Ways of Seeing

The book is very small papers are like novel quality (not the usual art book quality) all pictures included are black and white. A bit disappointed الكتاب صغير جدا الاوراق رديئه النوعيه و جميع الصور في الكتاب بالاسود و الابيض

Great book, fast shipping. Thank you

Especially since I think I was supposed to read it in Art School thirty years ago. In fact I thought I had read it, and I was just buying it to show a student. Read it myself. Slow going at the beginning.

This book is a collection of conferences which Berger and other critics held on TV. The illustrations are too small and of very poor quality, so don't expect a fancy art book or something like that. It is a bit irritating especially on one of the essays, which is only consisting of pictures and not a single word. Said this, it is a pure compendium, extremely inspiring and modern. 5 stars because you should never complain about a Penguin pocket book.

Ways of Seeing von John Berger ist schnell lesbar und hat mir echt die Augen geöffnet. Er erklärt, wie wir Kunst und Medien wahrnehmen und manipuliert werden, ohne kompliziert zu werden. Besonders das Kapitel über den „male gaze“ war stark – regt zum Nachdenken an. Ist jetzt nicht die absolute Bibel, aber definitiv ein Buch, das man mal gelesen haben sollte, wenn man Kunst und ihre Wirkung besser checken will. Klare Empfehlung!

I had been on the lookout for a good book on visual culture, and after a long search , I decided to buy this one, as it is a classic. A classic in the non-fiction genre means that latest books on the subject have stolen the main themes from the classic text-which may be very short-and then added verbosity and lots of pictures to make thick and expensive books. This book may seem like a small book full of pictures, but it propounds big ideas. For me it was a quick read, I finished it in a few hours, possibly more so due to the fact that the main ideas were thoughts already scattered in my head; Berger compiled them, stated them way more eloquently, and then some. As is often the case, this book took me back to Qur'anic verses, as it seemed to be tied to the main themes of the Islamic scripture. The section on the female nude, could very well have been a summary of a dissertation on the veil in Islam. A detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this review. Having just read Chomsky's "How the world works," it was quite intriguing to read Berger making the same connections of capitalism with envy, covetousness and social apathy. Just like Chomsky, his identification of capitalism as a roadblock to democracy was also equally intriguing. It was almost the same points being stated, except that this time the thesis was based on marketing and the visual arts. (less)