First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: “This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. He died in 2017, at the age of 90.“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled” - so opens John Berger’s revolutionary million-copy bestseller on how to look at art John Berger was a storyteller, a novelist, a painter, a poet, a critic, a screenwriter, a playwright. Her most recent book is Everybody: A Book About Freedom. Her collected essays on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, were published in 2020. She’s written catalogue essays on a variety of contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Derek Jarman, Wolfgang Tillmans and Chantal Joffe. Her writing on art and culture appears in the Guardian, Financial Times, and Frieze. Olivia Laing is the author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, The Lonely City and a novel, Crudo.

The painting’s status as a kind of body that had survived meant something to me at that moment, as a person housed in a newly perilous body, which its replication as a digital image, so freely available, so immaterial, did not.' 'It was this room that I’d wanted to be in for months, though I would have been hard pressed to explain why. In today's episode, we follow Olivia Laing into the National Gallery on a rainy day after the third lockdown, where she is confronted by the first painting she has seen in person since the pandemic began. To mark the 50th anniversary of Ways of Seeing, Radio 4 invites five writers to tell us about a work of art that is important to them, and to reflect on how Ways of Seeing influenced their own ways of looking at - and thinking about - art. The book published to accompany the series has never been out of print and has had a profound influence on popular understanding of art criticism and visual culture. The programmes explored Walter Benjamin's ideas about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction the female nude and the male gaze oil painting, status and ownership advertising, art and commerce. Our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing'. The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe. Across a series of four half-hour episodes, Berger talked about how we look at art, and why it matters: 'The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. First broadcast in 1972 on BBC Two, Ways of Seeing was a collaboration between the writer John Berger and director Mike Dibb.

Ways of seeing series