About Looking - John Berger

A collection of essays reflecting on photography, painting and the act of looking.

The first few essays are about photography. "Why Look at Animals" is a reflection on the objectification of animals in the modern world, and the disappearance of the look of recognition between living beings across the species barrier.  It relates to the Winogrand book of photos about animals I read recently.  p. 13 "This reduction of the animal, which has a theoretical as well as economic history, is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units... The mechanical view of the animal's work capacity was later applied to that of workers..."

The other really dynamite essay is "Uses of Photography", reflections on Susan Sontag's book.
p. 58 " During the second half of the 20th century the judgement of history has been abandoned by all except the underprivileged and dispossessed.  The industrialized, 'developed' world, terrified of the past, blind to the future, lives within an opportunism which has emptied the principle of justice of all credibility.  Such opportunism turns everything - nature, history, suffering, other people, catastrophes, sport, sex, politics - into spectacle.  And the implement used to do this - until the act becomes so habitual that the conditioned imagination may do it alone - is the camera.

- from Sontag: "Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions.  The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggest that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing..."

There is another interesting essay, "Francis Bacon and Walt Disney."  He argues for a basic similarity both in underlying style and ethos  between the two - similar distortions of the human body, violence, colour ranges.  Both explore alienation - Disney makes it funny, Bacon makes it banal, the subject of art.  No moral judgement in either.  Interesting idea.

Didn't get through all the essays.  Some interesting ones on seminal figures in art in the first half of the 20th century.  Need to have another look.