John Berger

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Biography

John Berger (5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter and essayist. He trained as a painter at the Chelsea School of Art, worked as a critic for the New Statesman in the 1950s, and from 1962 lived in continental Europe, settling for the last decades of his life in the Alpine village of Quincy in Haute-Savoie, where he wrote the Into Their Labours trilogy about peasant life.

He won the Booker Prize in 1972 for the novel G., and used the acceptance speech to denounce the sponsor's historical involvement in Caribbean plantation labour, giving half the prize money to the British Black Panthers and using the other half to fund his study of migrant workers.

Ways of Seeing

Ways of Seeing was a four-part BBC television series broadcast in January 1972, made with the producer Mike Dibb, and a Penguin book of the same year assembled by Berger with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb and Richard Hollis. It was written partly in response to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, and against everything that programme assumed.

Its arguments have become so widely absorbed that their origin is often forgotten:

• Reproduction changes the image. Following Walter Benjamin, Berger argues that photographic reproduction detaches a painting from its place and makes it available to be used — cropped, captioned, set against other images — so that its meaning becomes a function of context rather than an inherent property.
• "Men act and women appear." The book's most quoted passage analyses the European nude as a form addressed to an assumed male spectator-owner, and describes the resulting split in women's self-experience: "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. The surveyor of woman in herself is male." This is the origin point for a large body of feminist visual theory, including Laura Mulvey's work on the gaze.
• Oil painting and property. The genre's characteristic subject, Berger argues, is ownership — of land, of objects, of people — and its characteristic technique, the depiction of tangible surface, is a way of making possession visible.
• Publicity and glamour. The final chapter reads advertising as the direct successor to oil painting, with one substitution: oil painting showed what its owner already had, while publicity shows what the viewer does not have and proposes that buying it will make them enviable. "Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion."

The book's form is part of its argument. Three of its seven essays contain no words at all, only sequences of images, on the principle that the reader should be given the material to think with rather than the conclusion.

Selected Works

• Ways of Seeing (1972)
• G. (1972)
• A Seventh Man (1975), with Jean Mohr, on migrant labour in Europe
• About Looking (1980), including the essay "Why Look at Animals?"
• Another Way of Telling (1982), with Jean Mohr
• Into Their Labours trilogy: Pig Earth (1979), Once in Europa (1987), Lilac and Flag (1990)

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Ways of Seeing is the standard training in reading images as arguments rather than as records, and its analysis of publicity — an image economy that manufactures envy and sells its resolution — describes the feed with uncomfortable accuracy. Berger's account of the surveyed self, watching itself being watched, is also the most economical description available of what a profile is.

Related Reading

• Roland Barthes
• Guy Debord
• Robert Goldman
• Roland Marchand
• Extended Avatar