says, to the distances of time and space that we cannot know and will never see, but which never mitigates the ‘desire to have seen – the ocean, the desert, the aurora borealis’.12 And Jean has seen those things for us and brought them back so that we can never say that we haven’t seen, or that he did not bring it to our attention, once, twice, or a hundred times. This is the judgement that photography offers us – that there was once a girl, on a veranda, laughing at the noises that animals might make. In the absence of those pictures we confront a disappearance, a negation, something unseen and unkept.

John Berger has argued that photography is not necessarily an art form that works on behalf of the oppressed and marginalised. Often photographic surveys of ‘natives’ served to rationalise the relationship between imperial surveyor and the surveyed and subaltern.13 It was with the intent of documenting what was in many ways an unsurveyed class of people that Berger and Jean Mohr began their study of migrants, in Europe, in the 1970s. Yet the mapping and surveying of their experiences had to take place from a position of commitment to validating their real, lived experience otherwise it would fall into the kinds of imperial cat-egories that they so wanted to avoid. In their telling, in words and pictures, of the multiple stories of migrancy they felt they had to capture some sense of what home had meant to the displaced.

The idea of home is one in which both time and ancestry on the one hand, and space and many-crossing paths on the other, meet and fuse. Emigration severs and dismantles that centre leading to displacement and disorientation.14 The pho-tography of A Seventh Man is about expressing that absence, that lost world of home never to be truly regained, but the book also validates and annotates the being and actuality of the migrant.15 In a social space which eclipses and elides the migrant experiences and histories of millions of people, the documentation and demonstration of their being is of profound importance.

Nowhere is this of more import than in Jean Mohr’s photographs, taken over half a century, of the Palestinian experience of migration and silence. For someone like Jean, to whom textual annotation to pictures is so important, this question of silence is not to be evaded. The United Nations International Conference on the Question of Palestine, held in Geneva in 1983, refused to allow textual annotations to Jean’s photographic celebration of Palestinian life. More, Jean’s pictures have been concerned with overcoming both silence and the simplified images of exile and oppression amongst the Palestinian people. His pictures might be fragmentary expressions of real moments, but in that nuance and fragmentation the rich com-plexity of the Palestinian diaspora emerges. The dispersed and the dispossessed were both captured and captivated by Jean’s images of themselves. As Edward Said has said, ‘Many Palestinian friends who saw Jean Mohr’s pictures thought that he saw us as no one else has. But we also felt that he saw us as we would have seen ourselves – at once inside and outside our world.’16 From his first visit to the

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Hudson: Jean Mohr: photography on the world’s edge 83

camps in 1949 until the present, Jean’s photographs have documented the multiple ways of being of a community or set of communities in a context of intransigence and dispersal. Again, Said has talked of the idiosyncrasy and enstartlement of Jean’s documentary photography, in the case of one specific picture:

Jean Mohr’s photograph of a small but clearly formed human group sur-rounded by a dense and layered reality expresses very well what we experi-ence during that detachment from an ideologically saturated world. This image of four people seen at a distance near Ramallah, in the middle of and yet sepa-rated from thick foliage, stairs, several tiers of terraces and houses, a lone elec-tricity pole off to the right, is for me a private, crystallized, almost Proustian evocation of Palestine.17

What is most startling about Said’s response to this picture is not just the reso-nance that the picture has with Said’s own childhood, but the fact that this is a picture of a home, locked into the sedimentation of history and geography, that is there, whatever the ways in which power and accident have tried to eliminate that people from that time and that place.

One day, Jean recounts, he was taking a picture of some cows in the Haute Savoie, and the farmers made jokes about him and asked if he would pay a sou for taking a picture of the farmer’s cow – ‘I laughed along with the others. And I went

Figure 2. From ‘Jean Mohr: victims of war’ exhibition (photo: courtesy of Jean Mohr/UNHCR)

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84 Race & Class 55(3)

on taking my photos. That is to say, taking in my own way what was before my eyes and what interested me, without paying and without asking permission.’18 As Jean became, over many years, the intimate and the documenter of a peasant class gradually dying, it became of more importance to display the fact that these people had once existed. When Jean began taking pictures of Marcel the cowherd, the latter was unconvinced of the merits of what Jean could do for him. Jean took his portrait, carefully and with profound respect. In turn Marcel, in preparation, took great care of his appearance: ‘and now my great grandchildren will know what sort of man I was’.19 Jean has confronted many worlds and as he takes his pictures stands on the edge of the world from which he has come.20 In reality he says that he never really has reached the edge of the world if we think of that as the end of a world, he simply moves tirelessly from world to world.21 Berger says, ‘Jean is always on foreign soil, or Jean is always the stranger. Yet, like all nomads, he knows how the guest behaves and how the host receives. And the paradox is that it’s there, on the Edge of the World, that he is at home, as both host and guest. And it is there that I had the privilege and luck of being offered his friendship.’22

There are three significant things, then to say, about why Mohr is such a deci-sive but quiet presence in the struggle to create yet another world, one which Mohr will not now see. The first lies in the validation of experience that is passing or has been dispersed or relegated into silence yet one which lives and endures and keeps within it not just the markers of past golden ages but some intimation or prefiguration of what the future might bring. The future will not be recognisa-bly the world of Marcel, but that future will only be valid if it has both tran-scended and elevated the lost worlds of the forester, the peasant and the refugee. Secondly, Mohr displays what we might call the intransigence of art in the face of those who believe that art has to be uncommitted. No art is uncommitted whether it speaks to itself this lie or not. Further, Mohr’s art demonstrates that in this com-mitment there is no need for mystification or untruth – the very search for truth and the delineation of real human faces and their labour is revolutionary in itself. Finally, the dialectic of text and picture says something to us about the absolute interrelatedness of writing about the world and picturing that world – that pic-tures do not speak for themselves, like people do not speak for themselves. Not that they cannot or have no will to speak, but because the quietude perpetrated against them is unwavering and relentless. Jean Mohr has not allowed them to speak but he has allowed us to listen to their voices and see their faces. It reminds us that we cannot pass over everything in silence.

References 1 Jean Mohr, At the Edge of the World (London, Reaktion, 1999), pp. 7–8. 2 John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (London, Granta, 1989), pp. 38–9. 3 Jean Mohr, op. cit., p. 9. 4 John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (London, Writers and Readers, 1984), p. 31. 5 John Berger and Jean Mohr, op. cit., p. 83. 6 Gareth Evans, John Berger: a season in London 2005 (London, Artevents, 2005), p. 51.

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Hudson: Jean Mohr: photography on the world’s edge 85

7 Jean Mohr, op. cit., p. 10. 8 See Martyn Hudson, ‘The clerk of the foresters’ records: John Berger, the dead, and the writing

of history’, Rethinking History (Vol. 4, no. 3, 2000), pp. 261–79 and ‘On the dead of world history’, Race & Class (Vol. 43, no. 4, 2002), pp. 26–33.

9 Jean Mohr, op. cit., p. 11. 10 John Berger and Jean Mohr, op. cit., pp. 133–275. 11 John Berger, op. cit., p. 50. 12 Ibid., p. 50. 13 John Berger and Jean Mohr, op. cit., p. 97. 14 John Berger, op. cit., pp. 56–7. 15 John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Seventh Man (London, Penguin, 1975), p. 17. 16 Edward W. Said and Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky: Palestinian lives (London, Faber and Faber,

1986), p. 6. 17 Ibid., p. 47. 18 John Berger and Jean Mohr, op cit., p. 11. 19 Ibid., p. 37. 20 Jean Mohr, op. cit., p. 21. 21 Ibid., p. 174. 22 Ibid., p. 15.

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