A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe was published by Penguin Books in 1975, the second collaboration between Berger and photographer Jean Mohr. The title refers to the statistic that, at the time, one in seven manual workers in Europe was a migrant — imported from Turkey, Yugoslavia, Portugal, North Africa, and Southern Italy to perform the labor that prosperous northern Europeans no longer would.
Berger and Mohr follow the migrant’s journey: departure from the home village (with its mixture of hope and desperation), the passage through processing centers (where men are reduced to bodies, examined, categorized, accepted or rejected), arrival in the host country (the shock of cold, of incomprehension, of invisibility), work (the most dangerous, the most degrading, the least paid), and the impossible return (to a village that has changed, to a family that has grown without them, to a self that no longer fits either world).
The book’s form mixes photography, economics, poetry (including verse by Berger himself), historical analysis, and direct testimony from workers. This formal hybridity serves a political purpose: no single mode of representation can capture the totality of the migrant’s experience, because that experience is precisely what the dominant culture renders invisible. The book must use multiple languages to speak what monolingual culture cannot.
Berger’s analysis remains devastatingly current: the argument that wealthy nations’ prosperity depends on imported labor that is simultaneously necessary and despised has only become more visible in the decades since publication.
Collecting A Seventh Man
First edition (Penguin Books, London, 1975): Trade paperback original.
Market values:
- First Penguin edition: $20–$50
- Signed copies: $60–$150
- Later printings: $5–$15