John Berger would have turned one hundred on 5 November 2026. His best-known legacy, ‘Ways of Seeing’, begins with a challenge that now sounds almost self-evident: seeing is not a neutral activity. What a picture means depends on who is looking, under what conditions and with what knowledge. Yet Berger is interesting not only as a critic of the gaze. His books pose a further question: what happens when we turn contemplation into a narrative — and let the picture begin not with the object, but with people?
Seeing is already a relationship
The BBC series ‘Ways of Seeing’, broadcast in 1972 and published as a book that same year, focused on the power relations that structure images. Berger connected paintings with advertising, ownership with representation, art history with viewers’ everyday lives. This was not an invitation to stand reverently silent before a picture. It was a call to read the conditions of seeing alongside it.
Today, as images appear in endless digital sequences, this call seems at once more urgent and incomplete. The question of who made a picture and whose interests it serves remains crucial. But swift unmasking — this picture is ideology, that one an expression of power — risks becoming a routine in its own right. It can explain how a picture works without saying what it means to people.
Here lies Berger’s literary strength. He wanted not merely to show that pictures are political. He sought transitions: from visible detail to living conditions, from a figure to the story surrounding them. Accordingly, at the heart of ‘G.’, the novel for which he won the Booker Prize in 1972, is not a fully formulated thesis but a narrative exploration of bodies, relationships and social conditions. The form remains in motion; it invites us to shift perspectives rather than serving up a ready-made judgement.
From the picture to narrated experience
For art interpretation, this would be a productive shift in the question. Not only: what do we see? But also: what story does this picture allow — and which does it make disappear? A landscape can then be more than composition or style: it can be an occasion to discuss labour, access and ownership. A portrait can lead us away from likeness towards memory, absence and the right to be seen.
This is not an argument for dissolving every work of art into a narrative. Indeed, this is where the strongest objection lies: stories can appropriate pictures, prescribe an unequivocal moral or turn a work’s formal distinctiveness into mere supporting evidence. Berger himself does not offer a ready-made method that need only be applied to today’s images. His pointed political arguments can become dated; his faith in the connections forged by storytelling is not automatically an answer to algorithmically sorted streams of images.
Yet as an approach, it remains helpful. Storytelling here does not mean imposing a message on a picture. It means establishing relationships and keeping them open: between work and viewer, present and past, visible surface and lived experience. This kind of interpretation takes form seriously while also asking who appears within it — and who is missing.
One hundred years after Berger’s birth, art interpretation need not vindicate him. It can carry his impulse forward by understanding seeing as a beginning, not an end. A picture then becomes neither a mute masterpiece nor an illustration of a theory. It becomes a place where viewers tell stories together, disagree and learn to look more closely.
Original reviewed by the editors · 6 November 2026
