About Looking

Regular price €17.50
Quantity:
Will Deliver When Available
Will Deliver When Available
14 days return policy Shipping & Delivery
A01=John Berger
animal rights
art criticism
Author_John Berger
Booker Prize
Category=AB
Category=AJ
Category=DNL
Category=QDT
cultural criticism
environmentalism
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
human eye
philosophy
photography
Ways of Seeing

Product details

  • ISBN 9781037207983
  • Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
  • Publication Date: 13 Aug 2026
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
Secure checkout Fast Shipping Easy returns

The centenary edition, with a newly commissioned introduction by Berger’s biographer, Tom Overton.

'Instant readability . . . [Berger] makes one see [paintings] as statements or questions in a living language.' New Statesman
'One of the most influential intellectuals of our time' Observer
'Berger is a writer one demands to know more about . . . an intriguing and powerful mind and talent' New York Times

As a novelist, essayist, 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 alters the vision of anyone who reads his work.

John Berger was born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative in form and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include To the Wedding, King, and the Booker Prize-winning novel, G. Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger), and the internationally acclaimed Ways of Seeing. He lived and worked in a small village in the French Alps, the setting for his trilogy Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa and Lilac and Flag). His collection of essays The Shape of a Pocket was published in 2001. His latest novel, From A to X, was published in 2008. The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol, produced by Complicite and based on a story by Berger, toured for three years between 1994 and 1997. About Looking, published by Bloomsbury in April 2009, was the follow-up to the seminal Ways of Seeing, one of the most influential books on art in the 20th century. He died in early 2017.

More from this author