And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos was published by Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative in 1984. It is Berger’s most concentrated, most personal, and most difficult-to-categorize work — a book that is simultaneously philosophical meditation, love letter, cosmological speculation, and prose poem, moving between registers with a freedom that only complete mastery of form permits.
The book is divided into two sections: “Once” (about time) and “Here” (about space). The first section begins with the Big Bang and moves through geological time, historical time, personal time, and the time of desire — asking what it means to exist in time, what memory preserves, what the present contains, and whether love constitutes a different relationship to temporality. The second section moves from cosmic space through geographical space to the space of the body — asking what “home” means for those who have been displaced, what presence means in a world of images and distances, and whether the space between two people can ever be fully crossed.
The writing is extraordinary: sentences that are simultaneously abstract and sensual, that move between the philosophical and the physical without transition, that achieve a density of meaning usually found only in poetry. Berger addresses a beloved “you” throughout — the book is a love letter — but the “you” is also the reader, the world, the possibility of attention itself.
Collecting And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
First edition (Writers and Readers, London, 1984): Trade paperback original.
Market values:
- First edition: $15–$35
- Signed copies: $50–$150
- US first (Pantheon, 1984): $10–$25