It is a knife that he takes, pointedly, to a canvas in London’s National Gallery in the opening moments of the first episode of Ways of Seeing, making a neat, violent crop of the goddess’s face from Sandro Botticelli’s Venus and Mars (c.1485). Many people have described the camera as a gun for Berger, it was also a knife. John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972, film still.
Here, curators Mariama Attah and Anna Frances Douglas, alongside tutor, artist and curator Jeremy Millar, return to Berger’s text and series to revisit its influence on photography. Though Berger continued to produce aeons of fascinating material throughout his career, it’s Ways of Seeing to which people routinely return as a blueprint for interpreting how images old and new structure our understanding of ourselves and how we want to be seen. His accessible reinterpretation of Walter Benjamin’s ideas, notably in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), which appeared 50 years ago this year, unlocked a means through which everyday people, not just academics or scholars, could access ideas of artistic representation, reproduction and image construction. Since its release, John Berger’s landmark television series and book, Ways of Seeing (1972), has been a consistent favourite of students, curators and artists alike.
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