John Berger essays
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John Peter Berger (5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter, and poet.1 He is best known for his novel G. and his book and BBC series Ways of Seeing. His books’ ideas and arguments (Ways of Seeings which we have chosen for the presentation) are still relevant today. Berger takes us beyond the visible, towards a closer understanding of the world as it really is - capitalism. I have read two of his...
2 Pages
862 Words
“We can only approach it obliquely, from different angles that get closer to a central understanding but never quite touch it. We can only comprehend asymptotically.” Angelica Chong mentioned in her article on Hiroshima, Redux (Chong, 2016). She questions if we can ever understand atrocity and if we can never truly understand it, should we still be responsible for comprehending it? John Berger’s essay “Hiroshima” talks about how the atrocity of the Hiroshima bombing should be always remembered and the...
5 Pages
2253 Words
Berger touches on the thought that beauty is with in the eye of the beholder, which really does make the attention the centre of the visible world. The invention of the camera has really changed the perception of the world, and has changed not only what we can see, but also how we see it. Berger also talks about how a lot of original paintings are recreated and distributed across the world. This really does mess with the value of...
2 Pages
832 Words
An image is but a “window through which we look out into a section of the visible world” (Richter, Wells & Kemp, 2008, p102). But what of this visible world and that of the viewer? To begin questioning “what we see and what we know” (Berger, 2008, p.7), is to watch 70s revolutionary broadcast Ways of Seeing by John Berger. The program, later adapted into a book, are both highly successful in liberating image, freeing them of what is merely...
5 Pages
2238 Words
Throughout Berger’s documentary, Ways of Seeing, Berger discusses how the female body is perceived by a male eye, and how women are automatically objectified and dehumanised in a way that makes them appear simply as an inanimate object for men to admire for their own benefit and lust. The way a photograph is lit, how the photo is taken and the angles the image has been captured at, as well as the way women are positioned, made up and dressed,...
5 Pages
2456 Words
