About looking
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
Print Book, English, 1991
1st Vintage International ed View all formats and editions
Vintage International, New York, 1991
205 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
9780679736554, 0679736557
23583170
[Pt. 1] Why look at animals?
[Pt. 2] Uses of photography:
The suit and the photograph
Photographs of agony
Paul Strand
Uses of photography
[Pt. 3] Moments lived:
The primitive and the professional
Millet and the peasant
Seker Ahmet and the forest
Lowry and the industrial north
Ralph Fasanella and the experience of the city
La Tour and humanism
Francis Bacon and Walt Disney
An article of faith
Between two colmars
Courbet and the Jura
Turner and the Barber's Shop
Rouault and the suburbs of Paris
Magritte and the impossible
Hals and bankruptcy
Giacometti
Rodin and sexual domination
Romaine Lorquet
Field
Originally published: New York : Pantheon Books, 1980
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