Hence the crucial role of photography in ideological struggle .the necessity of our understanding a weapon which we can use and which can be used against us."" .
However, photography is not alone in being used to portray a specific set of visions as facts in order to support a particular ideology. Painting and writing have a long history of being used to these kinds of ends. It has truly been said that history is written by the victors in any conflict and (rather than the truth) history shows them to have been "right- or at least -better- than their opponents. Newspapers and television, as history-in-the-making mainly show things from a limited, one-sided point of view. Before photography, war artists existed as official recorders and they sent back sketches of battles and other important events they had witnessed (See image 2). This kind of recording still goes on today in British courtrooms, where the photographer is barred from entry. The most recent example being the Soham murder trial images (See image 3).
This brings us to the point that not all painting and drawing is "fine art- either. A courtroom drawing, a painted re-decorated room, a graphic advertising illustration - none of these can be really classed as fine art, though there may possibly be one or two examples whose visual impact upon the viewer is such that it approaches the "aesthetically pleasing- impact needed. The fact that many examples of the craft are not "fine art- does not lead us to assert that no painting is fine art. But Berger seems to be drawing an exactly parallel assumption about photography from this invalid point in this essay. He appears to be stating that because photography is also used to record events (horse-racing's photo finishes; wedding and event photographs; news and advertising photographs; surveillance photographs) this excludes all photography from being "fine art-. .
It is useful to look at Berger's other essays about art rather than photography, notably "The Shape of a Pocket-, "About Looking- and "Ways of Seeing- to get a more rounded view of what he considers constitutes "fine art-.