Click here to download a PDF of his moving poem “They Are the Last,” which includes the lines, “Once the animals flowed like their milk./ Now that they have gone/ it is their endurance we miss. It is comprised of seven different essays, three of which are pictorial and the other containing texts and images. In the French Alps, Berger worked side-by-side with the locals and wrote about peasant life with a sensitivity rare for a modern intellectual, especially in his trilogy Into Their Labors. Ways of Seeing is a key art-historical work that continues to provoke widespread debate. Of course, Berger wrote about more than art criticism. While there is insight in the analysis Berger presents, it is also reductive, filtering all art through the lens of Marxist cultural criticism.
John berger ways of seeing analysis series#
All these images are “intended to make an example of the dead,” says Berger (emphasis in original) medical in Rembrandt’s case, religious in Mantegna’s, and political in Guevara’s. 134) Berger’s essay and TV series are in many ways products of their time, and his work was rightly subject to a range of criticisms. The exhibition of the corpse showed their need to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the man was dead.Īs Berger notes, the image of the corpse and surrounding men has a startling similarity to paintings by Rembrandt and Mantegna. Berger argues that the authorities feared Guevara’s reputation, and thus his body, as much as his life. Already a living legend, Guevara was killed in Bolivia in 1967 with the help of the CIA. One of those essays is this fascinating analysis of the notorious picture of Che Guevara’s corpse. Focus your analysis on what you see and what youve read in Ways in Seeing. Geoff Dyer argues that Berger used the essay form for “more than forty years of tireless intellectual inquiry and fierce political engagement.” In Berger’s many essays, collected in numerous books over the years, Dyer says that “we come close to witnessing thought as an act of almost physical labor.” John Berger's Ways of Seeing: The Art Critic and the Search for Meaning. No additional research or art-specific background is required for this question. And, as he notes, “If I am a storyteller it’s because I listen.” In the various analyses of Ways of Seeing, the ideas articulated by John Berger become the focus rather than the images on which he based some of his. The documentary The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger, released last year, shows the man defining himself as a storyteller above all. Randy Kennedy, writing in the New York Times, reminds us that Ways of Seeing “declared war on traditional ways of thinking about art and influenced a generation of artists and teachers.”īorn in Britain, Berger (the family name is pronounced “BER-jer”) lived for many decades in rural France. Most well-known for his early 1970s television series Ways of Seeing and the popular book that followed it, Berger was a critic, painter, film-maker, novelist, poet, translator, and, always, a radical.