Essays
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A Seventh Man
Book 1975
Books, Collaborations, Essays, Jean Mohr, Migrants, Photography
A Seventh Man, by John Berger (text) and Jean Mohr (photographs), first publication in 1975.
This seminal classic explores the fate of migrant workers.
First published in 1975, this finely wrought investigation remains as urgent as ever, presenting the life of those who have travelled to live and work in Europe. Art critic, novelist, and artist John Berger brings humanity and a voice to those silenced in the p…
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Permanent Red
Book 1960
Art, Books, Early Works, Essays, Painting, Politics
Permanent Red, book of essays by John Berger, first edition in 1960.
Why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Any artwork reflects the artist’s intentions, but also its times: therefore all art is political.
In Permanent Red, John Berger argues that the contemporary artist should strive for a realism that aims for hope, to transform the world. Surveying the work of histor…
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The Success and Failure of Picasso
Book 1965
Art, Books, Early Works, Essays, France, Painting, Spain
The Success and Failure of Picasso, essay by John Berger, first edition in 1965.
At the height of his powers, Pablo Picasso was the artist as revolutionary, breaking through the niceties of form in order to mount a direct challenge to the values of his time. At the height of his fame, he was the artist as royalty: incalculably wealthy, universally idolized−and wholly isolated.
In this stunning critical asses…
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A Fortunate Man
Book 1967
Books, Collaborations, Doctor, Essays, Jean Mohr, Peasants, Photography, UK, Workers
A Fortunate Man : the story of a country doctor, first collaboration by John Berger (text) and Jean Mohr (photographs), first publication in 1967.
Berger’s exploration of what it means to heal. In 1966 John Berger spent three months in the Forest of Dean shadowing an English country GP, John Sassall. Sassall is a fortunate man – his work occupies and fulfils him, he lives amongst the patients he treats, the lin…
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Art and Revolution
Book 1969
Art, Books, Drawing, Essays, Painting, Russia, Sculpture
Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny And the Role of the Artist in the U.S.S.R, essay by John Berger, first edition in 1969.
What is the meaning of Revolutionary art? And who is the revolutionary artist?
In Art and Revolution, John Berger examines the life and work of Ernst Neizvestny, a Russian sculptor whose exclusion from the ranks of officially approved Soviet artists left him laboring in enforced obscuri…
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The Look of Things
Book 1972
Art, Books, Essays, Painting, Politics
The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles, book of essays by John Berger, first edition in 1972.
This anthology of some of John Berger’s most incisive and brilliant essays and articles, written throughout the 1960s, is one of his most celebrated books. The pieces span from the life of artists like Camille Corot and Fernand Léger; character sketches of the likes of Le Corbusier, Walter Benjamin, Jack Yea…
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Ways of Seeing
Book 1972
Art, Books, Essays, Feminism, Painting, UK
Ways of Seeing, essay by John Berger, first edition in 1972, based on the BBC television series with John Berger, made by John Berger, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb and Richard Hollis.
This book has been translated in 38 languages.
“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 artJohn B…
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About Looking
Book 1980
Art, Books, Essays, Painting
About Looking, book of essays by John Berger, first edition in 1980.
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 u…
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Another Way of Telling
Book 1982
Books, Collaborations, Essays, Jean Mohr, Peasants, Photography, Workers
Another Way of Telling, by John Berger (text) and Jean Mohr (photographs), first publication in 1982.
John Berger and Jean Mohr’s classic investigation into the nature of photography and what makes it so different from other art forms
The writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr set out to understand the fundamental nature of photography and how it makes its impact. Asking a range of questions – W…
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The Sense of Sight
Book 1985
Art, Books, Essays, Painting
The Sense of Sight, book of essays by John Berger, first edition in 1985.
With this provocative and infinitely moving collection of essays, John Berger responds to the profound questions posed by the visual world. For when he writes about Cubism, he writes not only of Braque, Léger, Picasso, and Gris, but of that incredible moment early in this century when the world converged around a marvelous sense of promise…
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Keeping a Rendez-vous
Book 1992
Books, Essays, Painting, Sculpture
Keeping a Rendez-vous, book of essays by John Berger, first edition in 1992.
When he stands before Giorgione’s La Tempesta , John Berger sees not only the painting but our whole notion of time, sweeping us away from a lost Eden. A photograph of a gravely joyful crowd gathered on a Prague street in November 1989 provokes reflection on the meaning of democracy and the reunion of a people with long-banished hopes …
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Photocopies
Book 1996
Art, Books, Drawing, Essays, Exhibitions, Short Stories
Photocopies, book of essays by John Berger, first edition in 1996.
This is a collection of portraits of a shepherd, a farmer, a painter and blind man, a sylph of Byzantine arrogance and a vagabond cyclist with primroses growing in her basket. The backgrounds range from Prague, Paris, Athens, Lahore and countrysides and mountainscapes.
…
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The Shape of a Pocket
Book 2001
Books, Essays, Painting, Short Stories
The Shape of a Pocket, book of essays by John Berger, first edition in 2001.
John Berger writes: “The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the new world economic order. The people coming together are the reader, me and those the essays are about – Rembrandt, Palaeolithic cave painter…
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Hold Everything Dear
Book 2007
Books, Economy, Essays, Politics, Workers
Hold Everything Dear, book of essays by John Berger, first edition in 2007.
A powerful meditation on political resistance and the global search for justice. From the ‘War on Terror’ to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the uses of art as an instrument of political resistance. Visceral and passionate, Hold Everything Dear is a profound meditation on the far ex…
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Why Look at Animals?
Book 2009
Animals, Books, Essays, Painting
Why Look at Animals? book of essays by John Berger, first edition in 2009.
John Berger broke new ground with his penetrating writings on life, art and how we see the world around us. Here he explores how the ancient relationship between man and nature has been broken in the modern consumer age, with the animals that used to be at the center of our existence now marginalized and reduced to spectacle. Throughout hi…
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Bento’s Sketchbook
Book 2011
Books, Drawing, Essays, Philosophy
Bento’s Sketchbook, essay and drawings by John Berger about Spinoza, first edition in 2011.
A deeply moving exploration of the relationship between thinking and drawing. The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (a.k.a. Bento) spent the most intense years of his short life writing. He also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes—but no dr…
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Confabulations
Book 2016
Books, Drawing, Essays
Confabulations, last book of essays and drawings by John Berger before his death in 2017, first edition in 2016.
«Language is a body, a living creature … and this creature’s home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate. »
John Berger writes about language itself, and how it relates to thought, art, song, storytelling and political discourse today. Also containing Berger’s own drawings, notes, mem…
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Selected Essays
Book 2001
Books, Economy, Essays, Geoff Dyer, Painting, Philosophy, Politics
Selected Essays, book of essays by John Berger, edited by Geoff Dyer, first edition in 2001.
Booker wining novelist, playwright, essayist, poet and critic – even admirers rarely know John Berger in all his literary incarnations. This collection of essays, for the first time, takes a definitive look at his extraordinary career. Far from being footnotes to the main body of work Berger’s essays are absolutely cent…
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Understanding A Photograph
Book 2013
Books, Essays, Geoff Dyer, Marc Trivier, Photography
Understanding A Photograph, book of essays by John Berger, edited by Geoff Dyer, first edition in 2013.
This selection contains many groundbreaking essays and previously uncollected pieces written for exhibitions and catalogues in which Berger probes the work of photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and W. Eugene Smith – and the lives of those photographed – with fierce engagement, intensity and tenderness….
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Italian books
Book 2004
Art, Books, Contemporary art, Drawing, Essays, Italy
Maria Nadotti edited John Berger’s books which only exist in italian : Modi di Vedere (2004) • Abbi cara ogni cosa (2007 similar version to Hold Everything Dear) • La Speranza, nel frattempo (conversation with Arundhati Roy, 2010) • Contro i nuovi tirani (2012) • Sulla Motocicletta (2018).
…
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Berger on Drawing
Book 2005
Books, Drawing, Essays, Yves Berger
Berger on Drawing, book of essays and drawings by John Berger, edited by Jim Savage, first edition in 2005.
With 49 black and white illustrations including drawings by John and Yves Berger. Berger On Drawing is an exciting anthology of essays in which John Berger explores that most primary and most primal of all art activities: drawing.
…
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Landscapes
Book 2015
Art, Books, Contemporary art, Essays, Tom Overton
Landscapes, book of essays by John Berger, edited by Tom Overton, first edition in 2016. This volume completes a first volume Portraits (2015).
What does art tell us about ourselves? John Berger on the politics and consolations of creativity. In this collection of diverse works — essays, short stories, poems, translations — which spans a lifetime’s engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his…
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My Beautiful
Book 2004
Books, Collaborations, Contemporary art, Essays, France, Marc Trivier, Photography, Sculpture, Workers, Yves Berger
My Beautiful by John Berger (text) and Marc Trivier (photographs), first publication in English and French in 2004.
The question of beauty is addressed here in the intertwining of photographic and writing approaches. Jean Marquis made portraits of Giacometti in his studio, Marc Trivier photographed Giacometti’s sculptures. John Berger, in the continuation of his reflection and in particular on his distance from…
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Railtracks
Book 2011
Books, Collaborations, Contemporary art, Countryside, Essays, Photography, UK
Railtracks, by Anne Michaels and John Berger (text), first publication in 2011. Some editions with Tereza Stehlikova photographs.
Railtracks is a unique collaboration between two writers of remarkable achievement. A profound meditation on railways, love and loss, at once intimate and committed, it moves from the industrial to the metaphysical, from the tectonic shifts of globalization to the interior pulses of m…
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Velasquez Äsop
Book 1991
Art, Books, Essays, Painting, Philosophy, Spain
Velasquez Äsop, artist catalogue of the Spanish painter Diego Velasquez (1599-1660) by John Berger, first edition in 1991.
…
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The Shape Of A Pocket event 2025
Apr 28 2025
To pass the Berger Baton, Jan Woolf proposes this second The Shape Of A Pocket event to share John Berger’s world and his different commitments.
«The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the new world economic order.»
John Berger
Sunday May 11th – 4pm – 6:30pm Upstairs …
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JOHN BERGER
Storyteller, essayist, novelist, screenwriter, playwright, painter and critic, John Berger (1926-2017) is one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years. Solo or in collaboration with Jean Mohr for example, he published more than 30 titles, the Booker Prize winning novel G and the best-seller Ways of Seeing. He has also published articles in the most important newspapers around the world.
He used to work and live in Quincy, a small French peasant community, the setting for his trilogy Into their Labours.
Painters, cineasts, writers, dancers, curators have been and are still inspired by his work, this website is a window on these TODAY creations.