Taken together, however, this signature variegation emphasises the continuities that have underpinned more than forty years of tireless intellectual inquiry and fierce political engagement. It is not just that he has written on photographers, artists, thinkers and peasants, on zoos, museums and cities he has travelled to these diverse concerns are often combined in the course of a single essay. Polemical, meditative, radical, always original (‘The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art’), Berger’s essays are, of course, extremely wide-ranging.
#John berger ways of seeing quotes series
Many of the ideas in the ground-breaking book and TV series Ways of Seeing - ideas which have since become part of our received cultural knowledge - were presented first and, in some ways, more sensitively, in essays for New Society. Far from being adjuncts to the main body of work, these essays are absolutely central to it. Throughout his working life Berger has written essays. However, the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, in November 2001, provided a timely opportunity to try to come up with just such a book. It is the entire body of work that is remarkable no single volume represents Berger adequately. The questions ‘Which is his best book?’ or ‘Which book should I read first?’ are unanswerable. Even admirers tend to know him in only one or two of his many incarnations. John Berger’s achievements as a writer are both widely recognised and - because of their diversity - difficult to grasp. John Berger: Selected Essays of John Berger
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