One of the writer and art critic’s finest essay collections, which includes his influential essay on animal ethics, “Why Look at Animals?”; a critique of the “bourgeois sexual morality” of Rodin’s sculptures; and an unlikely work of criticism linking Francis Bacon and Walt Disney.
John Berger was a thinker and writer of altogether extraordinary independence and range, an essayist, novelist, poet, and lifetime political activist whose work resonates with a voice that is as particular and personal as it is observant and reflective. Central to his long career was the experience of looking at and writing about art, and of all Berger’s many collections of essays About Looking is the one that goes to the heart of his understanding of art and criticism and their complicated relation to individual experience, social life, and human history. Beginning with one of his most powerful and influential essays, “Why Look at Animals,” the book continues with seminal pieces on the appeal and limits of the photographic image, before turning to consider and reconsider the achievements of painters and sculptors such as J. M. W. Turner, Gustave Courbet, Auguste Rodin, Francis Bacon, and Alberto Giacometti. The book is everywhere marked by Berger’s determination, in the face of the specialization and commodification that are capitalism’s stock-in-trade, to recall and engage with the essential question of “the meaning and enigma of visibility itself.”
Part of an ongoing reissue of Berger’s major works of criticism and fiction, About Looking quietly—but fundamentally—alters the vision of all who read it.
