JOHN BERGER PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Andy Merrifield | 224 pages | 15 Jun 2012 | Reaktion Books | 9781861899040 | English | London, United Kingdom John Berger (Author of Ways of Seeing) Eamil Facebook LinkedIn Twitter. John L. Berger Partner. New Jersey. Add to Folder. Related Areas Corporate Real Estate. And what follows in its wake once one has been made? These are questions that may strike the contemporary Western reader as nostalgic. They are redolent of a past age, before history was said to have ended, and entered overtime. We continue to speak of revolutions in business, in style and technology; but rarely in politics does it mean what it used to mean. Or, for that matter, in art. It has become easier for us to imagine a disaster so vast as to make the planet uninhabitable than to see far beyond the capitalist world order that everywhere surrounds us. Only after some great cataclysm will we be able to press the reset button and start afresh. This is the latent utopian content of so many summer blockbusters. But to go only two generations back is to inhabit a different world with a different conception of the future, a different sense of the possible. The crucial dates for the European left—, , , , —attest to a radical lineage in which revolution occupied a central and recurring position in its psyche. History was shown again and again to be a living, writhing force. Popular energies would erupt, lose control, be put down, re-emerge, and be put down again only to reappear, often spectacularly. This was the stop-and- start of the long 19th century. And in those revolutionary moments—windows of mass disruption and seemingly irrevocable historical change—the political vanguard can be said to have been living the dream , convinced in the moment that a second coming was near at hand. For John Berger, who began not as a dreamer of the maelstrom but a campaigner for tradition, the very concept of the total transformation, sudden and exhilarating, was something he came to only later, after his hopes for postwar unity had dissolved. His early taste of political disappointment was in this sense unusual. It was not that the revolution of his youth had gone wrong or failed to come, but that the revolutions that did come, whether cultural from America or political in the Eastern bloc , were of the wrong kind, from the wrong quarters. Meanwhile, the artistic New Deal he tried to encourage, as if brick-by-brick, was buckling under the weight of its own ambition. It was only three years before the Beatles started playing clubs in Liverpool. Having staked his sense of self to larger historical forces more imagined than real, Berger had to confront defeat. As new technologies radio, cinema, television usurped the role of popular communication, the visual artist was left entirely dependent on the bourgeoisie. This was to imprison them in the most frustrating contradiction. They became disillusioned either with their medium or with their content. When you take yourself out of your own little bubble and really concentrate on noticing, looking and observing life in closer detail, you become aware of the intense energy that other people, places and things are emitting. Everything in our world has some form of energy — light, land, weather, the energy of movement between people. Even when it feels like there is an absence of energy — an inert object, a barren landscape, an empty wall. That energy creates a dialogue, a quality to recognise and to understand within the scene. This is a reminder to all us creatives that creativity is a journey and we are not aiming for perfection, but I think instead, towards the act of exploration. Being creative means you are in constant motion, examining, probing, questioning, looking. I love this, and for some reason it reminds me of one of my favourite photographers — Elliott Erwitt. Erwitt has a stunning eye for the comedic and hilarious moments of life. This made me think about when we look at a photograph that makes an impact on us, there is the obvious aesthetic appeal, but there is also something that is very hard to explain. I love watching very young children go about their days. The very young are in a permanent state of observation, as they watch without inhibition the world unfolding around them. I think we could all benefit from doing that a little bit more — being in a state of open, uninhibited attention. Because words will only take you so far. We are, we should be, so much more fluent in the visual as words came much later into our worlds. But what about the people who view our creations? Now maybe we are not on the level of the grand old masters, but I do believe that every single one of us has something interesting to communicate. Humans are by nature storytellers — whether that is through song or photos, paintings or writing. The act of taking a photo is saying — hey, I am here and this is what I saw, this is what I found profoundly and amazingly interesting. Art for me in its many ways and many facets is an opportunity to explore, to reflect, to learn, to understand. Accept what life is, and relish every cloud… I really want my life to be an interesting experience. How you perceive your life and the small choices you make to deepen your awareness of the world. In later life John Berger moved to a little Alpine village in France. This is permanent issue on the horizon for most creatives — the act of getting started and finishing! I photograph a lot of cities and they can be hard to get a handle on them. They are chaotic and big and multi-faceted and hard to break down so that you can create interesting shots. But there is always a spirit to a place. Leave a dozen photographers in a city and they will all come up with something different, but there is an atmosphere that makes sense to you. Every photograph you take is a subjective impression of the world around you. I am always amazed how when I am out on my workshops the group can all be in the same place, but we came come out with very different photos. This should give you tremendous confidence with your photography. We are unique and if we keep at it and keep pushing ourselves out of our little bubbles of what life is to us, then we will create something unique and interesting. It was suggested by his friend Victor Anant, who told him:. The Best Books on John Berger | Five Books Expert Recommendations More on this Topic. Coronavirus Update: What patients and families need to know Dismiss Alert. Watch Video Intro Play video. Languages Spoken English. Biography John T. Outside Interests Virginia Commonwealth University. Heart Failure Heart Surgery. Innovation District - Mar 12, Innovation District - Nov 06, Coronavirus Assessment Tool. Coronavirus Assessment Tool is taking longer to load than usual. Men go backwards or forwards There are two directions But not two sides. For Berger, forwards meant the continent, and it meant a new kind of writing. It meant living out as an artist the possible syntheses he had only glimpsed as a critic. Though based in a suburb of Geneva, he spent much of the decade on the road. He produced an awe-inspiring array of forms: photo-texts, broadcasts, novels, documentaries, feature films, essays. It was a sensual yet heady decade and a half. Riding from museum to museum on his motorbike, staying with friends in country homes, painting landscapes in open fields, making pilgrimages to altarpieces and monuments, seeking out the buried manuscripts of the interwar left, speaking at marches and teach-ins: all this went into his new identity as a European—rather than English—writer. If Berger first made his name in the polemical blood sport of London, the figure that emerged as the New Left rose to a crescendo was a theorist in transit, a critic writing back to his homeland. A total transformation indeed. The late 50s were an exit ramp. After his leave from journalism, his time spent away from London, the publication of his first novel, the dissolution of his second marriage, the collapse of his social realist project— after all this, Berger returned to the New Statesman for three final years. From to he once again contributed articles on exhibitions, but his focus had changed profoundly. Any interest in contemporary art shrank to the point of dismissal or indifference. But even here there was a new outlook. Of course there had always been, interspersed with the polemics, studies of masters: Courbet, Goya, Kokoschka, Chagall. But he now studied the art of the past with a more synoptic lens. He asked larger questions. What can painting tell us about the development of human consciousness? How might our senses be colored by civilizational belief? What place do artists occupy alongside thinkers from other fields? He wrote of Velazquez in relation to Galileo, Poussin in relation to Descartes, and Picasso in relation to Heisenberg. The parallels were of course more evocative than rigorous—he was aware of the pitfalls that came from treating art as merely an adjunct to the history of ideas a criticism often leveled at the iconographic school of Erwin Panofsky ; but he held firm to the fundamental premise. All fields both condition and are conditioned by the ideological possibilities of their time. The two primal scenes for Berger not a professional scholar but a critic and writer were the Renaissance and modernism.