‘The lived moment’: New aesthetics for migrant recollection

In 1975, when A Seventh Man was first published, writer John Berger and photographer Jean Mohr intended their book about the experience of Migrant Workers in Europe as both social critique and political intervention. It continues to be read in Istanbul, Madrid and Damascus, in the places from which migrant workers set off, and by those who themselves become migrant workers. The changing ways in which journalists, social commentators and sociologists, engravers, photographers or film-makers have attempted to render, or preferred to avoid, such lived moments is a revealing theme in the historical exploration of migrant experience. The meaning of migrant labour is especially revealing for Berger and Mohr since an understanding of systematic exploitation morally discredits capitals profit-driven self-justifications. A Seventh Man emerges from Berger's engagement with the oppositional artistic and political theory of the inter-war years.