John Berger

Landscapes showcases the development and practice of John Berger's unique way of seeing. Here he surveys the aesthetic landscapes that have informed, challenged and nourished his understanding of the world. Berger pays homage to the writers and thinkers who influenced him, such as Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Bertolt Brecht. His expansive perspective embraces artistic movements and individual artists - from the Renaissance to the present - while never neglecting the social and political context of their creation.

John Berger, storyteller, critic and political writer, brings us this tender and bittersweet novel of a man's dreams of freedom and romance. In his sixty-third year, quite unexpectedly, William Corker, the genteel proprietor of a London employment agency, moves out of the house he has shared with his overbearing sister for most of his life. In this poignant tale of a late-life awakening, Berger creates a character of astonishing depth and liveliness - a man whose fantasies and ambitions are at once splendid and tragic.

The Moment of Cubism is one of John Berger's most important collections of art criticism. Whether considering Vermeer in his studio, Poussin's poignant meditation on death, or the complexities of Rodin's sculpture, Berger draws together the threads that bind individual artists to their social and political context. Here Berger argues that Cubism was a moment rather than a movement, one that came and went without the consent of its key figures - Picasso and Braque above all. He makes a case for Cubism's revolutionary influence. As always, Berger helps us see the world in new ways.

Despite their status as intellectual giants of the twentieth century, John Berger and Susan Sontag's artistic collaboration - and intense friendship - remains virtually unknown. Published for the first time, To Tell a Story offers a glimpse into their shared history that spanned nearly a quarter-century. From sources such as their eponymous film broadcast, rare personal letters and archival recordings, the composite fragments build a portrait of a relationship that was often lively and challenging, sometimes trivial and always affectionate. Berger and Sontag's voices echo throughout these pages, riffing off the other as they grapple with their respective concerns. Above all, their conversations reveal a deep reciprocal admiration and an exchange of ideas about storytelling, the self and society that informed their own work.

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 political debate about who does and doesn't belong. Why does the Western world look to migrant labourers to perform the most menial tasks? What compels people to leave their homes and accept this humiliating situation? In A Seventh Man, Berger and Jean Mohr come to grips with what it is to be a migrant worker - the material circumstances and the inner experience - and, in doing so, reveal how the migrant is not so much on the margins of modern life but at its centre.

From A to X is a powerful exploration of how humanity affirms itself in struggle: imagining a community which, besieged by economic and military imperialism, finds transcendent hope in the pain and fragility, vulnerability and sorrow of daily existence.Aida lives in a dusty ramshackle town. Everyday she writes to her lover Xavier, a rebel who has been imprisoned for his beliefs. She tells of daily events in the town, and of its motley collection of inhabitants whose lives flow through hers. But the area is under threat, and as a faceless power inexorably encroaches from outside. through the letters, the smallest details and acts of humanity are transformed into an intimate dance, an act of resistance against the forces that might otherwise extinguish them.What is threatened, and what will survive? In Berger's exquisite prose, the fight for justice and beauty braid into a stunning work of defiant resistance.

The Underground Sea is a succinct, urgent collection of writing from John Berger''s archive. It brings together for the first time his work on mineworkers and the miners'' strikes and has been edited as a set of actions for today: a time when people are rediscovering the necessity, power and possibilities of collective action.Including essays, transcripts, interviews and images, it places itself in the heart of a Derbyshire mining village, with reflections on the everyday life of a typical pit community.

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 extremes of human behaviour, and the underlying despair. Looking at Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, he makes an impassioned attack on the poverty and loss of freedom at the heart of such unnecessary suffering. These essays offer reflections on the political at the core of artistic expression and at the center of human existence itself.

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 historical artists as well as that of near contemporaries such as Picasso, Léger and Matisse, he explores the role of the artist, dividing these figures into those that struggle, those that fail, and the true masters. He explains why we should study the work of the past: in order to understand the present and to rethink the future. First published in 1960, Permanent Red established John Berger as a firebrand critic willing to broadcast controversial opinions on some of the most important British artists of the day, including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

'We shall speak. We shall sing. We shall shout.' This blazing autobiographical poem by the founder of the négritude movement became a rallying cry for decolonisation when it appeared in 1939. Following one man's return from Europe to his homeland of Martinique, it is a reckoning with the trauma of slavery and exploitation, and a triumphant anthem for Black identity, one which reclaims and remakes language itself. 'Nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time' André Breton 'A Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket, suns burst forth whirling and exploding' Jean-Paul Sartre 'The most influential Francophone Caribbean writer of his generation' Independent Translated by John Berger and Anna Bostock

'We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks' In this series of remarkable pieces from across his career, John Berger celebrates and dissects the close links between art and society and the individual. Few writers give a more vivid and moving sense of how we make art and how art makes us. One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series. This new selection showcases a diverse list of thinkers who have helped shape our world today, from anarchists to stoics, feminists to prophets, satirists to Zen Buddhists.

'It's an improbable city, Bologna - like one you might walk through after you have died.' A dreamlike meditation on memory, food, paintings, a fond uncle and the improbable beauty of Bologna, from the visionary thinker and art critic. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

'Language is a body, a living creature ... and this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate'. John Berger's work has revolutionized the way we understand visual language. In this new book he writes about language itself, and how it relates to thought, art, song, storytelling and political discourse today. Also containing Berger's own drawings, notes, memories and reflections on everything from Albert Camus to global capitalism, Confabulations takes us to what is 'true, essential and urgent'.

Jedna z nejinspirativnějších a nejvlivnějších knih o umění a vizualitě, která je právem považována za zakladatelskou klasiku oboru vizuálních studií. Poprvé vyšla v roce 1972, ale dodnes neztratila nic ze své břitké pronikavosti, s níž bezprostředně a srozumitelně zpřístupňuje základní vědění o obrazech a dívání, do té doby zastřené sofistikovanými mystifikacemi profesionálních teoretiků a kritiků. Sedm esejů (z nichž tři jsou čistě obrazové) se zabývá takovými tématy, jako jsou moderní reprodukce starých mistrů, zobrazováním ženské nahoty, vztahu vidění a moci anebo reklamou. Kniha Způsoby vidění (Ways of Seeing) britského kritika, spisovatele a výtvarníka Johna Bergera (nar. 1926) představuje klíčovou publikaci z oblasti teorie vizuální kultury. Oproti původní černobílé verzi český překlad, který nyní vychází vůbec poprvé, doprovází bohatý obrazový materiál v barvě.

In a dazzling fusion of Quentin Fiore's bold and inventive graphic design and Marshall McLuhan's unique insight into technology, advertising and mass-media, The Medium is the Massage is a unique study of human communication in the twentieth century, published in Penguin Modern Classics Marshall McLuhan is the man who predicted the all-pervasive rise of modern mass media. Blending text, image and photography, his 1960 classic The Medium is the Massage illustrates how the growth of technology utterly reshapes society, personal lives and sensory perceptions, so that we are effectively transformed by the means we use to communicate. His theories, many of which are illustrated in this astonishing 'inventory of effects', force us to question how modes of communication have shaped society. This concept, and his ideas such as rolling, up-to-the-minute news broadcasts and the media 'Global Village' have proved decades ahead of their time. How do we see the world around us? The 'Penguin on Design' series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar - a professor of English Literature, a literary critic and a communications theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. Among his other works are The Mechanical Bride (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). Quentin Fiore (b. 1920) is a graphic designer renowned for his collaborations with writers including the academic Marshall McLuhan and the futurist and engineer Buckminster Fuller. If you enjoyed The Medium is the Massage, you might like Bruno Munari's Design as Art, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'The media prophet of the 1960s' The New York Times 'In the tumult of the digital revolution, McLuhan is relevant anew' Wired

John Berger's writings on photography are some of the most original of the twentieth century. 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. The selection is made and introduced by Geoff Dyer, author of the award-winning The Ongoing Moment. How do we see the world around us? This is one of a number of pivotal works by creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision for ever. John Berger was born in London in 1926. His acclaimed works of both fiction and non-fiction include the seminal Ways of Seeing and the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, and he now lives in a small village in the French Alps. Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels and several non-fiction books. Winner of the Lannan Literary Award, the International Centre of Photography's 2006 Infinity Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters's E. M. Forster Award, Dyer is also a regular contributor to many publications in the UK and the US. He lives in London.