Here Berger showed the continuities between post-Renaissance European paintings of women and imagery from latter-day posters and girly magazines, by juxtaposing the different images – showing how they similarly rendered women as objects. Berger’s idea that looking is a political act, perhaps even a historically constructed process – such that where and when we see something will affect what we see – comes across most powerfully in the second episode of Ways of Seeing – which focused on the male gaze. “Berger’s theoretical legacy”, the Indian academic Rashmi Doraiswamy wrote recently, “is in situating the look in the context of political otherness”. Yet his style of blending Marxist sensibility and art theory with attention to small gestures, scenes and personal stories developed much earlier, in essays for the independent, weekly magazine New Stateman (between 19) and also in his first novel A Painter of Our Time, published in 1958.

He was also a vibrant example of the public intellectual, using his position to speak out against social injustices and to lend his support to artists and activists across the world.īerger’s approach to art came most directly into the public eye in four-part BBC TV series, Ways of Seeing in 1972, produced by Mike Dibb and which preceded the book. The opening to John Berger’s most famous written work, the 1972 book Ways of Seeing, offered not just an idea but also an invitation to see and know the world differently: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” he wrote.īerger, who died on January 2 at the age of 90, has had a profound influence on the popular understanding of art and the visual image.

The ways of seeing book