Overview

The centenary edition, with a newly commissioned introduction by Berger’s biographer, Tom Overton. 'Instant readability . . . [Berger] makes one see [paintings] as statements or questions in a living language.' New Statesman 'One of the most influential intellectuals of our time' Observer 'Berger is a writer one demands to know more about . . . an intriguing and powerful mind and talent' New York Times As a novelist, essayist, and cultural historian, John Berger is a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight whose work amounts to a subtle, powerful critique of the canons of our civilization. In About Looking he explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. How do the animals we look at in zoos remind us of a relationship between man and beast all but lost in the twentieth century? What is it about looking at war photographs that doubles their already potent violence? How do the nudes of Rodin betray the threats to his authority and potency posed by clay and flesh? And how does solitude inform the art of Giacometti? In asking these and other questions, Berger alters the vision of anyone who reads his work.

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9781037207983

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Reviews

Polemical, meditative, radical, always original, Berger's essays are extremely wide-ranging. -- Geoff Dyer One of the most influential intellectuals of our time. * Observer * A wonderful artist and thinker. -- Susan Sontag Berger is a writer one demands to know more about . . . an intriguing and powerful mind and talent. * New York Times *

Author Information

John Berger was born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative inform and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include the Booker Prize-winning novel G, To the Wedding and Here is Where We Meet. Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso and the internationally acclaimed Ways of Seeing. His fragmentary prose poem And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984) was translated into nine languages. Towards the end of his life he lived and worked in a small village in the French Alps, the setting for his trilogy Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa and Lilac and Flag). He died in France in 2017.

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