About Looking (Vintage International)

As a novelist art critic and cultural historian Booker Prize-winning author 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. InAbout 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 quietly -- but fundamentally -- alters the vision of anyone who reads his work. Review There is great stillness in Berger's prose. But after a few pages his statements start to sing and go on singing. -- New RepublicInstant readability ... [Berger] makes one see [paintings] as statements or questions in a living language. -- New Statesman From the Inside Flap As a novelist art critic 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 quietly -- but fundamentally -- alters the vision of anyone who reads his work. From the Back Cover In About Looking the author explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. Berger quietly - but fundamentally - alters the vision of anyone who reads his work. About the Author John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel A Painter of Our Time was published in 1958 and since then his books have included Ways of Seeing the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours and the novel G. which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently and lived in a small village in the French Alps. He died in 2017.