ABSTRACT
With Ways of Seeing, John Berger wrote about visual culture in a period that saw a range of radical ideas being implemented in the arts. Ways of Seeing challenges the idea that artworks are the preserve of the rich, accessible to an elite minority. The origins of Berger's Ways of Seeing can already be discerned in some of his earlier work, where he avoids the traditional categories of art in favor of an existential view of the artist and the artwork. According to Mike Dibb, co-author and director of Ways of Seeing, the inspiration for the first essay came at a time when the English translation of Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" was first published. Benjamin's essay looked at the democratizing impact of the availability of images through modern reproduction, and opposed the method of art criticism practiced by academics in the late 1960s.
