The Suit And The Photograph

John Berger’s The Suit and the Photograph focuses on and analyses the work of August Sander, a German photographer. Sander was trying to find people from every type, job, social class, sub-class, vocation, and privilege, and make portraits of them. Berger goes on to examine and analyze three of Sander’s photographs. He goes in-depth explaining how what they’re wearing, more specifically, their suits, affects their overall appearance and assumed social class. He later goes on to explain how the suit’s comfort and classiness makes it appealing to many social classes, resulting in a class hegemony when many member of different classes started wearing suits.

John Berger’s writing style was very easy to follow, the “anatomy” of the article flowed

He praises it for how much descriptive information the picture contains, “There is as much descriptive information in this image as in pages by a descriptive master like Zola.” Despite saying this Berger only wants to focus on their suits. He describes how the suits alter their appearance and apparent social class by a large amount. Berger wants the reader to perform an experiment by blocking the heads in the photos and examining their bodies and then vice versa while observing the different impressions they give. When you block the faces of the musicians they look, “uncoordinated, bandy-legged, barre-chested, low-arsed, twisted or scalene.” That changes when you block their bodies and look at their faces, they just look like five country men who like to make music. He also describes how much, “tailored clothes, instead of deforming, preserve the physical identity and therefore the natural authority of those wearing them.”

Berger then switches focus to a photograph of four Protestant missionaries in 1931. He focuses on their suits which are well tailored – enhancing their physical presence. The examination of these photos leads to Berger’s larger point of class hegemony. He explains that most peasants are physically strong and well-developed. They have developed these features from years of hard, manual labor beginning at an early