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About Looking

About Looking

by John Berger, afterword by Tom Overton

$18.95
$18.95
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John Berger was a thinker and writer of altogether extraordinary independence and range, an essayist, novelist, poet, and lifetime political activist whose work resonates with a voice that is as particular and personal as it is observant and reflective. Central to his long career was the experience of looking at and writing about art, and of all Berger's many collections of essays About Looking is the one that goes to the heart of his understanding of art and criticism and their complicated relation to individual experience, social life, and human history. Beginning with one of his most powerful and influential essays, "Why Look at Animals," the book continues with seminal pieces on the appeal and limits of the photographic image, before turning to consider and reconsider the achievements of painters and sculptors such as J. M. W. Turner, Gustave Courbet, Auguste Rodin, Francis Bacon, and Alberto Giacometti. The book is everywhere marked by Berger's determination, in the face of the specialization and commodification that are capitalism's stock-in-trade, to recall and engage with the essential question of "the meaning and enigma of visibility itself."

Part of an ongoing reissue of Berger's major works of criticism and fiction, About Looking quietly—but fundamentally—alters the vision of all who read it.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230670
Pages: 240
Publication Date:

Praise

Not since D. H. Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience. He is a wonderful artist and thinker.
—Susan Sontag

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

There is great stillness in Berger’s prose. But after a few pages, his statements start to sing and go on singing.
—New Republic

Instant readability … [Berger] makes one see [paintings] as statements or questions in a living language.
—New Statesmen

Berger values art—whether records of moments or momentous breaks in tradition—as ‘Moments Lived’ … The stress is on the ‘lived’: ‘the importance of the subjective experience as a historical factor.’ In a sense, these moments are illuminations that allow us ‘to see more clearly.’
—Hal Foster, Artforum

Britain's John Berger has got to be the widest-ranging Marxist art critic around; and in these 23 assorted essays, 1966-79, he almost apotheosizes into a butterfly. He'll poke around at anything anywhere that might ratify his rather wistful dream of truly socio-historical art.
—Kirkus

How readily we, as a civilization and as individuals, stop believing in the value of that awe-inspiring variety of sentient life. Hardly anyone has addressed this disquieting cultural tendency with more dimension than John Berger … In his essay 'Why Look at Animals?,' part of the altogether fantastic 1980 anthology About Looking … Berger examines the evolution of our relationship with animals and how they went from muses for the very first human art … to spiritual deities to captive entertainment.
—Maria Popova, The Marginalian

Berger resisted and arguably even vanquished the academic condescension toward artists and the public. Instead, he felt indebted: to the former’s intentions, to the latter’s ability to relate to art through lived experience.
—Sarah Cowan, The Paris Review

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