He explains the difference between optics and perspectives and how our personal biases and surroundings affect the way we scrutinise a piece of art. His first essay focuses on seeing and knowing, the lapse between vision and knowledge. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production, Berger examines manipulated human perception and explores the idea of art as a commodity. John Berger is a British painter, novelist, poet and art critic who bases his point of view on his experiences explains what it means to see. “We never look at just one thing we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”
Ways Of Seeing ©Village Books Book Design ©Richard Hollis A masterpiece that draws parallels between art, advertising, desire and capitalism. This book recreates the feeling of the television, almost reading like Berger’s declarative script pulling one inside the text with its characteristically pithy sentences. The design of the book done by Richard Hollis, who matches the weight of the images by setting the text in bold, Univers 75 black in an awkward layout. Famous for its visual art criticism, John Berger’s Ways Of Seeing raises questions about how we see images and what influences us when we see them – drawing our attention to the relationship between vision, images, words and meaning. Four of these essays are worded and three are pictorial. John Berger’s Ways Of Seeing, originally a BBC television series, was further elaborated in the format of a book that consists of seven essays.