About Looking

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.

As a novelist, art critic, and cultural historian, John Berger was 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, Berger explored 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?

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.