John Berger was born a hundred years ago today. He was an artist, critic, novelist, poet, polemicist and playwright who made impassioned, idiosyncratic, fiercely attentive and deeply humane contributions to a swathe of artistic and intellectual disciplines across six decades. In fact, the diversity of his output can make it “difficult to grasp,” as Geoff Dyer observes, in his introduction to the Selected Essays. “Even admirers tend to know him in only one or two of his many incarnations.”
I hope the recommendations below provide a somewhat representative handle on Berger’s range. I have limited myself to books he assembled himself, which means I haven’t allowed myself to include anthologies, such as the excellent Understanding a Photograph, edited by Dyer, or Tom Overton’s collections Landscapes and Portraits, or the recent selection Across a Frontier, chosen by the similarly interdisciplinary critic, photographer and novelist Teju Cole.
There are many ways to approach Berger, but wherever you choose to start, you will be encountering, as Susan Sontag said of him, “a wonderful artist and thinker”.
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The entry point
Berger is best remembered for Ways of Seeing, his 1972 BBC television series and accompanying Penguin paperback. Radically, he combined art and social criticism, discussing artworks in relation to advertising, mass reproduction, the female nude, the male gaze and social status. The book’s format is equally revolutionary: the text appears to begin on the front cover, and three of the seven chapters are made up of images only. Ways of Seeing is a sui generis design classic and a swift introduction to Berger’s enduring preoccupations with art, sex and politics.
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The prizewinner
The same year that Ways of Seeing was published, Berger won the fourth Booker prize with G. (1972). The novel itself has been somewhat overshadowed by Berger’s acceptance speech, in which he pilloried the sponsor Booker McConnell Ltd for their “extensive trading interests” in the Caribbean, announcing that he would be donating half his prize money to the British Black Panther movement. This experimental novel follows a young man (G) and his vigorous sex life as he travels across Europe on the eve of the first world war. G is mostly oblivious – but inextricably connected to – the world-historical events taking place around him.
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The quiet masterpiece
Another excellent place to start would be A Fortunate Man (1967), the first collaboration between Berger and the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr. It is a deceptively simple portrait of a country GP in the Forest of Dean, told through stark photography and haunting prose. Word and image interweave to powerful effect: the minutiae of one man’s vocation reflect compellingly on the whole of society. Berger and Mohr became close friends working on this project and collaborated several times over the following 50 years.
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The one for writers
One of Berger’s lesser-known titles is Photocopies (1996), which presents a series of exquisite prose vignettes, titled as if they were photographs. Berger captures real moments, reproducing them – photocopying them – with pinpoint attention to detail. The book has an air of delicate stillness: it is a masterclass in clarity and an inspiration for prose stylists.
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The one for artists
Ways of Seeing may have made his name, but much of Berger’s best art criticism is collected in About Looking (1980), which includes essays on Turner, Giacometti, Magritte, Francis Bacon and Walt Disney. It also includes his famous essay Why Look at Animals?, which considers the fact that we rarely interact with animals today, despite living in a world full of animal imagery.
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The best on photography
Berger’s third collaboration with Mohr was Another Way of Telling (1982), a revelatory investigation into the art of photography. Despite its diffident subtitle – “A Possible Theory of Photography” – this landmark work stands alongside those of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. A photograph is “a meeting place,” writes Berger, “where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photography are often contradictory”.
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The best on politics
To some extent, everything Berger wrote was political; he was always concerned with the human experience in relation to society. One topic he wrote about repeatedly was migration, most memorably in A Seventh Man (1975), another remarkable collaboration with Mohr. This galvanising book intimately documents the experience of migrant labourers seeking work in western Europe in the early 1970s, but it remains soberingly topical today.
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The one that will make you cry
G. may have won the Booker prize, but To the Wedding (1995) is Berger’s greatest novel. Through fragments of conversations, songs and silences, we follow a mother and father, estranged for many years, travelling across Europe to the wedding of their daughter Ninon. It’s both a heartbreaking story and a triumphantly optimistic celebration of love and life. Colum McCann calls it “one of the greatest and most honest love stories of our time.”
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The one that deserves more attention
The wonderful Here Is Where We Meet (2005) is fiction – or is it? In 8½ chapters, “John” has a series of encounters with people who are dead: he meets his mother sitting on a park bench in Lisbon, he meets his childhood mentor in Krakow market, he stands above the grave of Jorge Luis Borges in Geneva. This is Berger at his most playful, seamlessly blending novel, essay, criticism, memoir and travelogue. It’s a brilliant, unclassifiable achievement.
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The one to carry in your pocket
“This is a book I carry with me everywhere,” writes the actor and director Simon McBurney, in his new introduction to And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984). “It fits into the inside pocket of my jacket, a little larger than a passport.” This slim, numinous work contains scraps and scenes about mortality, art, sex and belonging. It is organised into two halves – “Once”, about time, and “Here”, about space – and manages to condense a lifetime’s wisdom into little more than a hundred pages.
Henry Eliot edited the 2026 Bloomsbury reissues of John Berger’s work. He is the author of five books, including The Penguin Classics Book
