The page on the right offers a couple of more complex scenes: two paintings that depict their subjects-tables replete with food and wine-from further away. The page on the left features a painting of a glass, a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, and a pen sitting atop a table below that, a painting of several slabs of meat.
#John berger ways of seeing episode 3 series#
These images are followed, on the next two pages, by a series of still-life oil paintings. The opposite page focuses on images with fewer figures: a Gericault scene with two distressed-looking heads, a Manet painting depicting a single man lying alone on the ground, and a painting of two women being guided by a sinister-looking male stranger-likely an allegory for death-by Hans Baldung Grein. On the left-hand page, two paintings show communities gathered around dead bodies, with figures scattered throughout the paintings in relative disarray. The next two pages depict scenes of chaos and death. Their surroundings change as the years progress: the settings shift from relatively empty backgrounds early on to more extensive mise-en-scene, shifting to reflect the fashionable painting styles of each era. In some, Mary and Jesus are surrounded by others, whereas in others, like a painting from 1523 by David, the two are alone. The first two-page spread shows seven representations of Mary with the baby Jesus, spanning the 12th through 17th centuries. He died in 2017, at the age of 90.Chapter 4 is another series of photos unaccompanied by text. John Berger was a storyteller, a novelist, a painter, a poet, a critic, a screenwriter, a playwright. He currently lives in Los Angeles where he is Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California. He is the author of a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling, and is the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays. Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels and nine non-fiction books, most recently See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. Interviewed about his reactions to first seeing the series, the Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje said he’d never seen anything like… that shirt: Berger’s shirt, as he stepped up and, looking like a first division footballer out for a night on the town, cut a piece out of a sacred art work or grabbed us by the lapels with the seductive and polemical intensity of his gaze." Ways of Seeing, I remember, made boring old paintings of men in ruffs look interesting. To begin the week, Geoff Dyer chooses a picture by Robert Capa - "I will never love another photograph more" - and remembers his first encounter with Ways of Seeing: "It’s customary to talk about the way that Ways of Seeing opened our eyes, made us see art, paintings and photographs in new ways. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Ways of Seeing, Radio 4 invites five writers to tell us about an image 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.