Ways of Seeing
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4.4 • 28 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever.
"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak."
"But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled."
John Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the (London) Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has.
Customer Reviews
A classic, poorly presented
Reading "Ways of Seeing" on a retina display - oh, the irony. Berger remains the essential writer on the politics of the visual and while some of the particulars of his analysis remain time-bound to the 1970s, this is still a transformative and essential work.
It is thus a tragedy that Penguin have not taken the opportunity of the new medium of the iPhone/ iPad to properly present this text. All images are low-resolution scans from what appears to be a printed version of the text. But even more inexcusably, readers lose the opening of Berger's text, which, famously and innovatively, began on the front cover of the book! Please, Penguin, reinstate the opening lines of the book!!
Ways of seeing
I agree with a previous reviewer that more books by John Berger ought to be listed. Shameful to have one only!
Ways of Seeing
This, scandalously, is the only Berger available in your store! He is a Booker prize winner for god's sake and one of the UK 's most extraordinary living writers.
This text was the most elegant and incisive and revolutionary reply to generations of exclusivity when talking about art. It is a brilliant and seminal work. But it is, as the previous reviewer points out, monstrous that the cover, where Berger begins his book, is missing in this format.
The store needs some serious upgrading and a great deal more thought.