Theory Diary: Getting to Know John Berger

“Who Is John Berger to Me?”

1. 🧍 Who was John Berger?

John Berger (1926–2017) was a British art critic, novelist, Marxist humanist, poet, and self-exile. He wrote about how we see, who gets seen, and why the act of looking is never neutral. He refused to stay within disciplinary lanes. He could be on a BBC program one day and in a goat herder’s field the next. He was part philosopher, part journalist, part anti-capitalist griot—reclaiming storytelling from institutionalized aesthetics and class-based notions of taste.

I don’t want to reduce him to “an art critic,” because that phrase conjures someone judging what hangs on museum walls. Berger was critiquing not just paintings but the entire visual regime of power—billboards, television, the gaze embedded in European oil paintings, the commodification of women’s bodies, and the political economy of sight. He helps me question what I’ve been trained to find “beautiful” and whether beauty can be decolonized.

2. 💡 What ideas or works is he known for?

His most well-known work is Ways of Seeing (1972), originally a four-part BBC series and then a short, punchy book. In it, he flips traditional art history upside-down and asks, “Who is looking? Who is being looked at? What are we not seeing?”

He is also known for And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos—a luminous, quiet book that mixes poetry, autobiography, and theory. It weaves themes of love, exile, time, and the soft violence of being uprooted. He saw the peasant and the refugee as philosophical figures, not just sociological ones.

His other works—Pig Earth, Hold Everything Dear, A Fortunate Man—all trace how class, place, and displacement shape perception and story. He was never interested in just the image, but in what surrounds the image—the silences, the ideologies, the bodies left out of the frame.

3. 🕰️ When did he live, and when did his work emerge?

He was born just after WWI and lived through the rise of fascism, the trauma of WWII, and the Cold War—through the neoliberal reordering of Europe and the global south. Ways of Seeing emerged in 1972, at the height of political counterculture. He died in 2017, just as Trump took office.

What’s striking is how contemporary he still feels. The gaze he named in 1972 hasn’t gone away—it’s just been digitized, filtered, algorithmically amplified. TikTok, Instagram, surveillance, racial profiling—all these systems of “seeing” still operate under the logics he critiqued.

4. 🌍 Where did he live or focus his work?

He was British by birth but lived much of his life in rural France. He chose to live among farmers and migrants, writing against the London and Paris art scenes. He turned his attention toward the margins—peasants in the French Alps, exiles from the global South, migrants trying to survive Europe’s political hypocrisies.

His ideas now circulate widely—in classrooms, in activist zines, in feminist art theory, in global media studies. He crossed borders, literally and intellectually. That migratory spirit resonates with me.

5. ❓ Why does he matter to me—or might?

Because I live between worlds. Between Korea and Indiana. Between teaching and aging. Between being looked at and not being seen at all. Berger speaks to that liminal space. He doesn’t just help me critique dominant images—he invites me to interrogate the gaze itself: who taught me to look the way I do? What do I miss because of how I’ve been trained to see?

His writing gives me a bridge between my visual intuition (color, metaphor, incense, breath) and my analytical mind (critical pedagogy, epistemology, autoethnography). I feel like he’d understand what I’m trying to do with Between Thresholds—curating spaces for seeing again, for meaning-making rooted in tenderness and critique.

6. 🔍 How did I come to be interested in him?

Honestly? I confused him with Roni Berger, the reflexivity scholar I cited in my 2016 qualitative methods journal. But then I found the video clip—this BBC archive of a man calmly deconstructing how art reproduces ideology. The tone was sharp but generous. I started Googling more. And then I realized—I’d seen his name in zines, on syllabi, in my field, but had never really met him.

That changes now. I want to listen. I want to walk with him, maybe not agreeing with everything, but letting him be one of my dialogical partners as I make sense of teaching, legacy, and gaze.

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🖼️ Quote Response

“The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.”
→ Yes. And what we’re afraid to know. What we’re ashamed to believe. What we’ve been taught to unsee. Reflexivity lives here, too—not just as method but as witnessing. As the practice of unbecoming a trained consumer of images and becoming instead a reader of silence.