About Looking

'Polemical, meditative, radical, always original, Berger's essays are extremely wide-ranging' Geoff Dyer
'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.

Auteur

John Berger was born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative in form and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include To the Wedding, King, and the Booker Prize-winning novel, G. Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger), and the internationally acclaimed Ways of Seeing. 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). His collection of essays The Shape of a Pocket was published in 2001. His latest novel, From A to X, was published in 2008. The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, produced by Complicite and based on a story by Berger, toured for three years between 1994 and 1997. About Looking, published by Bloomsbury in April 2009, was the follow-up to the seminal Ways of Seeing, one of the most influential books on art in the 20th century. He died in early 2017.