The article can be found
here, and probably other places too. It is apparently from 'Selected Essays and Articles: The Look of Things' published in 1972. I quite like John Berger, and have eight of his books, but not that one.
He approaches things from quite a leftist, radical point of view. For example, earlier in this article he says, "It is more useful to categorize art by what has become its social function. It functions as property."
His analysis of a photograph focuses on its selection of a particular instant in time, and on what it
excludes, i.e. other instants, other viewpoints.
In comparison with painting/drawing, I would agree with "Composition in the profound, formative sense of the word cannot enter into photography.", but then the art world is broad enough to include arrangements of 'found' objects, and a photograph is not so far from that.
I think that his exclusion of 'absurd studio works' is a bit limited, or perhaps just dated, as from behind-the-scene looks at some of the works of Edward Burtynsky, and Art Wolfe, for example, they sometimes indulge in quite a lot of arrangement/composition for photographs made outdoors.
I would disagree with "The formal arrangement of a photograph explains nothing.", perhaps depending on how one interprets 'explains'. In my view, the particular spatial arrangement(composition) of the elements of a photograph is important - for me this geometry is an important part of why the photographer chose
this viewpoint, and
this moment, to capture. And further, why, when editing, the photographer chose this photograph, of many taken, to print, and to present, and why certain photographs, of all those printed, are admired and loved. Of course there are many different aesthetics, so none of this is universal or fixed: a photographer may employ a variety of compositional strategies, and these may vary over time, and a viewer may appreciate various sorts of photographs similarly.
I think that in this article Berger may be reacting to something that he had previously written ("The argument of apologists (and I myself have been among them) has been a little academic."), and maybe over-reacting, being a bit extreme, and he has a tendency to be excessively polemical: "Hence the crucial role of photography in ideological struggle.".
Good though.
Thanks for raising the question.