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As a novelist, art critic, and cultural historian, John Berger is 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 he explores 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? In asking these and other questions, Berger quietly -- but fundamentally -- alters the vision of anyone who reads his work.
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Das Leben der Bilder oder die Kunst des Sehens
1991-04, Verlag Klaus Wagenbach
Hardcover
in German
- 5.-7. Tausend
3803111145 9783803111142
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About looking
1991, Vintage International
in English
- 1st Vintage International ed.
0679736557 9780679736554
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About looking
1980, Pantheon Books, Pantheon / Random House
in English
- 1st American ed.
0394511247 9780394511245
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Originally published: New York : Pantheon Books, 1980.
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First Sentence
"The 19th century, in western Europe and North America, saw the beginning of a process, today being completed by 20th century corporate capitalism, by which every tradition which has previously mediated between man and nature was broken."
Work Description
This successor to John Berger's Ways of Seeing, written over the last ten years, searches for meaning within and beyond what is looked at. Why do zoos disappoint children? Why do we take snapshots of those we love? How do the media use photographs of agony? When an animal looks us in the eyes, what does that look mean? Berger describes how a sixteenth-century masterpiece he saw in the 1960s comes to look different to him a decade later. He discusses how a forest looks to a woodcutter; how fields look to a peasant; how the world looks to a nineteenth-century barber's son; how New York looked to immigrants; and how each of these perspectives was reflected in the struggles of a particular painter. Every painting he considers, whether by Millet, Courbet, Turner, Magritte, Fasanella, or Francis Bacon, is evidence of an experience which belongs as fully to life as to art. (back cover copy)
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- Created April 1, 2008
- 16 revisions
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| March 24, 2025 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
| July 13, 2024 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
| December 19, 2023 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
| July 10, 2022 | Edited by dcapillae | merge authors |
| April 1, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from Scriblio MARC record |




