Another Way Of Telling by Michael Pinchbeck at Mercer Art Gallery

To mark the 40th anniversary of Another Way of Telling (1982) by writer, John Berger, and photographer, Jean Mohr, Michael Pinchbeck explores the relationship between performance and photography, photographer and photographed, image and text. Taking the form of an immersive slideshow, the piece explores the book to ask how each time we perform is different to each time we take a photograph.

For this seed commission, Pinchbeck adapts the photo-montage in Another Way of Telling, a sequence without words entitled If each time. A single performer guides the audience through the pages of the book using a live camera, a medical trolley loaded with mementos, Berger’s words and Mohr’s images. She travels between fact and fiction, philosophy and poetry, restaging verbatim interviews with Susan Sontag, and becoming a woman whose life the pictures evoke. She brings to life a fragmented book to ask how photography captures moments in time

Another Way of Telling is the final piece of The Berger & Mohr Trilogy following A Fortunate Man (2018) and A Seventh Man (2020). All pieces in the trilogy find ways of staging the dynamic dialogue between image and text in Berger & Mohr’s books.

http://michaelpinchbeck.co.uk