Berger helps us sharpen our critical mechanical eye – a skill that is becoming essential in a brave new world of image obsession and publicity. He emphasizes our duty to self-scrutinise throughout, asserting: “Our principal aim has been to start a process of questioning”. As Berger delves into distinctions between optics and perspectives, we see how our private conscience resembles mechanical eyes by selecting what our lens chooses to focus on and what to neglect. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you”. A Mechanical eye … the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Film director Dziga Vertov once said, “I’m an eye. Art is a symbiotic relationship in which both image and observer generate meaning. An artist’s subjectivity requires him to see the painting before he dabs pigment onto canvas, just as the observer sees a unique impression of a painting.

Unravelling the title, he explains the difference between looking and seeing: our eyes naturally look, but seeing assumes an idea, an understanding of the subject. Berger is strikingly original, balancing academic gravitas with a delightful playfulness we become enamoured with his rare way of seeing the world.īerger fulfils the roles of a philosopher, listener, and somewhat of a magician as he makes tantalising worlds appear, and illusions vanish.

Reading his revolutionary book Ways of Seeing, first published in 1972, I am still struck by its sharp modernist angles, the refreshing moral grit, and its sagacious study of our social psyche through visual culture. In January 2017, Britain lost the eminent intellectual John Berger, an individual peerless for his perceptive cultural contributions.

John berger ways of seeing book