A Seventh Man

A Seventh Man is an illustrated book by the British writer and art critic John Berger and the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, first published in English by Verso Books in 1975. The book mixes poetry, statistics, reportage, economic and sociological analysis, and the first-person account of a migrant worker referred to as "he," seeking to portray a hidden reality of 1960s Europe: the heavy dependence of prosperous countries, during the postwar economic expansion, on foreign laborers from less developed regions such as Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia. The "seventh man" is not a specific individual but an anonymous existence processed away by statistics and policy: they build roads, clean buildings, repeat motions on assembly lines, yet are almost invisible in the public life of their host countries. Jean Mohr's black-and-white photographs resemble both public documentary reportage and intimate family albums, recording departure platforms, dormitory beds, brief reunions with visiting families, and repeatedly deferred plans to return home; Berger's text interweaves among these images, asking about the relationships among labor, homeland, the body, and dignity. The Chinese edition was translated by Liu Zhangbolong, produced by Imaginist, and published by China Academy of Art Press in 2019 in the "Imaginist · John Berger Works" series. Some statistics in the book are already more than forty years old, yet the author's observations on migrants' situation in a foreign land and on the costs of "development" can still be set against the experiences of today's migrant workers and new urban migrants.