004 · Withholding
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Jean Mohr admits to fictionalising his experiences as he recounts them: ‘I’m making this up, or rather imagining it.’1
A self-conscious honesty.
An admission that events alter in the retelling.
Mohr describes how, across his collaborations with John Berger, Berger withheld certain photographs from their books, so readers could see the ‘characters in the imagination and shape them accordingly’.2
A resistance to the easy use of images to complete the text.
The photograph withheld from the page is remade in the reader’s mind.
To withhold visual information for the sake of imagination.