John Berger

John Peter Berger was born on 5 November 1926 in England. He worked as an art critic, novelist, painter and poet, building over several decades a body of work that moved between disciplines and addressed cultural and social questions through the close examination of images. By the early 1970s he had an established reputation as both a critic and a novelist, and it was at this point that a collaboration with the BBC brought his ideas to an audience far larger than any he had reached in print.

In 1972, Berger presented the BBC television series Ways of Seeing and wrote the accompanying essay collection of the same name. A work of art criticism directed at a broad public, it examined how images are seen and what conventions and assumptions govern that process, putting questions that had rarely been addressed at this scale to a mass television and reading audience. The book became a standard university text and has remained in continuous use since. That same year, his novel G. was awarded the Booker Prize.

Berger settled in France, where he lived for more than fifty years, continuing to write across fiction, criticism and poetry. He died on 2 January 2017. Ways of Seeing — both the book and the BBC series that preceded it — has never gone out of print or out of circulation; it is assigned in universities across the world, and the questions it raised about how images function in culture remain central to the disciplines it helped to shape.