John Berger, died 2 January 2017.
John Berger didn’t lose us, but we just lost someone important. His way of seeing things has been with me from the first screening of ‘Ways of Seeing’ [1972]. I had heard of, but had not yet read Berger’s writing about paintings and history. When I arrived at SFU in 1977 I was asked to create a course about ‘communication and culture’ because if students were to understand advertising surely they would need some analytic tools to understand it critically. They would specially need to understand the purposeful and persuasive construction of images!
In 1978 I was meeting twenty year olds from Burnaby who had not seen many paintings and had not discussed them, nor advertising, neither thoughtfully nor critically. Often they had not discussed them at all. Like any new instructor, I had to think of a medium that would work for them.
Berger had not only made 4 very effective films about seeing and interpreting images, he had also made a superb text to go with it. Ads and paintings were analysed by similar methods. I always remember carrying one of the film cans to the class room, to load them carefully into the projector, remembering how costly each film was, how prone to jamming and burning.
By 1982 former students stopped me in the street to say ‘that was the first time I looked at ads carefully. That Berger, he made me look carefully at paintings too. Thanks Bob’. There was class and inequality in there, but also colour, style, gesture, and lots of nuance. An effective image was never reduced by Berger merely to its parts.
Well, more thanks to John Berger. I never did much for him, but he illuminated a strange and important new world for me. Studios of painters (mostly in Europe) and drawing tables of television advertisers (mostly in the US and Toronto) were united, in our classroom; Berger in his blue shirt and characteristic way of speaking, me in my shirts and my characteristic way of talking. But we all made sense out of it, and I learned an angle on things from Berger that I would never give up. As he wrote in 1953 ‘art has dragged me into politics’. He stayed there with it his life, and I tried to follow in my inconsistent way, right up to Pig Earth [1979]. When I saw his collected essays, I wondered how he had time to paint and make films!
Should I plan a new screening of ‘Way of Seeing’, just to re-connect with John Berger? Would anyone like to join me? Bob Anderson, Communication