Just Finished Reading: About Looking by John Berger (FP: 1980)

After enjoying the author’s previous work ‘Ways of Seeing’ (or at least finding it a refreshing change from my normal reading) I thought I’d given him another whirl after seeing this book in my local bookshop after trawling through the Art & Design section. For some reason I find his second book both less interesting (overall) and harder to read – or harder to get into and get reading at a reasonable pace. I think my main problem was that, without looking them up, I often didn’t know the artists he was talking about so had no reference to hang the words on. Pictures would have definitely helped there as I didn’t feel a lot of motivation to fire up the internet to check things out that should have been on the page. The other thing that both slowed me down and resulted in that ‘slogging through the text’ feel was the use (or overuse) of technical ‘critic’ language we all know and the from things like ‘highbrow’ movie reviews. This is where I regard an author as ‘being up their own arse’ and basically both showing off and excluding those not ‘in the know’ – by basically belittling them. I thought that an author with his well-known left leaning political beliefs would be beyond that – apparently not. That left me somewhat disappointed as you can imagine.

Saying that, things where not all bad – far from it. The first section in particular (largely on photography) was very interesting where the author discusses the function of Zoos, the growth and popularity of personal photography and how photography can be used in the public domain for political purposes. The rest of the book was a series of reprinted articles looking at the work of various artists or artistic movements/styles. Here I found picking to be rather slim and was tempted more than once to skim over paragraphs looking for the more interesting stuff. Bad, I know.

This was, apparently, a book of some significance in the Art and Design world in the 80’s but I couldn’t really see it myself. His first book I thought had more to say and said it better. One for art critics only I feel.