About Looking was published by Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative in 1980, a collection of essays written between 1971 and 1979 that extends and deepens the arguments Berger made in Ways of Seeing. Where that earlier book focused primarily on painting and advertising, About Looking ranges across photography, animals, cities, specific artists (Francis Bacon, Courbet, Turner, Seker Ahmet Pasha), and the phenomenology of seeing itself.
The most celebrated essay, “Why Look at Animals?”, argues that the relationship between humans and animals — once based on mutual regard across an unbridgeable difference — has been replaced by the spectacle of the zoo, where animals are reduced to objects of observation, stripped of their returning gaze, and rendered into something between a stuffed specimen and a television image. The zoo, Berger argues, is not a place where we encounter animals but a monument to their disappearance from our lives.
“Uses of Photography” engages with Susan Sontag’s On Photography while developing Berger’s own theory: that photographs, unlike paintings, do not translate the world into the language of art but preserve an instant of it — and that this preservation is simultaneously an act of love (rescuing a moment from time) and an act of violence (separating that moment from the flow that gave it meaning).
The essays on specific painters demonstrate Berger’s method: he looks at paintings not as aesthetic objects to be appreciated but as evidence of human experience, asking what the artist saw, what social relations enabled and constrained that seeing, and what the painting reveals about the historical moment of its making.
Collecting About Looking
First edition (Writers and Readers, London, 1980): Trade paperback original.
Market values:
- First edition: $15–$35
- Signed copies: $50–$150
- US first (Pantheon, 1980): $10–$25