At the Edge of the World (Topographics) - Softcover

Mohr, Jean; Berger, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1861890486 ISBN 13: 9781861890481

Publisher: Reaktion Books, 1999

Synopsis

Swiss photographer Jean Mohr has traveled the globe documenting the lives of the dispossessed, the marginalized and the overlooked for over forty years. In 1996, while convalescing from a serious operation in the mountains near Geneva known locally as "The Edge of the World", Mohr realized that he had come close to the edge of his own existence. Having recovered, he was inspired to revisit places that had struck him as being at the edge of the world in the course of his long career, places which were remote in terms of both common experience and geographical location.

Each set of photographs in this book "from the edge" is introduced by a short text written by Mohr himself. Spanning 40 years, his photographs take us to such disparate venues as Romania, Lapland, Pakistan, Greece, Algeria and Nicaragua. Mohr's longstanding collaborator John Berger describes his life in a portrait that sheds particular light on the theme of this book.

About this title

About the Author:

John Berger and Jean Mohr co-authored A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967) and A Seventh Man (1975). Berger's most recent novel is King: A Street Story (1999).

Review:

Berger's narrative manages to let the reader engage with the visual portraits without dictating how the images are read. An extremely accessible keyhole view of different cultures and peoples, offering one man's perception of where the borders of the contemporary world lie Geographical Magazine Wonderfully evocative... thought-provoking and strangely uplifting Sunday Times Every picture tells a story, and Mohr uses the power of that narrative to take us, paradoxically, to the edges of a round world, to meet with people we will never meet, to undertake journeys with our imaginations that our bodies will never feel, to share friends who are not ours, to look into eyes we may never see Journeys

About this edition

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1861890486
• ISBN 13: 9781861890481
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144