John Berger

British · 1926–2017

British art critic, novelist, and painter whose "Ways of Seeing" transformed how we understand visual culture.

Wikipedia ↗

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”

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“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her. You put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting "Vanity," thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.”

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“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world.”

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“The past is not for living in; it is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.”

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