John Berger

Essays explore the ways in which we look at and derive meaning from paintings by Courbet, Turner, Magritte, and others, as well as nature, zoos, and photographs

About Looking

John Berger's writings on photography are some of the most original of the twentieth century. This selection contains many groundbreaking essays and previously uncollected pieces written for exhibitions and catalogues in which Berger probes the work of photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and W. Eugene Smith - and the lives of those photographed - with fierce engagement, intensity and tenderness. The selection is made and introduced by Geoff Dyer, author of the award-winning The Ongoing Moment. How do we see the world around us? This is one of a number of pivotal works by creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision for ever. Understanding a Photograph John Berger Edited and introduced by Geoff Dyer

Understanding a Photograph

'Language is a body, a living creature ... and this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate'. John Berger's work has revolutionized the way we understand visual language. In this new book he writes about language itself, and how it relates to thought, art, song, storytelling and political discourse today. Also containing Berger's own drawings, notes, memories and reflections on everything from Albert Camus to global capitalism, Confabulations takes us to what is 'true, essential and urgent'.

Confabulations

John Berger's Ways of Seeing changed the way people think about painting and art criticism. This watershed work shows, through word and image, how what we see is always influenced by a whole hose of assumptions concerning that nature of beauty, truth, civilization, form, taste, class and gender. Exploring the layers of meaning within oil paintings, photographs and graphic art, Berger argues that when we see, we are not just looking - we are reading the language of images.

Ways of Seeing

Essays and poems explore the emotions of the author and examine the natures of art, love, time, and poetry

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

John Berger broke new ground with his penetrating writings on life, art and how we see the world around us. Here he explores how the ancient relationship between man and nature has been broken in the modern consumer age, with the animals that used to be at the centre of our existence now marginalized and reduced to spectacle. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Why Look at Animals?

Born to an Italian father and his American mistress, G. becomes, in the years before the First World War, a modern Don Juan

A Novel

Görme biçimleri

Bride-to-be Ninon recalls her parents' marriage, her childhood, her first romance, her discovery that she is HIV-positive, and her initial rejection of Gino, her future husband. Reprint.

To the Wedding

A major new book from one of the world's leading writers and art critics John Berger, one of the world's most celebrated art writers, takes us through centuries of drawing and painting, revealing his lifelong fascination with a diverse cast of artists. In Portraits, Berger grounds the artists in their historical milieu in revolutionary ways, whether enlarging on the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves or Cy Twombly's linguistic and pictorial play. In penetrating and singular prose, Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. The result is an illuminating walk through many centuries of visual culture, from one of the contemporary world's most incisive critical voices.

Portraits

It's an improbable city, Bologna - like one you might walk through after you have died.' A dreamlike meditation on memory, food, paintings, a fond uncle and the improbable beauty of Bologna, from the visionary thinker and art critic.

The Red Tenda of Bologna

Maḥmūd Darwīsh

Rema Hammami

Present's a new translation of two of the late former Palestinian national poet's works--"Mural," a contemplation of his life and work written following life-threatening surgery, and his last poem, "The Dice Player," which the author read in Ramallah a month before his death.

Mural

In this series of remarkable pieces from across his career, John Berger celebrates and dissects the close links between art and society and the individual. Few writers give a more vivid and moving sense of how we make art and how art makes us. GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible

The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza ...or Bento de Spinoza carried with him a sketchbook. For years, John Berger has imagined finding Bento's sketchbook without knowing what its pages might hold...When one day a friend gave Berger a beautiful virgin sketchbook, John said "This is Bento's !"and he began to draw, taking his inspiration from the philosopher's vision.

Bento's Sketchbook

Görme Biçimleri

An encounter with the ghost of his late mother, dead for fifteen years, draws the narrator into a remarkable odyssey during which he explores the lives of the dead, from a woman at the time of the London Blitz to a Paleolithic cave, introducing such characters as a female English aristocrat, a pedophile schoolmaster, a Spanish sculptor, and Rosa Luxemburg. Reprint.

Here Is Where We Meet

A major new work from the world’s leading writer on art Landscapes, the companion volume to John Berger’s highly acclaimed Portraits, explores what art tells us about ourselves. “Berger’s work is an invitation to reimagine; to see in different ways,” writes Tom Overton in the introduction to this volume. As a master storyteller and thinker John Berger challenges readers to rethink their every assumption about the role of creativity in our lives. In this brilliant collection of diverse pieces—essays, short stories, poems, translations—which spans a lifetime’s engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of seeing. He pays homage to the writers and thinkers who infuenced him, such as Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Bertolt Brecht. His expansive perspective takes in artistic movements and individual artists—from the Renaissance to the present—while never neglecting the social and political context of their creation. Berger pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his artist’s eye makes him a storyteller in these essays, rather than a critic. With “landscape” as an animating, liberating metaphor rather than a rigid defnition, this collection surveys the aesthetic landscapes that have informed, challenged and nourished John Berger’s understanding of the world. Landscapes—alongside Portraits—completes a tour through the history of art that will be an intellectual benchmark for many years to come.

John Berger

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