About looking
By: John Berger.
Edition: 1st American ed.
Publisher: Pantheon Books; Pantheon / Random House
Published: 1980
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 198
Subjects: Art -- Psychology; Visual perception; Meaning (Psychology)
First sentence: The 19th century, in western Europe and North America, saw the beginning of a process, today being completed by 20th century corporate capitalism, by which every tradition which has previously mediated between man and nature was broken.
Description: This successor to John Berger's <i>Ways of Seeing</i>, written over the last ten years, searches for meaning within and beyond what is looked at.  Why do zoos disappoint children?  Why do we take snapshots of those we love? How do the media use photographs of agony?  When an animal looks us in the eyes, what does that look mean? Berger describes how a sixteenth-century masterpiece he saw in the 1960s comes to look different to him a decade later.  He discusses how a forest looks to a woodcutter; how fields look to a peasant; how the world looks to a nineteenth-century barber's son; how New York looked to immigrants; and how each of these perspectives was reflected in the struggles of a particular painter.  Every painting he considers, whether by Millet, Courbet, Turner, Magritte, Fasanella, or Francis Bacon, is evidence of an experience which belongs as fully to life as to art. (back cover copy)
Table of contents: title: Why Look at Animals?
pagenum: 1; title: Uses of Photography; title: The Suit and the Photograph
pagenum: 27; title: Potographs of Agony
pagenum: 37; title: Paul Strand
pagenum: 41; title: Uses of Photography
pagenum: 48; title: Moments Lived; title: The Primitive and the Professional
pagenum: 64; title: Millet and the Peasant
pagenum: 69; title: Seker Ahmet and the Forest
pagenum: 79; title: Lowry and the Industrial North
pagenum: 87; title: Ralph Fasanella and the City
pagenum: 96; title: La Tour and Humanism
pagenum: 103; title: Francis Bacon and Walt Disney
pagenum: 111`; title: Article of Faith
pagenum: 119; title: Between Two Colmars
pagenum: 127; title: Courbet and the Jura
pagenum: 134; title: Turner and the Barber's Shop
pagenum: 142; title: Rouault and the Suburbs of Paris
pagenum: 149; title: Magritte and the Impossible
pagenum: 155; title: Hals and Bankruptcy
pagenum: 162; title: Giacometti
pagenum: 171; title: Rodin and Sexual Domination
pagenum: 177; title: Lomaine Lorquet
pagenum: 185; title: Field
pagenum: 192